Customer satisfaction plays a pivotal role in the sustenance and growth of an organization. Their happiness is the live testimony of good products and services. It has a lasting effect on the sales and brand of the company.
Unsatisfied customers are likely to talk more about their bad experiences than their good ones. People often feel inclined to share how a product or service disappointed them. Most often, such unhappy customers go to review sites and elaborate on why others should not waste their money on the same product or service.
But how do you find if the customers are satisfied or not?
Ask them. Conduct an online survey that asks a range of questions that will help you decide whether you should make any changes to your offerings. Create a list of questions that would help you conclude your products and services meet customers’ expectations.
The next question is, how do you deal when it comes to thousands of customers.
Use online survey software.
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Customer satisfaction survey software
A survey tool will let you create questions, distribute a survey, and analyze results. You can pick from different types of questions to collect customer experience data. While the same data can be collected from different questions, the selection of a question type depends on what kind of insights do you want from the data. It becomes easier to interpret data when it’s used to generate the right report type.
If you are not sure of what questions to ask in a customer satisfaction survey, you can use a ready-made survey template. It is a list of questions prepared by research experts and can be customized as per your needs.
Free customer satisfaction survey templates
You can ask many customer satisfaction survey questions to collect feedback, but below are some of the questions that can be used in most customer surveys. You can add more questions if they can get you the data you need.
Groundbreaking customer satisfaction survey questions
The more important customer satisfaction survey questions are on top. They collect high-level feedback first. Subsequent questions can be more specific and detail-oriented.
1. How would you rate your overall experience with our product?
You will hardly find any customer satisfaction survey without this question. This question is used to calculate the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score. To calculate the CSAT percentage score, divide the count of satisfied customers by the total number of respondents, and multiply it by 100. It is a simple question often placed on the top of the customer satisfaction survey. Many respondents do not complete the survey. In such cases, businesses can get a basic idea of how was the overall experience of the customers and whether they are satisfied or not.
2. To what extent our products and services meet your expectations?
This question checks whether the products and services meet the needs of the customers. Again this is a broad question but can be used to gather actionable intelligence. Providing a product or service that meets customer requirements is the primary condition for offering high customer satisfaction measurement. If customers are not happy with the products, they will leave and move to your competitors.
It is difficult to gain new customers as compared to retaining existing customers. Hence, companies should make all efforts to satisfy customers.
3. Considering your overall experience, how likely are you to recommend our products to your friends?
This question is known as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question. It finds out the extent to which your customers are satisfied and likely to refer your business to others.
Based on the score given by the customers, they are segregated into 3 categories.
- Promoters: Customers who rate 8 and above; are happy with your products and services and most likely to continue doing the same.
- Passives: Customers who rate 6 or 7; have a neutral stand, and are likely to shift to your competitors.
- Detractors: Customers who rate 5 or below; are not happy and highly likely to stop working with you. They are one who will share their bad reviews with others.
4. How would you describe our products?
This question is another way of knowing how people would react online and while sharing their reviews with friends and colleagues. The kind of adjectives that your customers will associate with your products and services will highlight whether they had positive or negative experiences.
The alternative to this customer satisfaction survey question can be an open-ended variation. Analyze the positive or negative words used to describe the product. It may also help you find out more about what they are looking for in your product. Another use of this feedback can be targeting customers for marketing campaigns based on their responses.
5. How would you rate our products in the below areas?
This is a question when a company can ask for detailed feedback. It is the fifth question in the order, and if the respondent has reached this question, chances are he/she will complete the customer satisfaction survey. Hence, survey creators can ask for opinions on many parameters that affect complete customer experience.
Here multi-point scale matrix question type is used. It is a closed-ended question that asks respondents to select one or more row items using the same set of column answer options.
In the single choice matrix, radio buttons allow respondents to select only one option from the column answer options. Many survey software tools offer a multi-select checkbox, dropdown list, slider, and textbox.
6. Which are your three most favorite product features?
In this question, companies can delve deeper into customer experience and understand what do they like most about their products. It helps them prioritize their new development and research on enhancing their offerings.
For example, consider a smartphone company that wants to know what do their customers like most about their phones. Their feedback can help the company optimize its pricing, customer development, and marketing strategy.
The other characteristic of this question is that it lets respondents answer options that are not mentioned as one of the choices with the ‘Other’ option.
