When was the last time that an iPhone launch day had just a small line of people waiting to own the coveted piece for themselves?
Every time there is an iPhone launch, there are reports of people flocking the stores as early as 4 in the morning.
People even travel to other countries if the phones aren’t releasing in theirs.
So, how did Apple create such a loyal following?
By coming up with a stellar product that trumps each one of its competitors, and most importantly, by its superior customer service.
Here’s another. What’s the best part about being an Amazon customer? Apart from being able to order anything from a pin to a million dollar memorabilia, what else is Amazon’s biggest draw?
Its customer service.
Your customers will be your biggest advocates if you ensure that they have a great experience with your brand. Starting from caring about their website experience to the after-sales service you provide, businesses need to monitor every aspect.
But how do you ensure that each of your customers are having a great time with you?
With the help of Customer Satisfaction Survey questionnaire.
What Are Customer Satisfaction Survey Questionnaires?
A customer satisfaction survey question comprises of a set of questionnaires where you ask your customer if they are satisfied with the experience they have had with you.
That’s the simplest way to describe what it means, but it is much more than just a bunch of questions. There are different ways in which customer satisfaction surveys are formulated, it has a variety of feedback questions that can be asked and many ways in which we can analyze the answers.
The answer to the customer satisfaction survey questions that you send can help the organization in many ways.
From understanding what a specific customer thinks to the various chinks in your armor at every interaction touchpoint, the revelations from this exercise can be mind-blowing.
As a responsible brand that listens to its customers, you will get the best results for your customer service feedback surveys when you close the feedback loop.
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In this article, we will look at the different types of customer satisfaction survey questionnaires that will work like a charm, but before that, let us understand how exactly this could be of help.
Importance of a Customer Satisfaction Survey Questionnaire
Businesses need to understand that the only way they can thrive is by staying true to its customers. That means providing them the right kind of service and products.
More often than not, businesses are of the opinion that they are doing everything right, even without using a way to measure it.
Sending customer satisfaction surveys is one of those ways for you to gauge what your customers really think.
It is all the more effective because it comes directly from your customers, and not from a 3rd party that sends secondary research results. The best way to thrive in your business is by having a customer retention strategy.
#1 Chance to Connect With Customers
It gives you a chance to connect with your customers. With the help of the right online survey tool, you will be able to reach out to your customers via web links, SMS, social media, emails, etc. Customers who have always wanted to connect with you for some issue or the other will also find a way to do so, thanks to you reaching out to them now.
#2 Find Benchmark of Your Customer Satisfaction
By sending customer satisfaction survey questions at repeated intervals, you will be able to find a benchmark for your customer satisfaction. Using this, you can keep finding ways to improve your present situation satisfaction rates. It will also help you understand where you are improving and what are the steps that you took which helped in the same.
#3 Identify Bottlenecks.
When you find that there have been a lot of issues raised by customers in your customer service feedback surveys during the onboarding process, you can immediately take action on it. Without the help of these surveys, you might have never come across it and most customers would have dismissed it as a minor issue that they could let go. These surveys give you the opportunity to make it right.
#4 Identify Patterns
By sending a highly customized customer satisfaction survey questionnaire, you will be in a position to make amends for specific areas that your business is struggling with or is working on.
Let’s say you have introduced a loyalty program for your customers, and it has been a few weeks, but there has not been an uptick in any of the metrics that you are measuring, neither in the form of referrals nor are you able to retain your customers, what do you do?
Send customer satisfaction survey questions that are specific to the loyalty program which you just launched. Look for patterns that emerge in the feedback and take action.
#5 Analyze the Results To Take Action
When you send online customer surveys using a tool like SurveySparrow, you will get the feedback in real-time. The results will be available for you in a rich visual dashboard which makes it easy to analyze them.
It will also be able to generate reports based on specific parameters. This way, you can immediately monitor the responses and take swift action.
There are many more benefits of sending customer satisfaction survey questionnaires, and you should check them out too.
How to Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey Questionnaire?
#1 Establish Your Main Objectives
Before you send out a bunch of customer satisfaction survey questions, you need to be sure about why you are doing the entire exercise.
