7 Rules to Survey Success

The key to the success of any business is to understand its customers. Satisfaction surveys help capture and analyse customer feedback and get insights into customers’ opinions and thoughts.

Customer Research Technology (CRT), UK’s leading provider of customer satisfaction survey software, share their experience and gives out some tips about designing a clear and honest customer satisfaction questionnaire.

- Identify clear objectives for your survey. Ask yourself what you want to learn from the results and how you will use the feedback. Avoid any vague or ambiguous question that will cause your results to become invalid.

- For the evaluation of your products or services, use a 4 point rating scale rather than a 5 point one as respondents often tend to select the neutral alternative.

- Always test your questionnaire on a small sample first. This helps refining and reformulating any point that is unclear.

- Make sure that your list of answers includes all possible alternatives. E.g. “How did you travel here today? A) Car B) Public Transport C) Motorbike D) Walked” Someone who has travelled by bicycle cannot answer the question and is likely to stop completing the survey. Adding “Other” as one of the option will help prevent people from dropping off.

- Include demographic questions in your survey. You might find that while the majority of your customers are satisfied with the level of service, all men aged 25 to 30 are not.

- If you are capturing customer feedback through technology you can further segment the results by time and praise good service or address any customer satisfaction issue should customer care fall below the highest standards at certain times of the day.

- Keep it short and simple. Most respondents will not complete long questionnaires. Resist the temptation of adding more questions. Instead, why not undertake several satisfaction surveys with a maximum of 15 questions?

As a general rule, to increase the chances of success of your survey:
- Make sure you use words that your customers understand, avoid industry jargon and acronyms.
- Keep your questionnaire clear, direct and simple.

The last step to the creation of a survey is to undertake a “test-drive” survey with a limited number of customers before conducting it with the entire survey participant population.

CRT undertake thousands of customer satisfaction questionnaires every year. As survey software experts, they understand the importance of capturing powerful and immediate feedback that will help you grow your business.