Blog

Customer surveys are a powerful way to get to know your customers and really figure out what they want and what makes them tick. It can give you information on how you’re doing currently as well as what your customers want in the form of content in the future.

Here’s how to create a customer survey that will give you meaningful results with the least amount of effort on your customer’s part.

Start by Deciding What You Want to Learn

What specific information do you want to learn by conducting this customer survey? Simply saying “We want to get to know our customers better” is not a good answer. Surveys without a clear goal in mind tend to be far too long and untargeted.

Instead, have a clear question or direction for the survey. For example:

• How is our current service? What are we doing right and what are we doing wrong?
• What do customers want in our current product? What will they want five years from now?
• What is our clients demographics?

Once you have a specific line of questioning or specific question you want to answer, start building your survey.

Creating Your Survey

When you’re creating the survey, make it as short as you possibly can while still getting the data you want. That way you’ll have more people actually complete the survey and you won’t take up too much of your customers time.

Some options for what kinds of questions to have in your survey include:

• Multiple choice answers
• Rating 1-10 scales
• True/false questions
• Strongly agree/strongly disagree scales
• Open-ended answers.

Generally your survey should be a mix of all the above options. Make sure you include at least one open-ended question in your survey so your customers can freely express their thoughts.

Interpreting the Data

Make sure you have statistically significant data for each question before you deem the survey complete.  Collecting 20 survey results isn’t going to be enough of a mixture of to do you much good.

Next, take your survey and start evaluating results and what you’ve learned. Were you right about certain things and off about others? What were you surprised by?

Carefully read over all the open-ended question answers. Were there common themes in the answers?

Now take everything you’ve learned and write down what your top three discoveries were. Then, use the data now available to you to come up with new action plans to improve your customer experience.

One thing to note about customer surveys: If you’re conducting a survey about what customers will or will not buy, keep in mind that what someone says they would buy may not always match what they’d actually pull their credit card out for. It’s good data to have, but having a survey saying that they’d buy something is not a guarantee that the product will sell.

Design your surveys with a specific goal in mind. Keep them short and concise, then use what you’ve learned to immediately create a plan and put it into action.