While creating surveys for your business, you might surely be thinking of making them effective. Further, you also might wish to have a good response rate for your surveys so that you get real customer insights.
Well, you are right! Creating effective customer surveys with a sound feedback strategy is important to make the right business decisions at the right time.
Customer surveys (created with a customer survey tool or app) are a method to obtain customer feedback by asking a few questions from the customers to know about their perceptions and opinions on a product or service from a brand they have used.
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A well-drafted customer survey will include a variety of open-ended and closed-ended questions that will help bring out real customer insights.
Why Create Customer Surveys?
Creating effective customer surveys is important because it increases the survey response rate, it gives you a bigger dataset so that you can improve the quality of your decisions.
Conducting customer surveys shows that your organization cares about what your customers think. Doing this will not only enhance your brand perception publicly but will also enable you to improve the business system as they are information-driven, and have been from measurements like CSAT, NPS, and CES, all of which have been created by a customer survey tool.
Now, let’s look at how you can create effective customer surveys that will give you the business insights you are looking for.
Ways to Create Effective Customer Surveys
Creating surveys simply means creating a set of questions to be asked to customers. A customer survey can include a variety of questions. Let us give a look at a few practical ways that will help to make surveys that your clients would be bound to answer.
Keep Your Surveys Short
Your main goal should be to keep your survey short, clear, and concise. You must find the shortest way to ask your customers questions without muddying its intent.
Today, nobody has much time and thus would not like to waste much of his/her time on lengthy surveys. Everybody likes to complete these tasks as fast as they can. So, always make sure that your surveys are short.
Furthermore, short surveys can capture a lot more responses and thus can provide you with a good amount of valuable information.
Only Ask Important Questions
You must ask only those questions that are important and avoid asking unnecessary questions.
Every question that you frame must have a clear well-defined purpose, it doesn’t matter how a customer comes in contact with your site. If that’s the case, don’t ask them how they came in contact with you.
Include only those questions that you thought are very important. Adding unnecessary questions will only increase the length of your survey.
Write Questions That are Easily Understandable
This is another important key to making your surveys effective. You must always use simple language that is easily understandable by the common people.
Moreover, the questions you are planning to frame to ask your clients shouldn’t bear a serious level of complexity. Attempt to work on the questions as much as possible so that the clients can answer them without any problem and quickly, or else they will leave your survey in between, which will result in a decline in response rate.
Construct Open-Ended & Close-Ended Questions
There are numerous questions you may need to ask in a survey. These questions may contain open-ended or close-ended questions, or sometimes both.
Close-ended questions: Close-ended questions are those questions where you will be able to provide predefined answers in the form of options. Clients will actually be able to choose any one of them.
Close-ended questions are very simple and require very less time to complete, however, it limits the customers’ responses to some predefined options.
Open-ended questions: Open-ended questions are those questions where free space is provided to consumers so that they can communicate their perspectives in their own words.
Open-ended questions are very time-consuming; however, these types of questions provide you with rich data with real views and feelings of the consumers.
Both open-ended, as well as close-ended questions, have their advantages and disadvantages, so it is advised to use both of them in a survey. However, open-ended questions should be limited, there shouldn’t be more than 1 or 2 questions. If there are more open-ended questions, then it will make the survey very lengthy.
Therefore, you must try to use only one question to capture customers’ comments and suggestions for their ratings.
Mention A Particular Time Required to Complete Survey
Mentioning the appropriate time at the beginning of the survey is an excellent practice. This will be the appropriate time customers will take to complete the survey.
This will show the amount you value your consumers, and your customers will get an idea of how much time they would require for taking up the survey.
If your consumers are expecting less time but if it took more time for them to complete the survey, they would leave the survey in between.
This will not only decrease the response rate but will also create a bad impression of your brand. Therefore, it is advised to mention the exact time it would require to complete the survey at the beginning itself.
Make Sure to Create a Well-Structured Survey
Every written thing has a well-maintained structure, and this is the same with surveys. Each survey has a start and an end.
You can utilize the funnel method here by beginning your survey with simple and easy questions, then can include complex and tough questions (if needed), and finally ending with simple and easy questions.
Finally, you can end the survey with a positive message, like by writing Thank You message with a good day wish.
Offer Incentives for Completing The Survey
When you are still planning for your survey, you can come up with a motivation to urge readers to respond to the questions in general.
There are few websites that offer small incentives (discounts or small downloadable material) to motivate people to participate in the survey.
If you are planning to offer any incentive to customers, think about how you will be able to distribute it to readers. Sending incentives can be time-consuming, so look for any good survey program.
Use Survey Software That is Very Effective
Always plan to use effective customer survey software for your customers. With effective survey software tool, you will be able to choose various templates and create an effective customized survey as per your needs.
Further, you will be able to use multi-channels to take surveys like emails, SMS, tablets, and online surveys. It saves your time by sending mass emails and SMS with survey links and permits you to capture survey data.
You can also use multilingual surveys. So, make sure you use a good customer Survey app or tool to make your surveys effective and capture data from many customers.
Choose a Good Template
The majority of online survey tools offer a variety of pre-made templates depending on your needs.
Therefore, by using a good template, you will be able to edit questions to suit your business and customer survey goals and will be able to finish your day fast if you are not starting from scratch.
Use Brand Name & Logo in Survey
While you are creating a survey for your business, you can include your company name and logo in the survey and can even use the colors that are in your logo as well, so your survey is consistent with your brand.
