How Do I Run a Customer Satisfaction Survey?

Customer satisfaction surveys are a goldmine for businesses because they allow them to gain insights into the thoughts and feelings of their customers. This helps management develop products or services that meet their customers’ needs even better but also deliver a stellar customer experience that increases brand loyalty. 

But if you’ve never run a survey before, you may be wondering: What kind of impact can customer satisfaction surveys actually have? We’ll answer all your questions in this article. 

Why Measuring Customer Satisfaction is Crucial

How will you know how to serve your customers better without customer feedback? Customer satisfaction surveys are your chance to find out how your customers feel and how they think you could improve the business in their own words, which helps you increase sales and retention.

Are you meeting your customers’ expectations? Are you delivering great customer service? How much effort is it for new customers to use your product or service? By asking survey questions about customer loyalty, in particular, you can identify your best customers and brand advocates and gain valuable information from them.

How to Run a Customer Satisfaction Survey

So, what customer satisfaction survey questions should you ask to get the most useful measurement of customer sentiment?

Customer satisfaction surveys come in various forms as there are different ways to collect customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction. Decide on the measurement that works best for your business and purpose. Then, make sure you act on feedback to actually improve customer retention.

Let’s go over the steps you should follow to run a successful survey. 

Step 1: Identify the Type of Survey You Want to Run

Get direction for your own customer feedback survey from these tried and tested customer satisfaction survey templates.

→Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is a popular measure of customer satisfaction and represents the overall customer sentiment towards the brand. A high level of customer satisfaction indicates a good customer experience. The score is calculated according to the responses to a key question “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” and the answer is given on a scale of one to ten. Due to its simplicity, it’s a good starting point for running customer satisfaction surveys.

→Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Another way to conveniently measure customer satisfaction is through a two-part customer satisfaction survey following CSAT. This approach gathers customer feedback initially through the question “How satisfied are you with [company] on a scale of one to five?” Then respondents are asked to expand on their answer in their own words with an open-ended question such as “Tell us a bit more about why you chose [their answer]?” It’s best to specify survey questions to a particular part of the customer journey when collecting this type of customer satisfaction score. For example, “How satisfied are you with your experience with our customer service representative?”

→Customer Effort Score (CES)

This customer satisfaction survey is focused on ease of use. After a certain touchpoint in the customer experience such as after customers interact with your customer support team or after having used the product or service for a month, a simple customer satisfaction survey question is sent out. It’s usually based on the customer satisfaction survey template of “How easy did [company] make it to [action in question]?” This customer satisfaction data improves customer experience and product development efforts.

→Post-Purchase Survey

Another specific type of customer satisfaction survey is gathering customer feedback directly after purchase. This allows valuable feedback to be collected about how the customers feel about the purchasing experience such as the website and payment process. For example, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy did you find the purchase process for [product]?” Sending customer satisfaction surveys so early on in the customer lifecycle supports the improvement of conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

→Product Development Survey

When launching a new product or service, it’s best to get customer feedback before going all in. Gather customer sentiments about your product development through customer satisfaction survey questions. In this case, sample customer satisfaction surveys include:

“What other products have you used in [product category]?”

“Rank the features in terms of importance to you.”

“How easy was the platform to use?”

There are different types of customer satisfaction surveys that fulfill different purposes and align with what exactly you want to focus your customer satisfaction survey questions around. Once you’ve created your customer feedback survey, your job isn’t over.

Step 2: Choose the Proper Channel

There’s no point in coming up with a customer satisfaction survey unless your target audience is actually going to fill it out. The best way to reach them and get a representative amount of customer feedback is to make it easy for them to answer the survey questions. If they have to jump through too many hoops, they won’t bother.

When creating customer satisfaction surveys make sure to use your customer base’s preferred channel of communication. While collecting detailed feedback is valuable, you’ll get the most responses from quick-to-answer questions that have a scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Build up to more involved survey questions. It’s super simple to collect feedback through text because respondents don’t even need to click on a link. They can just reply to the text.

Step 3: Implement Changes Based on Results

Once you’ve curated your customer satisfaction survey questions, delivered them through your customer’s preferred channel of communication, and received a good amount of responses, it’s time to act.

Look for patterns in the results. What does the customer satisfaction data tell you about the customer journey, product quality, why customers stay loyal and why customers drop off? Draw conclusions and then create an action plan to implement the recommended changes. After implementation, run a follow-up customer satisfaction survey to check that the problem has been resolved in the eyes of your customer base. It’s a cycle of gathering feedback and refining.

Best Practices for Customer Satisfaction Surveys

In summary, here are a few best practices for conducting a customer satisfaction survey successfully. Use this checklist to guide you as you survey customers.

Keep customer satisfaction survey questions short. This makes it easy for respondents to understand and answer which increases the likelihood of them actually answering the survey questions.

Make sure the questions are clear. Misunderstanding could skew your customer satisfaction results because they aren’t accurately answering the question. Also, confusion can put respondents off answering at all.

Be specific when adapting a customer satisfaction survey template. This allows for the collection of the most useful customer satisfaction data because it can be applied to the exact stage of the customer journey that was the focus of the customer satisfaction survey.

Make the survey convenient so customers don’t have to work hard to fill it out. In terms of delivery channels, text is a great option because respondents don’t have to click to an external site.

Implement changes based on the feedback collected. The point of customer satisfaction surveys is to improve the business through increased sales and customer retention. Use the data collected to do just that.

Use the right tools. Customer satisfaction surveys should be as efficient as possible for both you and your loyal customers. So use technology to your advantage. Here at Podium, we have a text marketing tool that will efficiently send out satisfaction surveys that your existing customers are happy to fill out with their honest feedback.

Ready to get started with your first customer satisfaction survey? Start collecting feedback from your satisfied customers and improve your overall customer satisfaction with our text messaging platform for free today.