Are Customer Surveys Effective?

Want to learn more about your customers’ needs and preferences? A customer survey can reveal countless ways to improve your business. But too often, businesses miss out on insights because they’re sending inadequate surveys.

Hoping to improve customer experience, companies clog people’s email inboxes with customer satisfaction surveys asking about their latest store visit or online transaction. Robocalls continue to nag people, often during busy times. Even social media is not immune, as some of the largest social networks have recently rolled out poll capabilities for users. Done well, a survey is an honest approach to authentically improving customer satisfaction. Not taking the time to create a high-quality survey instead create a wasted opportunity.

What are Customer Surveys?

Customer surveys are a method of getting consumer feedback to help companies measure satisfaction, perform market research, and gauge expectations. 96% of consumers don’t bother to complain, making consumer surveys an excellent way for organizations to gauge customer satisfaction and ask questions to better understand their customers’ problems. When you create a survey designed to gather feedback, instead of relying on internal perceptions, a company can check in a concrete way on how they are actually performing. So it’s no wonder that many businesses are increasingly reaching out to their customers for feedback on what they’re doing well, and more importantly what needs to be improved.

Creating Impactful Surveys

Customer satisfaction is not an end-all-be-all approach to customer experience measurement, but it is a crucial piece of brand maintenance and customer relationship management. Individual interactions carry a lot of weight with your customers. Zendesk found that 39% of consumers avoid vendors for over 2 years after having a negative experience.

Improving the way you ask customers for feedback can make a monumental difference in your business. Even if you’re not a major rideshare company, you probably have important customer interactions every day that you’d like to measure more effectively. There are a number of best practices you can take away to create a meaningful survey with actionable feedback:

1. Send customer satisfaction surveys in a timely manner.
2. Keep customer satisfaction surveys to 3 questions or less.
3. Ask customers to explain their rating or response.
4. Include an open-ended question.
5. Personalize your survey questions.

Customer Surveys by BARE International

Businesses who measure customer satisfaction are 33% more likely to describe themselves as successful than those who don’t, according to Survey Monkey.  Surveying remains one of the top methods of data collection. Depending on your needs, there are several solutions that result in the actionable insights you need to make immediate decisions:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Surveys: Provide you instant results, unlimited feedback, and allow for customer incentives in exchange for completing surveys. These quick and easy surveys are cost-effective and user-friendly. Surveys can be conducted via mobile or computer, with QR codes or kiosk links.
• Crowdsourcing live insights: Engages real customers to gather the data important to YOUR brand and company goals. The customer community is invited to perform “tasks”: gathering data that is important to your brand. Customers are offered a reward to complete these “tasks,” giving them incentives to complete more “tasks” to get more information you need.
• Employee engagement: Boost productivity and increase engagement by making learning  fun! BARE partner MobieTrain offers a mobile training app combining micro-learning with gamification and content on demand. Put your employees at the heart of their training with mobile  learning on demand. Reduce the time needed away from their roles with short, engaging training to suit them.

Studies show it costs five times as much to gain a new customer than it does to keep an existing one; so if your clients aren’t happy with your customer service, they’ll go elsewhere. Worse, they may tell their friends and family about their negative experience, costing you further business. Using BARE’s 30+ year’s experience in customer experience research, you’ll find out exactly how to keep your customers loyal.  Our surveys are cost-effective and user friendly. Surveys can be conducted via mobile or computer, with QR codes or kiosk links.

Ultimately, methods of measuring and tracking customer satisfaction rely on asking your customer. Contact BARE International today to find out more on our tailored Customer Satisfaction Surveys.