As technology lies increasingly at the core of many products, many companies are turning to customer surveys to gain critical insights into how well their products are meeting customer needs.
This article will dissect the benefits of customer feedback surveys, as well as outline some best practices for their use. Our goal is to provide businesses with the tools & knowledge to improve their products and better understand customer needs.
Let’s get started!
What’s a Customer Survey?
To start, customer surveys are questionnaires or polls that are sent to customers to assess their thoughts on a product or service. They can be administered in a variety of ways, including online surveys, phone interviews, or customer feedback forms.
Some surveys take the form of short, one-question polls, while others consist of detailed questionnaires that can take up to 15 minutes to complete. Regardless of the length or complexity of the survey, the goal is always to gain insights into customer attitudes and behaviors, and to do it in a way that is both cost-effective and efficient.
After the survey, the customer’s responses are analyzed and used to improve the product or service. Historically, this analysis was done by hand, but today, there are a variety of software programs that help make the process more efficient. Retention360, for example, provides an AI-based sentiment analysis tool that automatically digests and understands customer feedback for you before providing actionable insights.
Why Customer Surveys?
As our world grows more and more digital, businesses are seeking new ways to understand how their products are being used. Customer surveys offer a reliable and efficient way to collect customer feedback. Additionally, from a competitiveness standpoint, customer surveys can also help businesses understand how they compare to their peers.
Generally speaking, customer surveys offer the following benefits:
– They provide a snapshot of customer sentiment at a given point in time
– They help identify customer needs and pain points
– They can be used to track changes in customer sentiment over time
– They can help identify areas for product improvement
– They can help benchmark product performance against competitors
It’s important to note that not all surveys are created equal. Well designed surveys offer the most value, as they can provide rich and actionable insights. In order to get the most out of customer surveys, it’s important to carefully construct your customer survey for maximum effectiveness.
How to Build Effective Customer Surveys
One of the core principles of customer survey building is to keep them short and simple. Long surveys can be daunting for customers to complete, leading to low response rates and inaccurate data.
Additionally, the longer the survey, the more likely it is that the information you’re collecting is noisy, self-interest-driven, or otherwise non-representative of your data sample. As such, it’s important to ask only the most important questions and to keep surveys concise.
Another key principle is to make sure surveys are relevant to customers. The goal is to improve the customer experience, meaning that questions should be tailored to the product or service being offered and should reflect the customer’s unique needs and wants. For example, a question about how often a customer uses a product may be irrelevant for a product that is used only once a year.
Finally, survey questions should be easy to understand. This means avoiding jargon and ensuring that all questions are clearly worded. Ambiguous questions can lead to inaccurate responses and confusion among customers. Politicians have a habit of building leading questions into their surveys which distort the answers given. Product surveys, on the other hand, should be so simple that a five-year-old could answer any type of questions in the survey.
Retention360 works hand-in-hand with restaurants and product-based businesses to develop effective surveys that capture customer needs. We help collect the right customer information, like email and phone number, and then bundle that into an automated intent analysis pipeline that can help deliver strong customer insights.
In closing
Customer surveys are an indispensable market research tool that can provide your business with a wealth of valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, to ultimately increase your customer retention rate.
In a modern world where consumers are more demanding than ever, it is essential to have a clear understanding of what they want in order to stay ahead of the competition. By conducting regular customer surveys, you can obtain this crucial information and use it to improve your products and services, boost sales, and increase customer loyalty.
If you’re looking to gain a competitive edge, Retention360 is the choice for you. With our powerful customer survey tool, you can obtain feedback directly from your customers and get the insights you need to improve your business. Our direct-response tool also makes it easy to reach out to customers on social media & other platforms to improve their experience with your brand.
Book a demo today!
