Businesses always want to know what their customers think about themselves. Sometime there is a dip in the sales, or the complaints start rising suddenly, or a new product failed to get expected appreciations, whatever the case is, businesses keep conducting customer feedback campaigns to better align themselves with customers’ needs and expectations. The customer feedback data provides valuable insights into customer’s mind and help businesses better understand their needs, demands, expectations and market trends. The customer feedback data is also vital for behavioral analysis and it can be a great source of information that can shape your future products and services.
However, not receiving good response or desired data is a very common problem with customer feedback campaigns. There could be several reasons of not receiving desired feedback data ranging from ineffective tools to less-effective communication mediums. However, if everything is set-upped right and you are utilizing professional customer feedback system or feedback survey system which is integrated with highly effective mediums and channels, and even then you are unable to collect the desired feedback data is a big problem. This is due to the poor design of the survey questionnaire. The customer feedback data is a treasure for a business and the surveys are the key to unlocking it. In this blog we will discuss the best practices for designing effective customer feedback surveys that can greatly improve the impact of your feedback campaigns.
5 Best Practices for Designing Effective Customer Feedback Surveys
1. Define Your Goals and Objectives
For any successful campaign it is extremely important to define your goals and objectives. What information you want to collect, how many customers you are targeting, and what type or data format is aligned with your needs, etc. Here are some most common goals businesses often want to achieve with their customer feedback surveys:
- Customer Satisfaction: The customer satisfaction is the most widely used goal for surveys, businesses want to know how happy and satisfied a customer is and what aspects of the products, services or customer experience are up-to-the-mark and what areas need improvements.
- Customer Pain Points: The customer pain points are problems that customers are facing frequently or these types of surveys are designed to identify recurring problems/challenges that customer have to face while interacting with your business.
- Product Development: The product development surveys are design to evaluate the products and even services. These surveys ask customer about specific features, whether customer wants them, like them or hate them or you can also ask them to give suggestions.
- Behavioral Analysis: The behavioral analysis is crucial for businesses as it provide them a deeper insight to customers’ minds and help them understand customer preferences, habits and trends. Such surveys are crucial for bridging the gap between customer expectations and your products.
Once you have clear objectives and set goals, you are in a better position to ask exclusive questions. Furthermore it also help you narrow down the audience groups, which also improve the quality of the feedbacks. For example, you want to get feedback from your customers who have purchased a specific product, you just don’t want to ask customers who are not even using that product.
See Also: 5 Types of Customer Feedback
Define Your Goals and Objectives
2. Keep Your Survey Short and Sweet
Having lengthier questionnaires is one of the main cause of failure. Especially in this fast-paced work, where the attention span is shorter and everyone is busy, no one have time to fill-in long questionnaires. That is why lengthy questionnaires have lesser completion rate. This usually happens when you don’t prioritize and categorize your questions. It is important to divide your questionnaire into different highly-relevant groups, and then prioritize questions in each set, and afterwards prioritize the questions from the entire questionnaires. This will help you eliminate most of the unwanted or less helpful questions and it lets you focus only on high-priority and high-return questions.
You can get the information which is highly important, you can get precise answers from the customers while also ensuring most of the customers complete the entire surveys. The ideal survey is should not last longer than 10 minutes so aim your questionnaires for 5 to 10 minutes max. You can also offer some incentive for the customers who submit their survey, this will compel them to fill-in the entire questionnaire and it will raise your completion rate. Offering too many incentive could also ruin the data quality and most of the audience will only attempt it for the benefit they are getting hence reducing the quality of the feedback data.
See Also: How to create Customer Feedback Surveys for Product Development?
Keep Your Survey Short and Sweet
3. Choose the Right Question Format
Apart from short listing only high-priority questions another most important aspect is to choose the right question format. The question format is something that makes it easier or difficult to answer to that question which directly impact the completion rate. Here are some commonly used question types:
- Multiple Choice: The multiple choice questions are widely used to get quick response, or to collect demographic data. Multiple choice questions are also used to get customer preferences.
- Rating Scale: The rating scales usually have some visual affects to give cues, such as star rating, happiness meter with emoticons, which are quite engaging and quicker.
- Likert Scale: The likert scale is a numbered scale ranging from 1 to 5 with a sentiment associated with each number such as very happy, unhappy, neutral, etc.
- Dropdowns and Selectors: The dropdowns and selectors are usually used to collect demographic data, and is used to categorize customer/audience.
- Open-ended Questions: The open ended questions are used to take suggestions and comments, it gives customers more freedom to express their answers or sentiments.
