Offering your customers a chance to provide their feedback is a great idea, both for your business and for your customers. They get to voice concerns and you can learn how to improve your products and services. Everybody wins. Yet who knows how to make a survey that customers will actually bother to complete?
Using an online survey solution, you can easily make a survey for your customers to take. We have put together a few tips to help you get the most out of your customer surveys. Customers don't always want to take the time to go online and answer questions, so you need to make it worth their while.
Offer an Incentive for Taking the Survey
One of the most effective ways to get your customers to participate in the survey is to offer an incentive that the customer will receive when they have completed the survey. This incentive could be a coupon, a discount code, a free account or some other kind of promotion.
The thing about incentives is that you have to find a balance between an incentive that is good enough to entice your customers and one that is too good. If you make your incentive too small, very few customers will take the time to take the survey. If it is too big, lots of customers will take the survey but they will rush through just to get to the prize at the end, and will not give you much useful information. A smart survey incentive offers enough to get many customers interested in submitting their feedback yet does not make it worthwhile for customers who just want to claim the discount.
Make the Survey Short
Keep the survey brief and let customers know how much time the survey takes to complete.
Keep Your Survey Simple
Make it easy for your customers to take the survey. Include the URL and instructions for the survey on the bottom of each receipt, and advertise the survey on your website and your social media pages so customers can easily click a link and take the survey.
Don't ask your customers to enter a lot of personal information in order to take the survey or type out too many long answers. Ask only for the information you need. Ensure that your survey questions are simple to understand. Avoid being vague or wordy.
Allow for Other Answers to Your Survey Questions
Sometimes the answer choices on a survey are not adequate for all participants. If there are many possible answers to a survey question, always include an "Other: Please Specify" option. This allows participants to provide the most accurate survey information, rather than just picking something that is close to what they mean.
Analyze Survey Results Carefully
Review your survey results in detail. An online survey solution will organize all your results and you can download them to further analyze them. Keep in mind that in order to get an accurate representation of your customer base you need to have a large sample size for each survey. If only a few customers fill out the survey, the data will not give you the full picture.
Sign up for a free SimplyCast account and try our simple online survey solution.
