You have business questions that need answers. To answer those questions effectively, you need to create the perfect survey to gather customer feedback.
The good news is that surveys seem pretty straightforward, right? Ask a few questions, get the answers you need, and then you’re off to the races making changes and finding new insights. Unfortunately, getting great actionable data is harder than it looks. In a 2018 report, Dun & Bradstreet and Forrester Research found that only 43% of individuals polled believe their companies’ “data sources and insights are well integrated, understood, consistent, validated, and shared across the organisation.” Furthermore, only 42% of those surveyed think their company is capable of converting the gathered data into insights.
Oftentimes this gap from data to insight occurs due to an issue right at the beginning of the process: the survey design itself. If your survey isn’t properly designed, you might end up with very few responses - or worse, misleading data that negatively influences your business decisions. Very few of us working in customer experience have a statistics degree. So, it’s understandable that we’re mostly winging it when it comes to creating statistically viable surveys. That’s why we’re here.
In this article, we cover four tips to build better surveys to give you results that represent what customers truly think, which gives your team the insights they need to act. Follow these tips and your team will be making top-notch surveys in no time.
The business objectives you are trying to achieve will dictate the type of survey you create. When the desired outcome is unclear, surveys become unfocused. Even though the survey may generate a lot of data, it won’t be helpful in making data-driven business decisions.
Before creating a new survey, decide what business problem you are trying to solve. Are you looking to validate your product roadmap? Streamline the customer onboarding journey? Improve the customer service experience? All of these surveys will look very different.
Once you’ve decided your overall survey objective, determine the top-line metric you’d like to base your survey on. These will be the structured backbone of your survey. Common top-line metrics include questions like customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score. This anchor metric will help position any qualitative feedback you receive through text based responses. Beware though, because as McKinsey reports, “no one metric is the best for all businesses... and best-in-class operators generally choose the metric that is most predictive of their desired business outcome, which can vary by industry.”
Secondly, determine the touchpoints that are appropriate for the measurement you’re trying to make. Asking a website visitor who is just browsing your website how they feel about your company won’t help you decrease churn - they might not even have a real opinion yet. Comparatively, running an NPS survey with customers who’ve just completed their onboarding period would be the perfect place to get feedback about the onboarding journey.
We all know the old adage, “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” This is very true in survey questions. How you ask is almost as important as what you ask. Getting someone to open your survey, let alone fill it out, is a huge undertaking of its own. So, the last thing you want to do is frustrate or confuse them with overly complicated questions.
Different types of survey questions are useful for different types of data. There are two main categories of questions: structured and unstructured.
Structured questions are close-ended (ie. respondents can only choose from a predetermined set of answers), which means they require less cognitive load. Because they are easier to answer, structured questions can be used to gather a ton of valuable information that is also easy to analyse. They result in more accurate data, so the majority of your survey questions should be close-ended. For example, structured questions include the NPS question, demographic data collection and satisfaction questions.
Unstructured questions are open-ended and allow for respondents to provide their opinion in free-flowing text. Open-ended questions require more time to read, analyse, and consider. However, unstructured data can be extremely powerful when analysed through text analytics software that takes advantage of natural language processing.
Depending on the metric you’ve decided to capture, the touchpoint and medium you use will change. The touchpoint is when you choose to send the survey, perhaps aligned with actions that the customer has taken, and the medium is the format or the channel you use. Together, they can make a big impact on the amount and value of data you receive.
The touchpoint: depending on the business outcomes you identified in part one, the timing of your survey will vary. Each point of the customer journey will offer different insights and opportunities.
The medium: whether it’s in-app, email, SMS, direct call or even good ol’ fashioned pen and paper, how you deliver the survey needs to align with the questions you’re asking and the point at which you’re asking them.
Let’s put the two of these together in some common survey scenarios:
|
Business outcome |
Metric |
Touchpoint |
Medium |
|
Improving service delivery |
Customer Satisfaction |
This question needs to be asked after a customer has an interaction with the customer service department - any other time just won’t give you relevant feedback. |
Using the same channel the customer reached out on can provide better response rates. However, email and SMS surveys are very easy for customers to respond to and can also be effective. |
|
Gathering input for a new feature |
NPS or purely qualitative feedback |
Customers will need to be familiar with your existing product to offer valuable data - consider delivering the survey later in the customer journey. |
In-app surveys can be perfectly positioned in this scenario to target customers that are already using similar functionality. Email surveys can also be used to gather more general input. |
|
Reducing churn |
NPS |
This question can be asked at any point in the customer journey and the touchpoint actually provides another piece of data for analysis. For example, the fact that customers who have just had a service interaction show a higher NPS is meaningful data. If NPS drops off over time, that’s a meaningful statistic as well. Separating NPS by touchpoint can uncover trends that aren’t visible when every survey is bucketed together. Churn analysis can also be helpful to run post-cancellation to collect feedback from customers who have already left. |
NPS surveys can be delivered in-app or by email. In-app surveys will only target users who are actively using your product on a regular basis, where email surveys can reach more stakeholders. |
Once you’ve cemented your desired business outcome, chosen a top-line metric and identified the appropriate touchpoints for your surveys, it’s time to ensure your survey is well designed. Even if the theory behind your survey is sound, a cumbersome design will deter customers from giving their feedback and limit your results.
You want to be thorough when you create your survey. Making sure you get all the information you want is important, but it’s also important to make sure you don’t needlessly ask questions. Seeing multiple versions of the same question can be fatiguing, or annoying, to your respondents, so do your best to avoid it.
Here are two things to ask yourself when adding questions:
We all want high-quality data. Customer insights guide company decisions and help us move forward. Surveys are a great way to gain those insights, so it’s important that we take care when creating them. Be sure you’re asking the right questions and considering your respondent at every point. If you do, your survey will be a success.