The clarity in the survey will help you understand what can possibly happen from it and how to execute it rightly.
By having clear goals, you will draft the right questions which will have the most impact.
For example, let’s say you want to find out from a set of customers who are using product A, a top-tier version of what you are selling, here are the things that you need to keep in mind when coming up with questions.
You need to address questions that are specific to product A. The questions that you write should also be specific to this particular audience.
The customers of product A’s top-tier version will be different from the other customers, so you need to know the customer personas before you draft the customer satisfaction survey questionnaire.
#2 Ask Simple Questions
None of the questions should focus on two different aspects of your product or business. Keep it as simple as possible. No matter how many objectives you have, do not ask about more than one subject.
Ask different customer satisfaction survey questionnaire to address each of the problems, but do not combine them in a single question.
Including more than one subject in a question can be confusing for most people, and it might even result in them dropping off from the survey altogether.
#3 Create Short Surveys
Please do remember that the customer is not getting anything by filling out the survey.
Most of them will not be all right with taking time out of their schedules for it. The onus is on you to make it as simple as possible by making them spend very little time by asking a few questions while bringing in the most impact.
#4 Use Different Channels To Send The Survey
Some of your customers might prefer getting surveys on their email inbox, while some might be ready to get on a call.
It is your prerogative on how you would like to distribute the survey, but do remember that the more the number of channels that you use, the more number of customers that you will be reaching out to.
Use all the channels, including email, in-app, website, phone calls, focus group, etc.
#5 Find A Good Online Survey Tool
Choosing the right online survey tool to dispense your customer satisfaction survey questionnaire is important. If you end up choosing a mediocre tool, you might have to do a lot of work which might reduce the efficiency of this exercise.
Find out the various tools available in the market and get to know the features that each of them has, how does its UI/UX works, what kind of effort does it reduce for the end-user, and so on.
Knowing this, you will be better suited to choose one that is right for your business.
#6 Analyze the Feedback
Once you receive the answers from your customers, the next thing that you should do is analyze them using the dashboard that is available in your online survey tool.
It will allow you to look at the results using various parameters. Using this, you will be able to understand the issues that your customers face and take appropriate action.
Close the feedback loop by asking follow-up questions, and solve the issue. Tell your customers that you have solved the issue after its completion. They will be happy to hear back from you and it is also an easy and effective way to increase customer loyalty.
#7 Benchmark The Results
The feedback that you have got so far in the customer satisfaction survey questions that you have asked, keep them as a benchmark.
Compare the results of the future customer service feedback surveys so that you can keep a check on how your brand is improving itself.
Note: Do not ask leading questions. The customer satisfaction survey questions that you ask should be completely objective in nature. Here’s an example of a leading question that you might want to avoid.
“How good do you think our customer service reps were?”
It describes the interaction with the reps as being ‘good,’ but that is for the customer to respond with, isn’t it?
It will not help you with accurate answers either when questions are framed in such a manner. Instead, frame the above question this way.
“How would you rate the interaction with our customer service rep on a scale of 1 to 10?”
Different Types Of Customer Satisfaction Survey Questionnaire:
As we have mentioned earlier in the article, there are a variety of questions that one might ask. It should be based on the kind of subjects that you want to focus on. Below are some of the question types to ask:
#1 Open-ended Questions:
Give the freedom to your customers to answer in any way they want by asking open-ended customer satisfaction survey questions.
Here is an example of an open-ended question-”How do you think we can improve our service?”
By asking a question like this, you are giving them an option to share what is in their mind without them having to stick only to answering multiple-choice questions or choosing radio buttons.
#2 Rating Scale Questions:
Your online survey respondents would love to answer questions of this type because it is easy to answer them. There are different types of rating scales available.
You can provide a choice of a scale from 0-5 or 0-7 or 0-10. Ensure that you define the scale. In the last example, 0 should be the least desirable option and 10, the most.
Here’s an example of a rating scale question.
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our service?”
When someone answers 10, it means they will surely be happy to recommend your service to others, but if they were to answer 5, it means that they might not really do it as they are not enthused about the proposition so much.
