It’s every company’s dream to have loyal, lifelong customers. In order to get this, you need to understand what your customers want, how they view your brand, and how they feel about your products and/or services. To put it simply, you need to understand their entire customer experience, from beginning to end.
One way to do this is through customer satisfaction surveys. Let’s dive into what they are, why they are important, and the different variants of them that you can use.
What Is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?
Customer satisfaction surveys enable you to measure your customer’s satisfaction with your businesses products, services, experiences, or even your staff. These surveys offer a holistic view of different aspects of your customers’ experiences. They can use a rating system that can be tracked over time, offer specific insights into your customers’ pain points, and help you work to continue to meet your customer’s needs.
Why Are Customer Satisfaction Surveys Important?
Customer satisfaction surveys are important because they are a direct insight into the customer experience. They help you understand how your business is viewed, and what you can do to improve that. Having high satisfaction rates is important to your brand for many reasons. Satisfied customers spread the word, satisfaction is a great indicator of retention, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.
What Are the Four Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys?
There are many ways to measure customer satisfaction, but there are a few that are more prominent, popular and productive than their counterparts. Here are three of the most common types of customer satisfaction surveys or measurements:
Customer Satisfaction scores are an attempt at capturing how satisfied customers are with a company’s goods and services. A survey asks a customer to rate their satisfaction, typically on a scale from 1 to 5.
Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is a trademarked metric between -100 and 100 that captures in aggregate the propensity of a company’s customers to attract and refer new business or/and repeat business.
The Customer Effort Score is an index from 1 to 7 that measures how easy a company makes it for customers to deal with its products and services. A company that provides effortless service gets a 7 while a company that makes it difficult gets a 1. In other words, the higher the CES, the better.
To learn about other types of customer satisfaction surveys, you can find more info here.
What Types of Questions Should a Customer Satisfaction Survey Include?
There are a wide variety of questions you can ask across multiple types of surveys, it just depends on what you are looking to get insight on. Here are examples of categories of questions and example questions.
- Product Usage
- How long have you been using the product?
- How often do you use the product or service?
- Does the product help you achieve your goals?
- What is your favorite tool or portion of the product or service?
- Demographics
- Where are you located?
- What is your level of education?
- Where do you work and what’s your job title?
- What industry are you in?
- Satisfaction Scale
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your experience today?
- Did you feel that our team answered your inquiry promptly?
- Do you agree or disagree that your issue was effectively resolved?
- How likely are you to return to our website?
- Open-Text
- How can we improve your experience with the company?
- What can our employees do better?
- How can our employees better support your business’s/your goals?
- Why did you choose our product over a competitor’s?
- Longevity
- May we contact you to follow up on these responses?
- Can we connect you with a customer success manager via chat?
- Would you be open to discussing upgrade options for your product?
- Can we send you a list of useful resources for getting the most out of your product?
One of the most important things to remember when designing customer acquisition surveys is that if your survey is too long, or too tedious, you will not get responses. Timing your surveys right, and designing them effectively will help you get all the information you need to keep your customers happy and satisfied with your products.
To learn more about customer satisfaction surveys and the best way to utilize them, download our free white paper here!
