Feedback forms, or surveys, are an invaluable asset to gathering information about how your business is performing and serving your customers. This week in our Flashback Friday series, we will take a look at a blog written in February 2012: Quick Tip: Feedback Form Design Process, which provides some useful advice on how to create your feedback form. This blog will take inspiration from that blog while we share what we believe to be some of the best practices you should use while creating your form.
Keep it short and sweet
It can be difficult enough trying to get people to fill out your feedback survey as it is, but for those who do decide to take the time, make sure they suffer the least amount of inconvenience possible by keeping the form concise and succinct. Rarely will someone want to fill out a survey to which they are not able to quickly see the end.
By limiting your survey to a few, direct questions, you can increase the number of participants willing to take the time to fill it out, improving your data sample size and providing you with a more accurate picture of what your business is doing well and what may need to be improved upon.
Ask the most important questions first
Always prioritize your questions so that the most important ones are asked at the beginning of the survey. This way, even if your responders get bored halfway through and submit the survey without fully completing it, they will have likely already given you the answers to the questions you will find most useful.
Make sure questions are clear and concise
It is extremely important that your questions are straightforward and easy to understand. If not, your responders will likely skip over them, meaning that you will not receive sufficient data for those questions, skewing your overall results.
Before sending out your feedback form to your contacts, run the questions by a friend or colleague to make sure they can be easily understood and the meaning of them cannot be misconstrued.
Offer an incentive to participate
An easy way to boost the number of people who fill out your feedback form is to offer a small reward to those who submit it. Even if it's something as simple as having their name entered into a draw for a chance to win a prize package, people like knowing they may be rewarded for taking the time to answer your questions.
Give them a chance to share their opinion
At the end of your feedback form, it is always useful to include an optional open ended question asking people for general feedback and comments about the service they received from you. If they have made it through your entire form, chances are they will appreciate the chance to give their opinion in a way that's less restrictive than choosing from a dropdown menu of options.
As well as making responders feel like their opinions are valued, open-ended questions are great for receiving valuable information that you didn't know you needed or wanted. The information you receive from these types of questions allow for you to optimize your communications and interactions with your clients and improve their overall customer satisfaction.
Send while their experience is still fresh
When you're sending out your feedback survey to your clients or prospects after they have had an interaction with your business, make sure to send it as soon as it is appropriate to ensure that the experience is still near the forefront of their minds.
Memory typically fades with the passage of time and if you send your form a week or two after they have interacted with your business, they likely won't remember every important detail. However, if they receive the form within a day or two of the interaction, this helps them give you an accurate representation of their experience which, in turn, provides you with accurate and honest data.
Try out SimplyCast's Form Builder application in SimplyCast 360 to create feedback surveys to send out automatically to your clients.