#3 Multiple-choice Questions:
Here, you are looking to offer a choice for your opponents by giving them a variety of choices. It is much easier to analyze the results when you are using this type than when you are using open-ended questions because the former is easily measurable.
Since multiple-choice questions are much easier to answer, make sure to include a lot of them in your customer satisfaction survey questionnaire.
#4 Binary Questions:
Are you looking for a Yes or No answer from your online survey respondents, then this is the type of question format that you need to choose when creating your online survey.
“Were you satisfied with our service today? (Yes/No)”
If the answer to the above question was a ‘No,’ then you can send follow-up questions to understand the reason behind their answer and try to make amends with the customer.
#5 Nominal Questions:
In this type of question format, there is no numeric value attached and it specifies categories for answers. Here is an example of Nominal questions that you could ask.
What describes you best?
- I have been a long-time customer of company A
- I am a first-time customer of company A
- Or, I have never brought a product from company A
6 Categories Of Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions
#1 Demographics:
In this, the onus is to collect information about the customer that will help in understanding more about them. It asks questions about where they are from, including questions which ask their zip code, occupation, designation, age, ethnicity, employment status, household structure, gender, income, and so on. It will be helpful to segment your customers using the information by using this category of surveys.
#2 Customer Satisfaction Surveys:
Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, Customer Satisfaction surveys (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys are the kinds of surveys that aim to understand how satisfied customers are with the brand.
It is the fastest way for us to understand how happy customers are after they bought a product from us.
They ask customer satisfaction survey questionnaire that will result in direct answers that will help us gauge the satisfaction level of customers.
#3 Understanding User Behaviour:
Finding out why a customer behaves in a particular way helps us in creating solutions or offering products that will keep them satisfied. Understanding their buying behaviour will give us insights into various aspects that we might have missed.
These customer satisfaction survey questions delve into how someone uses a particular product, what feature gives them the most satisfaction, what is the problem that gets solved when using the product, are they looking for another feature as well that will add more value to their business, and so on.
#4 Referrals:
One of the most important things that businesses can do is to take care of its existing customers. Not only will it help in increasing one’s revenue, but it will also get you more customers through referrals.
Put your existing customers who are satisfied into a loyalty program and get referrals from them by offering the right kind of incentives.
Before asking for referrals, pose the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question, which asks how likely they are to recommend the product or service to their friends and family.
You can even ask questions like how likely they are to buy a product from you again in the future. Based on the answers to these questions, you can decide whether to put them in your loyalty program or not.
#5 Agent-specific Questions:
Do you want to know how a particular customer success agent is performing? Then frame your customer satisfaction survey questions in such a way that it asks about their interaction with this particular agent. It will help the agents to address the issues they have, if there are any.
#6 Customer Retention Survey Questions:
When a client is downgrading their subscription or terminating the relationship altogether, asking them why they are doing so will also help the brand in understanding if they could have done anything to retain them.
As a final effort, you can also ask them if they would be willing to reconsider if they have any demand which could be met, as long as it is reasonable and within the terms of service.
The customer satisfaction survey questionnaire that you ask can be for different needs, from understanding their experience with the website, user experience, concerns with product, shipping, refunds, warranty terms, marketing, interaction with the salesperson, after-sales service, onboarding process, etc.
All of these questions is to help the brand understand where they could improve, so that they could take appropriate steps to do so.
Wrapping Up…
If you were looking to understand how to create customer satisfaction survey questions, we are hoping that this guide would have helped you.
Every question that you draft should have the benefit of your end customer in mind. Do remember that the whole exercise of creating a customer satisfaction survey questionnaire is to find out where you stand on that front and improve from that position.
By following the above guidelines, you will be able to create a balanced set of questions and question types that the respondent will be more than happy to complete.
At SurveySparrow, we have a number of customer satisfaction survey templates that one can use without having to create them from scratch.
From being able to ask anonymous questions to have features like logic branching and other advanced ones, you can get the maximum insights for your customer satisfaction survey questions with us.
Get on a call with our customer success team to see how we can help you.
