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Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practice

What should I include in a customer satisfaction survey?

Regular customer satisfaction polling should be a high priority for every business. Talking to your customers, finding out what they like (and dislike) about how you do business, is the first step towards success and growth. At demographix we are often asked for advice on what to include in a customer satisfaction survey. Here, we have put together some tips on best practice.

Standard customer satisfaction survey questions

There are several key areas of concern common to any CSS, but we suggest you break a survey down into groups of questions that address these core concerns:

• How did you find us? How do we improve our visibility and marketing?
• Did we give you enough information about our products/services? How can we improve our sales technique?
• Was there enough choice? How can we improve our product range?
• Was the product/service up to standard? Did buying from us make you happy?
• If there were problems with the product/service, did we resolve them? Do we problem-solve for you?
• Was our after-sales good enough for you? Did you need extras, and were we there to sell them to you?
• Would you buy from us again? If no, capture the essence of their unhappiness. If yes, capture the essence of their approval — was it price, service or product range?
• Would you recommend us to others? Word of mouth is the greatest marketing tool you can have. If your customers won't recommend you, who will?

Building your survey: make it user-friendly!

Many customer satisfaction surveys suffer from one of the following problems: there are too many questions; questions are ambiguous; the questions don't take account of previous answers; or the survey is just boring to fill out. At Demographix we believe surveys should be engaging for respondents, and built in a way that makes them easy-to-use.

Best Practice Tips for customer satisfaction surveys

All of the best practice features listed below can be seen in action on our example customer satisfaction survey.

• Make it easy for your customers to respond: Ensure questions are not ambiguous, and include variety in your questions — single choice, multiple choice, statements they can agree/disagree with, questions with preset satisfaction/dissatisfaction ranges, and so on.
• Use write-ins to find out what they think: Don't assume you know all the possible answers. The write-ins are where you discover what you didn't know.
• Don't ask direct questions on price: If you ask people "how much will you pay?" they are most likely to choose the cheapest option from a list. Demographix offers a price randomiser question type, which displays a different value in each survey, from a list you specify.
• Embed multimedia elements and images: The internet makes it easier to insert audio, video and photos into surveys. Users respond better when they have interactive elements that "spice up" a survey and just make it more interesting than a whole lot of written questions.
• Take account of previous answers: If a respondent answers "No" to a question, make sure they don't get asked the same questions as someone who answers "Yes". This can be done in demographix by piping responses from a question into subsequent questions (see our example survey) or by using conditional questions and/or pages.
• Structure surveys for different kinds of customers: Set-up questions on the opening pages that define your relationship with your customer (eg, have they bought in store or from your website?) then show them questions (or pages of questions) depending on how they answered those initial questions.

Analysis and long-term trends:

Finally, bear in mind the long-term benefits of ongoing customer research. Can you build up an archive of responses that allow you to track trends over a period of time? Can you build up a panel of customers who will respond to surveys on a regular (say three monthly basis) in an honest way. Can you use the information gained in a survey to measure Key Performance Indicators? All of this is possible with Demographix — and at a much cheaper cost! Web-savvy marketing and research professionals are discovering the cost benefits of bringing ongoing customer satisfaction surveying in-house. Maybe you should too!