Are your customers satisfied with your services, your products or your customer experience? Do you have an idea of what they like about you? Can they recommend you to their friends? Do you know where you can improve to satisfy your customers? Only customer satisfaction surveys can give you the right answers to these questions. Questioning customers through a satisfaction survey is a good way to know their expectations and their feelings about a company, a brand or a brand. However, very few companies are able to create real and effective satisfaction questionnaires. In this article, we are going to present you some simple and efficient tips to create your online customer satisfaction questionnaire.
What are the advantages of a customer satisfaction questionnaire?
There are many reasons for a company to launch a customer satisfaction survey. Indeed, an online customer satisfaction questionnaire can be launched in order to measure the level of customer satisfaction in order to obtain a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) to monitor
, to know the strong and weak points of the company and finally to have the opinions of the customers on the improvement areas.
Also, the company can use the customer satisfaction questionnaire in order to know and appreciate the propensity of customers to recommend its service or products. To reach such an objective, companies often use the Net Promoter Score
(NPS).
Indeed, the NPS is one of the indicators of customer satisfaction in the same way as the CES, the CSAT. It allows companies to ask their customers how likely they are to recommend the company’s services or products to their friends and family on a scale of 1 to 10.
How to carry out and make an online customer satisfaction survey effective?
There are several methods available today to conduct a customer satisfaction survey.
Build your customer satisfaction questionnaire based on their expected answers
Many companies, in the process of writing a satisfaction questionnaire, brainstorm the list of questions to submit to customers. But this method provides a lot of questions and therefore longer questionnaires with no consistency. It is a strategy that affects the response rate, but also their relevance. This is why we recommend that companies set clear and precise objectives for their questionnaire. They should first think about the answers they expect to get from their customers and then imagine the questions to ask to get those answers.
What information do you expect to obtain through this satisfaction questionnaire? This is the question that will allow you to stay the course instead of going here and there. For example, you can start with a central question that will serve as a compass and the real objective of your questionnaire. It is through this central question that you can write the other questions by formulating them in such a way that their answers validate the initial hypotheses.
A questionnaire is equivalent to an objective
Keep this in mind, a questionnaire equals an objective. Do you simply want to have a customer satisfaction indicator? Do you want to know which customers are satisfied or dissatisfied? Do you want to evaluate the performance of your services or products? You need to focus on one objective. You have the possibility to target another objective in another questionnaire.
How long should the questionnaire be?
Customers waste very little time answering questions. So the longer your questions are, the fewer answers you will get. However, the objective is to get the customers’ answers without losing them during the questionnaire. This is why you have to find the right balance between the number of questions that will allow you to cover the whole subject and a short and quick questionnaire that the customer will answer quickly without losing enough time.
However, there is no fixed length to be respected when writing a questionnaire. The length can vary between 5 and 15. This allows you to have very qualitative feedback. If you want to monitor your customer satisfaction KPI for example, a rather short questionnaire is recommended. But if you are looking for detailed feedback, you will need more questions.
The type of questions to put in an online customer satisfaction survey
What questions can be included in a customer satisfaction survey? Several questions can be included in a customer satisfaction survey. These questions often serve different purposes. It is therefore important to understand their use case in order to use them better. In addition, the balance between these types of questions is important in order to have the best response rates and to reduce customer abandonment during the questionnaire
- Open-ended questions: these types of questions must be used carefully. They generally require a lot of time from the customers and can lead to them giving up. However, they should be used when the company needs to have more details after a “YES/NO” question or a rating scale question. It is recommended that these types of questions be used once or twice in the questionnaire.
- Multiple choice questions: These types of questions are used by companies when they want to allow customers to make one or more choices from a list of possibilities.
- Rating scale questions: These types of questions allow companies to have more nuanced responses than “YES/NO” questions. However, they can take a variety of forms namely:
- Semantic rating scale that allows customers to take a position on their satisfaction level: “Satisfied”, “Not very satisfied”, “Very satisfied”. This is the most commonly used rating scale by companies.
- A numerical scale that allows customers to choose their response on a scale of 1 to 10.
Be transparent
You must announce the color from the beginning of the survey. Very often, certain points are sometimes hidden from customers, knowingly or unknowingly. This is why we recommend transparency. You must therefore tell your customers all the elements necessary for the survey. For example
- the purpose of the questionnaire (the survey);
- the total number of questions;
- the time required to answer the different questions;
- how it will work;
- how you want to use their answers.
The choice of the customer satisfaction questionnaire tool
The choice of the tool is very important to have a customer satisfaction questionnaire. You have to forget about Microsoft Word and even my questionnaires sent by email. Nowadays, there are a variety of online questionnaire tools such as Google Form, SurveyMonkey and Typeform. The company also has the possibility to host its questionnaire directly on its website.
The channels for sending a customer satisfaction questionnaire
Nowadays, there are many ways to send a satisfaction questionnaire. You have for example email, SMS, In-app or on-site. You have to test each of these different channels to know which one gives you the best return rate