We already talked about the theoretical elements of collecting customer satisfaction insights. For example, we’ve covered off the different kinds of survey that measure customer satisfaction score. We also talked about the non-survey metrics that you should also be keeping an eye on.
But there are some very practical tips that we can look at together. And although some of these might seem overly simplistic, you’d be surprised at how frequently things get left out of the planning for work like this.
Make sure you use a mobile-friendly survey!
A huge amount of traffic on the internet today is via a device that isn’t a desktop computer. And yet, so frequently the tools that people use to deliver customer satisfaction surveys look like they were created when we still used dot-matrix printers and asked people to fill out forms in pencil.
A rule of thumb: you’ll get way more insights into your audience when you ask them for feedback in a way that is easy for them to complete.
In September 2019, according to StatCounter, up to 52% of browsing was mobile with desktop dropping down below 50%. That trend isn’t unique. Mobile is consistently more used.
Even more than that, according to IMIMobile, 75% of people complete surveys on their mobiles. This is significantly lower than our own data for mobile usage on doopoll which comes in at around 90% across the past 60 days.
All of this to say, that it is super important that you make sure whatever survey tool you end up using is mobile friendly. Here’s a few options:
- doopoll – we’ve checked and all our customer satisfaction surveys work really nicely on mobile
- Typeform – although to be honest, it’s not necessarily suited to customer satisfaction work\
- Delighted – if you’re only looking to track a single metric
Some platforms that have improved but are still not great:
- SurveyMonkey – it’s a tool that was made in the previous millennium. Were you using a mobile device back then to browse the internet? No? Presumably neither were SurveyMonkey’s designers. Despite recent work on this problem, ask people whether they’d happily fill out a SurveyMonkey on a mobile. 80:20 that they’d run a mile.
- Google Forms – it’s the biggest survey provider in the world. But that doesn’t make it a good experience for a user on mobile.
Define your customer satisfaction strategy
Before you think about creating your survey though. let me just give you a word of caution. If you don’t define a strategy, you probably won’t be successful.
This doesn’t need to be a whole project of it’s own, you just need to sit down for a moment with anyone who needs to be involved and follow the simple steps we outlined in great detail here.
That said, you can broadly define your strategy by asking (and writing down some answers to) the following three questions:
- What would you consider to be high levels of customer satisfaction?
- How will you track customer satisfaction levels?
- How will you improve customer satisfaction?
Seeing as we’re in a section of this guide about gathering customer satisfaction levels, I’m going to assume that you’re already familiar with the kinds of survey that are available for you to use.
If you’re not already there, we’ve got a brilliant guide to the three main customer satisfaction survey types right here.
Create a survey
Good news survey fans – you’ve come to the right place.
The next step in your customer satisfaction response collection work is to create a survey and it just so happens that I know a company who can help you with this.
There are survey templates for all of the most common customer satisfaction surveys available on our templates page:
- NPS
- CSAT
- CES
We recommend using an established survey template (like the ones above) because they’re based on methodologies which you can track easily and then use the data to benchmark against others in your industry.
However, if you’re after something different, then we have these less established, but useful in their own right, survey templates too:
- 5-star rating
- Smileys
- Thumbs up, Thumbs down
And if you’re still not content, then you can create your customer satisfaction survey on doopoll using some of the question ideas that we have in this post.
Share the survey
How should you share your customer satisfaction survey? Well, that kind of depends on your customer lifecycle.
The worst possible move is not to share your survey at all. So let’s assume you have a basic idea of when you’d like to share the survey, here are a few ways that we’ve seen work for actually getting the survey to people.
Send feedback emails
The best way to collect feedback in our experience is to send out an email at key customer touch points (purchase, post-purchase plus 90, pre-renewal) to ask a customer to fill out your simple survey.
It’s super easy to do this. Just write an email explaining why you’re asking for feedback, explain what you’ll use it for, explain any incentives you may have (some people give prizes/discounts for feedback), and then include a link to the survey.
Include your survey in email signatures
We have customers who include a link to a customer feedback survey in every single email their company sends. They go into the signature of anyone who sends company emails and invite people to tell them ‘how did I do today’.
This is effective. When you think about how many emails you’re sending, you’ll see why.
Include feedback link on receipts
If you’ve got a bricks and mortar store, and you give out till receipts, you can include the link to a feedback survey on your receipt itself. Pair this with a prize draw for people who leave their emails at the end of the survey and you’ll notice you start getting lots more feedback.
Ask more than once
Don’t forget that customer feedback can vary greatly over the course of a customer’s lifetime (with you) because the service you provide and their experience of your company and product will change all the time.
So it’s worth capturing feedback regularly. That’s why we suggest building a customer feedback lifecycle.
We’ve only got a few more topics to cover in this section. But if you’re content to try out one of the established survey templates we created then you can do that here.
