When you have a business, one of the most important things is that your customers feel they have a voice and are being heard by the company. If customers feel you are not listening to their concerns or issues, they are not likely to continue being a customer.
While having a way for them to contact you on your website or a suggestion box at your store are okay, they are often good enough. Instead, you should look to run a customer survey every now and then. They can help you learn a lot of important information about the feelings of your customer, while also giving them an avenue to make their voice heard. Here are a few tips to ensure your customer survey is effective and successful.
Make Sure Participants Know the Purpose of the Survey
Of course, you need to be sure to tell your customers what the goal of the survey will be and what you hope to do with the information gathered in the survey. Without this, they might be unwilling to provide information if they don’t know how it will be used.
One of the toughest parts about running a customer survey is actually getting people to respond and fill it out, and letting them know the purpose could also help more people participate. Another good thing you could do is to provide some sort of an incentive to customers who complete the survey, to encourage more people to do it.
Use a Suitable Data Collection Software
While creating, sending out and managing a survey seems relatively easy, that isn’t always the case. As a result, you should be sure to use a quality type of data collection software to make sure everything goes off without a hitch.
These pieces of software can help you collect data offline, perform quality control for your survey, and some can even use GPS to capture the exact location of the data collection. They normally also provide a simple and effective user interface that will record and show the results to your survey.
Ensure Your Questions are Specific and Clear
This survey is all about getting useful information for your company, so you want to be as specific when you select the questions you want to use. The more general the question, the more general the answer, and you want specificity in surveys, not generality.
In addition to making sure that your questions are specific, they also need to be clear. Remember, if your customer is unsure how to answer a question or doesn’t get it, they will likely leave it blank. That’s why your questions should be as clear and easy to answer as possible. Ask them one thing at a time, don’t try and sway them into answering a certain way and make sure all possible answers are covered, if you’re asking multiple choice questions.
Make Them Short, Sweet and Intuitive
There is a good chance that your customers are busy people and don’t have half an hour to spend on a survey for you. As a result, you should make sure that your survey is a relatively short one. It is tempting to include a lot of questions to get the most information as possible, but this is a bad practice.
That is why it’s very important to do a lot of research before making your survey, so you know what are the few important questions that you should ask. Also, in a similar vein, your survey should be very easy to complete. If it takes a ton of scrolling or clicking, some people may stop half way through. With many people treating their smartphones as computers these days, you should make sure the survey will work on mobile devices, too.
