What is a customer survey? The importance of surveying customers

Customer survey is the activity of collecting opinions from customers through pre-designed questionnaires to help businesses capture customers' thoughts and feelings about their brand, products, or services enterprise.

Customer surveys play an important role because this activity will help companies collect data from customers through specific touchpoints in the purchasing process. From there, businesses will understand their customers thoroughly and come up with appropriate marketing and customer service strategies.

Each type of survey will be used for different survey purposes, so choose the appropriate survey type to obtain the most useful information for your business. Here are the 5 most popular survey types today:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey

The NPS Customer Survey is a popular tool across many industries, helping to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction against competitors. Additionally, NPS can help identify customers who may be thinking about switching to a competitor or have negative feedback about your business.

To conduct NPS surveys, businesses often use emails, text messages, or pop-ups/chat boxes on websites. The first question is "How would you recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?" Customers will be asked to rate on a scale of 0 to 10.

The NPS survey will classify customers into 3 groups:

  • Detractors (under 6 points): customers who are dissatisfied and can negatively affect your brand.
  • Passives (7 - 8 points): customers are relatively satisfied but there are still unmet points. They can switch to a competitor's service.
  • Promoters (9 - 10 points): customers are very satisfied and loyal to your products and services. They will recommend you to friends and family.

NPS calculation formula: NPS = % (Promoters) - % (Detractors). For example, in a survey of 110 customers, there are 60 Promoters (60%), 20 Passives (20%), and 20 Detractors (20%), so NPS = 60% - 20% = 40%. NPS >50 is considered excellent and >70 is considered the best service in the world.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Survey

CSAT surveys help businesses measure customer satisfaction with their products or services.

CSAT survey questions often include a variation of the question "How would you rate your satisfaction with the product/service?" Customers will choose the level of satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5:

  • Very dissatisfied
  • Dissatisfied
  • Neutral
  • Satisfied
  • Very satisfied

The formula for calculating the CSAT score is: CSAT index = (number of satisfied customers or more / total number of customers participating in the survey) x 100. For example: If out of 100 people participating in the survey, 80 people responded that they are satisfied or very satisfied, the CSAT score will be: (80/100) x 100 = 80%.

CSAT surveys allow your business to remediate specific negative customer feedback and improve the quality of your products and services to deliver better customer experiences. From there, it helps businesses receive the love, trust, and loyalty of customers.

Survey on customer service experience

To collect feedback from customers about a specific product or business experience, businesses should use this survey. In particular, after-sales surveys are often combined with NPS customer surveys when the NPS index is lower than 50 to help businesses determine whether they need to focus on improving customer service or product quality.

This customer survey is typically emailed to customers after they have purchased a product or used a service from the business. Although these surveys can be open-ended, they will often ask customers to rate various aspects of their experience on a scale of 1-5, corresponding from dissatisfied to satisfied. It helps businesses understand specifically which aspects of their product or service need improvement and meet customer needs.

Survey about upcoming products/services

Surveying customer reactions to upcoming products/services is conducted before a business launches a new product to evaluate customers' purchasing ability.

The goal of conducting a product development survey is to evaluate the profitability of a new product/service and collect ideas and feedback from customers to improve the product. before launching to the market.

To conduct this survey, businesses need to allow customers to try the product directly, and even inform customers of the product's selling price. They will then ask questions to gauge the customer's reaction to the product.

Survey product availability

E-commerce businesses often use usability surveys or user experience surveys on their websites to gather customer feedback, thereby providing a better experience for them.

To that end, these surveys typically appear while shoppers are using the site and can be administered as multiple-choice or open-ended questions.

Product availability surveys are the best way to enhance customer experience, optimize content, or improve website experience. Therefore, customer surveys should be performed regularly and properly so that businesses can listen directly to customers' opinions and improve the quality of their products and services.

Customer survey process

For customer surveys to take place smoothly and collect truly quality information, businesses need to have the most specific and detailed plan. Below is the 4-step process of implementing a customer survey campaign that you can refer to:

Identify the problem that needs to be investigated

The first and most important thing is that you need to identify the problem. You need to survey to collect opinions from customers. Then from there, choose a touch point in the customer's purchasing journey to conduct a survey.

Some typical examples at stages in the customer buying process include:

  • Pre-sale: Are customers provided with enough information about the product/service to make a purchasing decision? If not, what information are they missing?
  • Post-sale: Are customers satisfied with the product? Is the ordering process simple and convenient? Do they have any suggestions for improving your product or service? Would they recommend your product/service to others?
  • After-sale support: Have you resolved the customer's problem? If so, what was the problem-solving process? If not, how will this affect their opinion of your products and brand?
  • For low reviews, cancellations, or product returns: Customers are dissatisfied with your product or service. What is the reason why they are dissatisfied?

Choose the appropriate customer survey type

Choose the type of survey that matches the problem you need answers to. This is an important step, analyze and consider carefully before making your final decision.

Choose a survey method

There are many ways to conduct surveys, you can choose one or a combination of the following methods:

  • Interview

Approaching the market by direct interviews usually takes place in public places such as shopping centers. This method helps promote and market products effectively and collect feedback immediately. However, conducting face-to-face interviews is costly and requires a lot of time and resources, despite achieving response levels of up to 90%.

  • Face-to-face interviews using handheld devices (CAPI)

New technology allows direct surveys using questionnaires on tablets or smartphones. This tool connects to the survey management software on the server and has useful features such as authenticating locations and respondents using GPS and taking photos, controlling surveyors' travel routes. CAPI helps ensure survey authenticity and minimize errors while saving time and data entry costs.

  • Survey by phone

Telephone surveys have lower costs than face-to-face surveys. However, the difficulty in convincing people to participate in remote interviews has led to a low response rate of only about 50-60%.

  • Mail survey

Mail surveys are a low-cost market research method that attracts a large number of customers. However, the response rate is low, only from 3% to 15%. For small businesses, this is still an economical choice.

  • Online survey

Online surveys can yield unreliable results and unpredictable response rates, due to the inability to control feedback. However, this is a simple and inexpensive way to gather customer opinions and preferences. Currently, some tools support motivating respondents by giving bonus points after completing the survey. However, this method is only suitable for simple surveys or those that have a direct impact on respondents.

To survey customers effectively, you should also choose a reasonable time frame.

Design questionnaires and send surveys

The next step is to build and design the questionnaire. There are many different types of questions depending on the research purpose of the survey. Some popular forms include:

  • Open question
  • Multiple-choice questions
  • Hierarchical scale questions
  • Binary scale questions
  • Nominal scale questions
  • Likert scale questions
  • Semantic differential scale questions

After completing the questionnaire, the next step is to conduct a customer survey. Try to build your professional and quick survey skills and avoid bothering customers. You can give them gifts after completing the survey to show your thanks!

Conclusion

In addition to surveys using rating sheets, you can collect customer feedback easily and quickly by calling. Businesses can use smart features such as autocall and callbot of the Contact Center to automatically conduct mass customer survey calling campaigns, or conduct periodic surveys without spending too much resources.

With StringeeX's multi-channel customer care call center solution, businesses can automatically carry out mass survey call campaigns, allowing the fastest customer response right at the time the survey is needed.

Furthermore, StringeeX also has the function of collecting and storing data from outbound call campaigns for later data synthesis and evaluation through survey call recording files and call information records. (ticket)... and 100+ other superior features.