The coffee goliath Starbucks, in their early days, leveraged the sounds and smells inside their shops for providing a better customer experience. And one of their most effective customer retention strategies was to introduce a Mobile Pay and Order Feature within their app. Their customers loved it since it saved them a lot of time. Identifying your customers’ behavior and desires would help you to create a system that can empower them. And yeah, innovation is the stepping stone to customer retention and to grow they need to implement new strategies.
From Apple to Adidas, all the giants try to come up with creative marketing strategies to do that. They are funny and memorable. And if creating a division between you and your competitor is your aim, you need to prove that you can serve them better. How do you do that? By being knowledgeable about your existing and potential customers.
At one point or another, we had a beautiful illusion that customers depend on different types of businesses and companies for their comfortable existence. It wasn’t an illusion back in time when there were only fewer than fingers companies in the field. The customer had to satisfy himself with whatever product or services that were given. Well, that is not the scenario now, isn’t it?
Today, the customer demands and somehow you make it happen. Sometimes you meet their expectations and sometimes you don’t. Unfortunately, that is not the end of it. They would leave you for another company that offers the product or services exactly the way they want it. Hence it is essential to set yourself apart from your competitors just to remind them that YOU are the right choice for them.
Listen to them. Understand what they want. For that, first of all, you need to know who they are.
Your customers are like a large pool of unmined data waiting to be discovered.
How will you extract this information? Yes, Customer Satisfaction Surveys!!!
Surveying your customers have turned out to be the pulse of running businesses. Obviously, what better way to find ideas and inspiration than to ask your customers themselves? No matter which industry you are in if you are vague about what your customers want, you are definitely going to annoy your customers. Towering business tycoons might have relied on their intuitions, in the past, to develop their companies into a success. That era has gone and the interests of customers are beyond anybody’s guesses. With companies mushrooming around every nook and corner you really shouldn’t gamble with your luck.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys would naturally help you to get a finite amount of specific data. This will provide you with invaluable insights which will definitely boost your company and reduce the customer churn.
Satisfied customers are likely to make a purchase again and they might refer you to their friends and family. What do repeated purchases bring to you? Excess revenue! A study conducted by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs claims that a loyal customer is worth 10 times more than their first purchase.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys also help you to check if your belief of having the flawless customer service really checks out with reality. According to a study by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. It is time for you to find out where your weakness lies and give customers a seamless experience with you. To find out what you are doing just right and where you need a little nudge and what annoys your customer, you need an excellent and effective customer satisfaction survey.
The whole process can seem like a piece of cake if you are just thinking about creating a survey. How hard can it be, right? Writing some questions and sending them is very, very far from what Customer Satisfaction Surveys really are. Getting the customer satisfaction survey questions right is not an easy task.
We all have taken surveys and we all have abandoned almost all of them too halfway. Customers are in general not very keen to answer the questions that look routinized and lifeless. Rather than asking as many questions as you can, handpick your customer satisfaction survey questions and then send.
Always go with answers you need and then create the question. Other than these tips, let’s go through the 12 customer satisfaction survey questions your customers would not mind answering.
Category #1: Question Concerning The Products And Services
The bread and butter of your company are the products and services that you offer. If your products are not perceived the way they were intended or don’t perform well as promised, your company might be in jeopardy. The brand image of your company and its integrity will be at stake. Your customer satisfaction survey questions must include the ones that focus on the satisfaction level on your products. It works when you are testing a new product or as a general feedback question. You need to know how successful you were in fulfilling their needs.
1. How would you describe the experience with our product?
These open-ended customer satisfaction survey questions can actually reveal how well you have communicated the product vision with the end users. When you want actionable data by your side regarding how well the customers have accepted your product or when you want to know how satisfied the customers are with your services you could go with the following questions
2. Which are the features that you loved most in us?
This question highlights the services and features that you need to sustain and nourish and enables you to get to know what you did correctly and continue to do so merrily.
3. What would be the first thing that you would want us to change?
This is a golden question and you get to find out the specific needs that your customers are looking out for. Focus on the frequent prepositions submitted by your customers and allow it to lead your future preferences.
4. What are the features we can further add in for a better experience?
Customer retention is not as hard as it made to sound if you know what your customers want. And this questions answers that. You get to know where you are falling short, where you have room for improvement.
These questions can point you in the right direction. You would come to know the features that have become a hit amongst the users. You will get to know your shortcomings so that you can rectify them. Mind you, Customers will move on to your competitor if you do not offer what they want. Like Samsung on Apple and Emirates on United Airlines, Your competitors are waiting for you to miss a step.
Category #2: Question Concerning Your Website
When you redesign your website spending a lump of money, you might consider the changes you made to make it look more innovative and creative and what-not. That might not be how your customers feel about it. While creating your Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions, It is a must to include a question about how easy and accessible your website is, and especially if you have redesigned it recently. When research blames bad customer experience as a reason for 67% of the churn experienced, you have to make sure that your customers are satisfied with your company. You have to be proactive since many would hesitate to reach out to you. They would rather unleash their frustrations to the familiar faces such as their friends and family. And how do you think they would do that? Through Social Media. You cannot let that happen. The same research claims that only 1 out of 26 customers bother to complain, and others just leave. You could go with a question as simple as,
5. Was this information helpful?
Like in WikiHow. You would get their feedback on the content provided by you. You should definitely include a question that asks how smooth the navigation was. You could reconsider the stages they highlighted to be difficult or complicated.