7. Which three areas would you like to improve? (Rank 1 = most important, 3 = least important)
This question has great potential for collecting high-value feedback from the customers. Businesses can learn what their customers want to improve on. Apart from it, they can also gain insights into the order of importance for the customers.
If companies act on the feedback given through this customer satisfaction survey question, they can significantly improve customer satisfaction. It can lead to higher customer loyalty and more sales eventually.
It uses the rank order question type in which respondents can answer options based on their order of preference. In a multiple-choice multi-select question, respondents can select more than one option, but it would be difficult to make out what’s most important for them. Rank order question is used in such scenarios when you need to rank answer options.
8. How responsive have we been to your questions or concerns?
This question can be asked for feedback on customer support. It can be a part of check-out customer satisfaction surveys after every interaction with the support staff. It indicates how well does the support team listens to the questions or concerns of the customers and if they feel satisfied with the assistance.
9. How likely are you to buy again from us?
This question helps businesses find to what extent the customers are satisfied. At times it may happen that though the customers are happy, they might switch to your competitors. Businesses can find out if the customers are loyal or not from the responses to this question.
Companies can use this question to predict sales, plan inventory, and create marketing strategies. When the answer to this question is coupled with demographic, it gives a further view in detail as to what group of people are planning to buy again.
10. Do you have any other comments or suggestions for us?
And lastly, the open-ended customer satisfaction survey question that asks customers to elaborate on their feedback. Respondents can mention the reasons behind their ratings, give suggestions or new ideas, or leave some comments in the text box.
The responses to the open-ended questions are analyzed differently from the multiple-choice questions. Advanced data processing algorithms using natural language processing and artificial intelligence are used to generate survey reports.
Survey tools can generate reports like world cloud that analyze the text and find out the most used words in the response. Based on the frequency and type of words, it can be concluded whether the customer is satisfied or not. You can also tag text and categorize responses into themes and patterns.
Once you are done with finalizing customer satisfaction survey questions, you will need to choose a distribution method to send your survey. While email surveys are the most common method of sending online surveys, you can distribute them through SMS, QR code, website, and social media sites. The selection of the distribution platform depends on where your customers are most likely to answer them.
Once you are done with creating and sending your survey, it’s time to visualize data. Survey software enables you to generate reports from the survey data and get a quick glance with dashboards.
Just as it is important to select the right customer satisfaction survey questions, you also need to analyze it well so that you can make the right decision.
Here are some of the best practices of customer satisfaction measurement feedback analytics.
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Best practices for customer satisfaction feedback analytics
To get the right insights from the customer satisfaction survey, it is important to design it well. Measuring the right KPIs and taking the follow-up actions will help you make the most out of the survey. T
1. Score responses: Add score values to responses to quickly analyze survey results. These values carry relative weight for each choice, making calculations easier.
2. Generate reports: Create graphs and charts from survey results. The type of chart to be generated depends on the insights you need. For instance, a line graph is apt for showing trends, whereas a pie graph is used to understand how a full entity is divided among groups, and a bar graph is used to relative comparisons.
3. Make sense out of data: There is no point in creating fancy charts and graphs that don’t help you. Make sure that your survey reports tell a story. While sharing reports, highlight the below points.
- What did we learn from this survey?
- What insights did we gain?
- What are our recommendations?
- What are the improvement areas?
- What is our action plan?
Make sure that none of the survey responses skew data and are biased.
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4. Organize surveys: Move your surveys into folders so that searching them is easy. Deleting surveys will lead to loss of data, so move surveys that aren’t required to an archive folder.
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5. Set the right filters: Create data filters based on demographics, question, device type, location, and more. While generating reports, use data filters to view responses that fit specific criteria.
6. Analyze textual responses: Responses to open-ended questions can provide valuable insight into key areas of concern and customer satisfaction. However, they can also be more difficult to analyze as compared to multiple-choice questions.
Survey software lets you convert qualitative data into quantitative data and generate text analytics reports, word cloud, and search reports. The sentiment analysis report analyzes the textual survey responses and finds out if the customer had a positive experience or not.
7. Identify trends: Identify recurring patterns in your survey results and use them for making effective business strategies. Compare how ratings change after major events. For instance, a company should conduct a customer satisfaction survey after launching a new product feature that was requested by the users earlier. Ideally, they should see a spike in their ratings as they have acted on their customers’ feedback. To track trends effectively, make sure questions, and rating scales remain constant over time.
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