Do you feel that you truly, deeply understand your customer base?
Honest feedback from your customers is essential for keeping your business growing and on the right path, and surveys and polls can be a simple and effective way to get that valuable feedback. Customer surveys are a critically important tool, helping you to measure satisfaction, determine needs, and build a deeper relationship a with your customers, growing their brand loyalty.
Yet surveys are deceptively simple. Though it can be easy and quick to throw together a few questions for your customers to answer, a poorly designed survey won’t get you the results you need.
To really benefit from your surveys, you need to do a bit more planning than just writing a few simple questions. Here’s how.
How Exactly Can You Use Customer Feedback to Grow Your Business?
The data you gather from customer surveys and polls can help you with a wide range of business goals, like:
- Understanding your customer base
- Building accurate, data-driven buyer personas
- Testing new ideas for your business or specific products and services
- Getting feedback on what you’re doing right – or wrong
- Keeping a finger on the pulse of your industry and market trends
Tips for Creating Customer Surveys That Work
1. Define your goals
Firstly, it’s important to define your exact goal for creating a survey. If you start writing questions without a specific goal in mind, you won’t get the results you’re looking for.
You can use ideas from the list above, or come up with your own goals.
Feel free to combine similar goals as well. You could create a survey with the dual purposes of “spotting new market trends” and “gaining a deeper understanding of customer needs,” for example. But remember that the more goals you have, or the more disparate they are, the more difficult it will be to create an effective survey that isn’t too long.
2. Just the right length
The longer your survey is, the fewer people will actually complete the entire thing.
But while it’s tempting to create an ultra-short survey so you can get as many responses as possible, it probably won’t generate enough valuable data for you to act on.
The key is balance. You need to be sure to get the essential information you need, but not go into so much detail that all your respondents abandon the survey halfway through.
Carefully review your survey questions and ask yourself if each question really needs to be there. Once you have your most important questions picked out, make sure they’ll provide enough data for you to accomplish your survey goal.
3. Follow best practices for surveys
Creating effective surveys is an art and a science – whole firms specialize in designing and administering surveys.
If you’re designing your own DIY customer survey, keep in mind these best practices:
- Avoid leading questions – rephrase them to be more open-ended and not anticipate a particular answer.
- Avoid jargon and acronyms in your questions.
- Don’t state questions in the negative – it can be confusing.
- Give respondents a chance to expand on their answer or offer additional information at the end.
- Get more responses by explaining why customers should participate, and/or offering a reward.
- Use a specialized tool or software (like FoxMetrics survey and poll tools) to make it easy for customers to take your survey, and easy for you to view the results.
Create Surveys & Polls Quickly and Easily With FoxMetrics Tools
If you’re ready to create your own surveys and polls, FoxMetrics has the tools to help. You can easily create pop-up windows asking for visitor feedback, or set up a quick poll to get answers to specific questions. Just contact us to give FoxMetrics a try today!
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