6. How responsive have we been?
This is a very important question while we are discussing the accessibility and easiness of your website. No matter how expensive and creative your website is, the whole experience goes downhill if it fails to be responsive. This question makes sure that the customer support has spent enough time and effort to assist the customer. It adds in a humane touch to the whole experience and turns it to be pleasant and accessible.
Category #3: Question Concerning Customer Loyalty
You want to retain your customers? Reduce Customer Churn as much as possible? Customer loyalty is your key to it. Brands compete to deploy the best customer loyalty programs. It is more expensive to create a new customer than to retain your existing customers. According to a study published by Marketing Metrics, there is only 20 percent of a chance that a new visitor to your website would make a purchase, whereas there is 60 percent of the chance that a customer who has made purchases before to do it again. Financially customer retention pays off enormously. So you need to ensure that your company has implemented an effective customer loyalty program and more importantly you need to know whether it is working. While writing your customer satisfaction survey questions to measure your customer loyalty, do not forget to add some questions that brush up on this area.
7. Would you recommend us to your friends? If not, why?
The Likert Scale question type asks your customer to rate their feelings and attitude towards your brand. This question would help you to understand how well they are satisfied and thinks you have helped them. If you have met their expectations, they are going to refer you. If not, you get to know which stage or part of their experience didn’t match up with their needs.
8. Will you buy more or similar products from us again?
This is another variation of question 7. You get to know the satisfaction level of the customers. If they had a pleasant experience or not.
9. Would you like to subscribe and stay connected?
If they have an intention to be your loyal customer, they are definitely going to subscribe to your company so that they never miss out information on new releases or offers. This question is an amazing one to check out how loyal they are going to be. They would say yes only if they think you can assist them in their future purchases.
Customer loyalty is the stepping stone for your company and if the answers for these questions are not looking very good, in all probability you are going to experience huge customer churn. Analyze the data received and figure out when, where and what you did wrong. With competition at its peak and with customers getting million other options Customer Loyalty is your Holy Grail.
Category #4: Questions Concerning Your Customer Support
As important as it is to ensure that the customer is happy with your product or services, you should not underestimate the role of your agents in making your customer’s experience a pleasant one. A well-put customer support team can inspire loyalty and trust. A study put together by NewVoiceMedia revealed that 42% of the customers were put off by rude or not very helpful staff,29% were annoyed by a staff’s lack of knowledge whereas, 32% of them were tired of speaking and explaining the same thing to multiple agents.
It is of utmost importance to have well trained and sophisticated staff since it is they who represent your company to the customers. The emotions developed towards them is turned into their emotions about your company. When a passenger of the United Airlines was dragged out of an overbooked flight, the company had to face the burn. It was not just the two or three employees who were skinned, rather, the reputation of the entire brand is at stake. And the competitors also jumped into troll the company even more.
Customer support is the backbone of your company. You need to watch how the customers feel about them very cautiously. For that, while designing the Customer Satisfaction Survey, definitely add questions that would help you to measure and analyze how good your customer support is.
10. Are you satisfied with the agent who handled your inquiry?
A very simple and straightforward question like this would fetch you how your agent performed and whether he followed the protocols he learned during his training. If not and if the reasons listed is similar to all, you can deploy an effective training program as needed.
11. Did your agent resolve the issue completely?
This follow-up question would elevate the trust of the customer placed in you. The customer would feel like you cared enough to follow-up and ensure that they had a pleasant experience and still does. They wouldn’t feel like your whole aim was the purchase and after that, you have abandoned them.
12. Was your solution or answer delivered in a timely manner?
The answer to this one would help you to know whether your customer support works as good as a newly oiled machine or has some broken pieces in between. In many of the bad customer experience stories that do the rounds in social media, Time is the villain. Your company might have resolved the issue completely but if it took 20 phone calls and 4 weeks, you have only managed to win a very annoying heart. Sometimes the customers are a bit forgiving when the customer experience they have received is excellent.
Wrapping Up!
With statistics disclosing numbers favoring the importance of customer experience you have to up your game in all areas. If you want to deliver an excellent customer experience, you need to know your customers more than ever. This means you have to create customer profiles that can help you to measure and understand your customers’ buying behaviors. You can use this knowledge to personalize every interaction. If you ensure that the experience they had with your company is seamless and pleasant, you gain brand loyalty.
The questions provided are from a basic set of customer satisfaction survey questions. It varies and branches out according to the target audience and the data you are trying to gauge out. According to OpinionLab, 80% of the customers have abandoned their survey halfway through. They also found out that 52% of the customers would not bother to fill out a survey that takes more than three minutes to finish. Always keep your surveys short and precise. Your surveys need not be solely focused on Customer Satisfaction, you can also include other questions that you want to ask the customers.
