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Creating Your Unique Customer Feedback Survey
Every customer feedback situation is unique; generic customer surveys are a good place to start in terms of getting an idea of what kinds of questions you should ask and what the overall structure of the survey should look like, but you are going to need to put some effort into coming up with the specific questions that are appropriate to your situation. In this article, we detail what your survey should look like and what functionality it should have for maximum effectiveness.
Design your survey
- Working with the key stakeholders in your organization, create an outline of the product or service that you are collecting feedback on. Identify the key aspects of every step and from these key steps, come up with a short list of survey items. These items are typically asked on a 5-point rating scale from "Strongly Agree" to "Strongly Disagree" - for example, "The documentation that came with the product provided all the information I needed to use the product." Keep your items simple and deal with only one topic in each item.
- For each survey item, consider whether you might like to probe deeper when customers indicate that they are dissatisfied. For each item where you would like more information from unhappy customers, compose an open-ended question that will ask for more information. Using the previous example, you might ask, "In what ways was the product documentation inadequate?" When your customers complete the survey, they will only see the open-ended questions that are relevant to them.
- At the end of your survey, be sure to include an "overall satisfaction" question such as, "Overall, how would you rate your experience with our company?" This question should include a comments box that invites people to explain their ratings. If your survey includes clusters of questions that relate to different aspects of their experience, you might also consider asking an overall satisfaction question for each of these key areas. The overall satisfaction data will be invaluable to you later on as you identify not only which things your customers are unhappy with, but also which things are most important to their overall satisfaction.
- Also at the end of your survey, be sure to ask your customers if they would like somebody to follow up with them.
Identify Follow-Up Paths
For each question in your survey, decide whether you want somebody to be alerted when a customer indicates that he or she is unhappy with regard to that survey item. For example, any time a customer is dissatisfied with the product documentation, you might want to send that customer's survey response to the head of your product documentation team so that he or she can get feedback, fix the problem, and follow up with the customer to resolve his or her problems.
This is one of the key areas where you will get huge value and instant results from your feedback survey. The process will be entirely automated to your specifications when you work with us to set up these feedback paths.
Communicating with Stakeholders
- Be sure the people who will be receiving the follow-up requests are informed about the process and have the support they need to deal with the requests.
- Be sure you have a system or process in place to hold people accountable for following up on customer issues.
- Customer Feedback Tracking - To make all this easy for you, we can provide an online tracking system for you and your stakeholders that will enable them to process issues and update their status and enable you to monitor their activity.
Ready to Launch?
At this point, you should test out the survey and feedback process before inviting your customers to complete the survey. Clear out the test data, make any tweaks that are necessary and you are ready to go. After a couple of weeks or so, you should do the following:
- Check in on the follow-up process to make sure everybody understand what they need to do and is doing it.
- Generate a report to have a look at the preliminary data. Look for any areas where you are not getting the information you need, and consider whether you might need to tweak your survey a bit. It is better to catch these things early so you can start collecting all the data you need as soon as possible. You should revisit this question once or twice a year as things change both within your business and in terms of customer issues.
info@CustomInsight.com
750 Arrowhead Dr.
Carson City, NV 89706
650-577-9604
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