It is important to utilize multiple different types of question, this will keep your customers engaged and help you get a bit more rounded-prospective. Sometime businesses also use leading questions to direct the customer to a specific set of questions. For example, providing a list of products in a dropdown or multiple choice type while collecting product feedback will help you ask relevant question to each product.
See Also: How to Enhance Customer Experience with Customer Feedback Surveys?
Choose the Right Question Format
4. Choose Your Wording Carefully
When you are writing your survey questions, you should remember you are not writing them to hear what you want to hear but you are aim here is to get the most honest and unbiased perspective of the targeted audience. Here are a few most important aspects of the survey question which could greatly enhance the feedback data quality:
- Clear Language: The survey questions must have clear and easy-to-understand language. Use the common day-to-day words, avoid technical terms or jargons to avoid confusing the customers.
- Neutral and Unbiased: In order to get an honest and unbiased customer opinion the question statement must be neutral and unbiased avoiding leading statements towards any answer.
- Start with Positive Questions: It is always good to start the survey with positive and engaging questions to increase customer’s interest in the survey, this will also help raising completion rate.
- Maintain Logical Flow: It is crucial to maintain a logical flow, such as start with general questions then move to specific questions and at the end give an open-ended question to maintain the flow.
- Use Skip Logic: The skip logic is directing your customers to a specific set of questions on the bases of their answer to the previous question, it helps improving the completion rate as well.
- Group Similar Questions: It is important to stay on-topic, hence all questions related to a particular subject should be grouped. It also increase engagement and raise completion rate.
- Demographic Questions: The demographic questions are essential to improve data quality, however, avoid asking too much of private information and use culturally sensitive wordings.
The wording is crucial for a successful customer feedback survey campaign. When you are conducting a survey for a large audience, you should carefully chose your words. Especially for businesses in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and any other region of UAE where the societies are generally comprises of people from various different backgrounds and ethnicities along with a large local population, the wording matters a lot and it could be main contributor to success or failure of the feedback survey campaign.
See Also: What is Multichannel Customer Feedback and Why it is so Important?
Choose Your Wording Carefully
5. Include Visuals wherever Needed
A picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures, visuals and illustrations are a great way to not only make your survey easier-to-understand and also more engaging. Human brain tend to like graphics, pictures and illustration, therefor adding some visuals, photos, or graphics in your survey could greatly enhance the user engagements. Here are some ways to make your survey more engaging:
- Images and Graphics: Images and info-graphics can be used to demonstrate both question and answer. It becomes very easy if something is shown in an image rather than explained in words.
- Progress Bars: These progress bars are used to help customers understand how far they have progressed, and how much more questionnaire is left, it is a great way to raise completion rate.
- Charts and Graphs: The charts and graphs are a great way to share your findings with the audience. These graphs and charts are displayed at the end of the survey.
- Videos: Videos are not always advised to be used in the feedback surveys. However, videos can also be used if it is absolutely necessary.
Visuals are a great way to enhance the user experience however, doing too much could overwhelmed your audience and it could distract them from the main subject which will also impact on the feedback quality.
See Also: 11 Customer Feedback Examples for Business Success
Include Visuals wherever Needed
Conclusion
The customer feedback is extremely crucial for any business it is a tool to understand customer behavior, their needs, expectations, pain points and latest market trends. Businesses heavily rely on customer feedback data to design and develop new products/services and to enhance customer experience. The customer experience is a key to success in the modern day market landscape. Therefore conducting regular customer feedback campaigns is very common among businesses in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and elsewhere in UAE. However, most of the businesses either doesn’t get the expected response rate or they end up having unreliable feedback data.
The customer feedback collection is a sensitive process, as businesses incorporate customer feedback in their decision making processes, unreliable or incomplete feedback data could lead to catastrophic failure. In this blog we have compiled the 5 most important and crucial best practices for designing the effective customer feedback surveys:
- Defining your Goals and Objectives first will put you in right direction
- Keeping your survey questionnaire short and sweet will rise completion rate
- Choosing the right question format will greatly improve data quality
- Right wordings and language will greatly maximize the completion rate
- Including visuals, graphics and illustration will increase customer engagements
By following these 5 best practices for designing effective customer feedback surveys you can unlock the true potential of your feedback data and it will empower you to take highly effective data-driven decisions.
Take Action Today!
Now that you are equipped with a better understanding of designing the most effective customer feedback surveys, it is time to implement that knowledge. An effective and advanced customer feedback system could not only help you design visually appealing and highly functional surveys but it will also help you effectively collecting data. And with in-built analytical tools and integration features you can seamlessly incorporate the feedback data in various business process. If you want to learn more or if you want our help to design a customized customer feedback system for your organization, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.