Mistakes to Avoid When Creating a Customer Satisfaction Survey

Creating a customer satisfaction survey as a means of gathering data, information, feedback, and suggestions from customers themselves can sometimes be overwhelming. The amount of questions you have on your mind can be endless. There are times that curiosity leads to having a set of questions wondering how your visitors and customers look at your business as a whole. However, you only have to include questions that are relevant to what your main goal and purpose is in collecting survey answers.
The entire preparation of these surveys involves a lot of brainstorming and points to keep in mind, to avoid any mistakes. For instance, you have made a survey with poorly written questions. The customers might not give you the answers you are expecting to get. They might even alter their perspective about a certain issue. Thus, you will never be able to acquire the answers you actually need, distorting the overall CSAT scores.
Process of Designing the Survey
In the process of designing a customer satisfaction survey, it is important to know and understand the most common mistakes that should be avoided. They are sometimes overlooked so the main goal of conducting this is not achieved, and even make the results unhelpful. Certain mistakes include having an unclear survey goal, including some vague questions, creating too short or too long surveys, and sometimes even forgetting to analyze the demographics. You must be aware that these might unintentionally happen so you always have to double check. It is even effective to have it checked by conducting a mock survey, letting others answer the entire survey.
Having to successfully analyze the responses of the customers to the questions and CSATs will be able to help you calculate how satisfied the customers are, how it has changed over time, and how you can be able to make changes to improve the overall customer experience. Thus, you must be able to ensure that your customer survey will be as effective as possible. This is done by preparing the surveys properly to avoid certain common mistakes.
Survey Goal is not Clear
The moment you decide to conduct a customer satisfaction survey, questions will immediately pop into your head, making it easier for you to jump right into curating questions. However, you should initially pause and think about why you are actually creating a survey in the first place. You should understand that the initial step in this process is to identify the actual goal. Followed by what responses you are expecting to get, to be able to think of research questions that will guide the entire survey. This will also be leading you into selecting only the related questions to include in the CSAT survey.
For instance, you are getting alarmed that your conversions are gradually decreasing, or even wondering why more of the customers of your business have only been interacting with you on social media. Therefore, you have to tailor questions that will be able to give you an answer on this matter. Whatever it may be, ensure that every question you put into your survey will directly help you come up with a solution through the responses they submit to you. You have to be as precise as possible in defining the aim of the survey and in creating the questions. This will lead you to come up with perfect solutions for the betterment and the success of your business.
Including too Many Vague Questions
No one wants to be asked with vague questions, in any way you can think of. This leads to confusion and misunderstandings. Thus, if you want your customers to correctly answer your questions, then you need to be precise and ask questions in a straight-to-the-point manner. For example, if you included a question like “How satisfied are you?”, it might confuse the respondents. Satisfied where? Towards a particular product? Service? Or brand? It makes more sense if you have constructed your question such as “How satisfied are you with our services today?”. You always have to be specific and in-depth to avoid making your customers puzzled.
Each question you create and include in the survey is an important aspect of your research. They should be crafted to get the most accurate response out of the customers. This way, you will be able to get the response you expect. Vague questions will just result in a waste of you and your customers’ time, so it must really be avoided. Design and tailor questions that direct customers in the right direction. You must make sure that the data and information you will be getting is as precise as possible.
Making the Survey too Short or too Long
The length of the customer satisfaction survey you are creating can be a factor that will make or break your entire marketing research plans. Those surveys containing lots of questions might make the respondents veer away from answering them all. They might get overwhelmed in answering surveys with 20, or even more, questions. Aside from this, it might add unnecessary time on your end. Some questions might not be actually related to what the actual point of your survey would be.
A survey that is too short, on the other hand, may also be ineffective. Of course, it would be easier and faster for your customers to accomplish these. But if you think about it, you would not get much answers, data, and information with just a few questions. You might not be able to capture in-depth insights from your customers, and you would not be able to reach some conclusion. Imagine investing time in designing a survey. You might want it to be as resourceful as possible. It is important to know the right balance of the number of questions you need to include in your survey.
Key Takeaway
A customer satisfaction survey should be made with precision, involving clear and understandable questions, with an appropriate design and balanced number of queries. Certain mistakes should be avoided, to also prevent you from getting inaccurate and unhelpful responses. And aside from what has been mentioned above, of course, there are many other aspects to take into consideration to avoid mistakes in CSAT surveys. It plays a vital role in creating an effective survey which will let you obtain valuable feedback and insights.