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Survey questions should all relate to your end goal. Make sure every question has a purpose

Creating customer surveys is a step in the right direction toward boosting customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. Surveys give your audience the opportunity to express their opinions and experiences, while helping you improve your processes and better understand how your products and services make an impact.

According to SurveyMonkey data, companies that measure customer satisfaction are 33% more likely to describe themselves as successful than those who don’t assess this aspect of the business.

But before you start sending out questionnaires, it’s crucial that all the questions you include are focused around a central purpose.

Creating a goal for your survey

Start by creating a concrete goal for each survey. What is the purpose of the survey? What are you trying to discover? What will change when you evaluate responses? How will you use the data you collect from customers?

To keep things simple, break down your goal into three parts:

• What do you want to know?
• Who do you want to target?
• How will you use the results?

These questions and considerations will help you create clear and deliberate goals for each survey campaign.

All questions should serve the goal

Now that you know the purpose of your survey, it’s time to focus on the questions. You may think that you need to include the same couple questions in each survey, regardless of its purpose (for example, asking customers how they found your brand, or if they would recommend you to a friend). But every survey can and should be different.

Don’t include questions just because you’re curious. Only ask your targeted customers questions that directly serve your end goal. Do you really need to know how they found your company if your goal is just to understand their experience with a new product?

Cut out anything that’s not serving your purpose.

Keep surveys brief

Cutting out unnecessary questions will help you follow another survey best practice: Keep it brief.

Today’s consumers don’t have a lot of time to spend on a long survey, so they probably won’t stop to give valuable answers to every question in a long survey. And they may not take the survey at all after they see that it’s long.

Make sure your questions can be answered easily and quickly. By focusing on one end goal and asking questions that only serve that purpose, your customers won’t be overwhelmed by having to think through a lot of different topics. Keeping things concise helps them confidently and quickly answer the questions to the best of their ability.

Short surveys give you benefits as well. When everything is focused and simple, you’ll be able to sift through data and understand your customers much better.

Don’t be afraid of yes/no questions

While it’s often appropriate to offer a place for comments and explanations in your customer surveys, it’s also OK to incorporate simple yes-or-no questions.

Whatever your goal is for a survey — learning if your customer service team is performing well or if your customers feel valued, for example — asking a simple question that directly aligns with this goal is acceptable: “Did our team make you feel valued?” You can then add an additional question to follow these yes or no questions and invite the customer to provide more details in a few sentences.

Start making fact-based changes

Put your survey results to work by following up on answers and incorporating what you learned into business planning. It’s not enough to simply send a survey and read results. You should have clear steps in place across teams to address any negative responses and make changes to improve the customer experience.

Remember: If you see a lot of negative feedback, try to keep a positive view. Those customers still took the time to answer your questions, which shows more hope and commitment than those who simply didn’t take the survey at all. Negative feedback is better than no feedback.

Customer surveys help you connect to your target audience; provide valuable information about business performance, products, and services; and give your customers the opportunity to voice their opinions. Before you dive in, just make sure you have clearly defined goals for each survey. You can then center all of your questions around this one purpose, helping the survey stay brief and to the point.

Crewhu helps you focus on what drives business success: customer and employee engagement and satisfaction. Collect better customer feedback with our one-click survey, and start taking action based on actual customer experiences.

Contact Crewhu to get started with a free trial.