7 Actionable Tips to Design Effective Customer Surveys
This is a follow-up to our recent post on major customer survey mistakes. This piece on how to design effective customer survey campaigns has become necessary since surveys are arguably the most effective way to get into the minds of your customers.
Customer surveys come in different types, depending on what is being surveyed. In this post, we’ll briefly highlight seven (7) tips that would make your surveys significantly more effective, regardless of what is being surveyed. Leggo!
1. Start with a clearly defined purpose
Granted that what you want to do is survey your customers, it’s also important to know why you’re doing this.
Having a clear purpose of your end goal with the survey will be important in designing every aspect of the survey, from how you choose your audience to how you word your survey questions, among other things.
2. Map out your target audience
Once you’ve ironed out your purpose, the next thing to do will be to decide on the survey population. In most cases, you probably won’t take the survey to just about any customer.
Your target demographic might be customers from a newly opened branch in another part of town, customers who have just bought your newly launched product, or customers who have recently contacted support to resolve challenges. Whoever you’re targeting, your audience must be clearly defined.
3. Ensure proper customer representation
Your target audience must be well-represented in every survey. This is the only way to ensure survey integrity and the quality of data obtainable at the end of the survey.
In this case, the number of customers surveyed with respect to the total number of customers within the target audience must be robust enough to make the results reliable enough.
4. Endeavor to ask the right survey questions
While we already discussed how defining your customer survey purpose will impact the entire process and the ensuing results, it’s still important to ensure the right questions are asked. Questions should be targeted closely at the exact questions to which the insights are needed.
5. Keep survey questions clear and concise
Along with asking the right survey questions, you want to ensure the wordings, context, and every other thing is right. Questions should be short, clear, and easy to understand. The goal should be to make this as easy for respondents as possible.
6. Test before launch
In the previous piece we published on customer survey mistakes, we emphasized the importance of testing your survey before launching as it helps uncover problem areas before the real interactions with the survey audience.
Errors, typos, and other mistakes lurking around anywhere can be corrected during this time before the survey is launched.
7. Incentivize responses
Nowadays, it’s become a lot more challenging to gain the attention of people. So, incentivizing your surveys can help trigger more interest within the population to be surveyed.
Incentives don’t necessarily have to be cash rewards. Coupons, discounts, prize draw qualifications could work, among other things.
Conclusion
All seven of the tips and recommendations above would go a long way to help you boost the effectiveness of your survey whether that means getting enough responses and feedback or improving the quality of the responses.
On a final note, you should consider working with an experienced agency like DSG Associates to help you uncover valuable insights with customer surveys. In this case, the odds of success increase exponentially when the process is being managed for you by experts with the right combo of knowledge, expertise, experience, and resources.
DSG Associates help ambitious brands design and implement super effective customer surveys, intercept interviews, mystery shopping, and audits, among other market research services.
If you’re wondering how one or more of these services can benefit your organization, we’ll be more than happy to discuss your options and help you chart a course forward.