eBusiness Weekly
Are you wondering why the business is not growing, why the customers are slowly voting with their feet and money somewhere else and why your competition is growing and opening more branches?
Well, when was the last time you did a customer survey for feedback on what your customers want or have been complaining about regards to your service. You surely cannot afford to think that their voice is not necessary.
Today we will share on what makes a customer survey critical to the business process. Customer surveys allow your business to collect large amounts of customer feedback in a short period of time with minimal effort required of the customer. Such insights help in business focus and reorientation as well as address requests and timely feedback.
With all the focus on customer acquisition these days, it’s easy to overlook one of the biggest potential sources of new revenue out there: your existing customer base.
Data gathered suggests that it’s five times more expensive to attract a new customer than sell to an existing one. With only 44 percent of companies having a greater focus on customer acquisition. The existing customers retained may be the key to your company’s massive growth, and customer surveys are one of the best tools for driving these future wins.
However, if you have never sent a survey out before, how do you know what to send? What types of surveys will be most effective, and when should they be sent?
The goal of using a
customer survey
The development of digital survey technology has made it easier than ever before to poll your customers. But with this great power comes great responsibility.
Send too few surveys, and you’ll miss valuable feedback. Send too often, and you risk alienating the customers you’re counting on for future growth. Developing a survey strategy that’s informative, but not intrusive, requires an understanding of what you’re hoping to achieve with your customer surveys.
A few possible survey types to consider include:
Post-purchase surveys to measure satisfaction with the product or service purchased, the delivery, or the on-boarding experience.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to determine customers’ likelihood of recommending your brand to others.
Product or service development surveys intended to capture customers’ desires for future launches (for example, asking for advance feedback on a possible line extension).
Customer survey questions
Asking the right questions in a customer survey is key to getting the information you need to make informed decisions. Typical customer survey questions and what information their answers reveal would be as follows.
- On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend (product/service) to your friends and colleagues?
This is an NPS survey question that measures customer loyalty. If the customer responds with a 9 or a 10, they’re loyal customers who may be willing to serve as your advocate.
But if their score is between 0 and 8, you need to do some more work to make them happier. Reach out to them pro-actively to ask for feedback.
- How satisfied were you with your experience?
This is a customer satisfaction survey question that measures how happy, or unhappy, a customer is with your product or service, or a one-off customer service experience.
- How easy was it to solve your problem with (product/service)?
This is a customer effort score (CES) survey question that measures how easy or difficult it was for a customer to use your product or service.
Customer survey sample to drive growth and measure loyalty
Post-purchase surveys
Since a post-purchase survey is asking for feedback on a transaction that’s already occurred, it does not necessarily drive growth by stimulating additional purchases (though offering a discount code for survey completion can have this effect).
Instead, post-purchase surveys allow you to do several things:
Improve brand emotion by positioning your company as one that cares about customers’ outcomes.
Identify problems with the ordering process — or your products and services themselves — or your products and services that can be corrected before they lead to bad reviews.
Gather additional information about your customers in order to send more targeted promotions in the future.
Deepen the relationship you have with new customers.
The specific questions asked on your post-purchase survey will depend on which goals the business is trying to achieve.
- Net Promoter
Score (NPS) Surveys)
Adding a post-purchase survey to your checkout flow is a good way to capture valuable business-building feedback from new buyers. However, never forget customers that are already in your system, What if you want to turn them into advocates for your company? Again, customer surveys can be your new best friend.
In this specific case, Net Promoter Score Survey is key. The goal of an NPS survey is to determine which of your past customers like your brand enough to refer you to others.
This is done by asking them to rate the likelihood that they would advocate for your company on a scale of 0 to 10. According to the official Net Promoter Score Definition, those who score your company as a “9” or “10” are “promoters”.
Those who give you a “7” or an “8” can be considered “passive customers”, while those who rate you below a “6” may actively be detractors.
Most email marketing providers offer templates for these types of surveys (whether they call them NPS surveys or not).
So what do you do with this information?
Certainly, if you receive a “detractor” score from a customer, you will want to investigate further to determine what went wrong. Again, this can lead to the kind of information needed to grow sales by improving the satisfaction and experience of future customers.
“Passive” respondents can be followed up with in much the same way. Rather than ask what went wrong, ask what could have made their experience even better to capture process- or product-improvement information.
Finally, identifying the “promoters” among your customer ranks is the first step in implementing a formal referral-marketing programme.
I trust this has been a good engagement and we will follow it up in our next article.
The views given herein are solely for information purposes; they are guidelines and suggestions and are not guaranteed to work in any particular way.
Robert Gonye is a Business Growth Expert and Influencer. He writes in his personal capacity. Comments and views: [email protected] twitter@robert_gonye
