Photo by Tbel Abuseridze on Unsplash
Customer satisfaction is important to any business and aside from gaining and attracting new customers, being able to retain existing ones is just as critical.
One of the best strategies to use when gathering valuable insight about your business is using a customer feedback survey.
Customer feedback surveys allow you to gather feedback on your customers’ likes, dislikes and overall experiences to help you uncover what’s working and what isn’t.
Initiating the survey seems easy enough, but there’s a lot more to it.
For valuable insights, there are basically two types of surveys:
1. Demographic Data
Typically, demographic data provides characteristics such as age, gender, income, language and location.
2. Psychographic Data
Psychographic data is qualitative vis-à-vis demographic data, which is quantitative. It includes a consumer’s feelings, interests and opinions.
Note: Two consumers might be similar in demographics, but can be different in psychographics. Therefore, they shouldn’t be lumped together in the same grouping.
Being able to properly collect the data and know what trends and patterns to look for when analyzing your findings will help you continue to improve your business.
Typical best practices for collecting accurate and usable survey data
Firstly, remember you must be careful in how the consumer’s feel about your survey itself – the act of completing a survey must be a positive experience for them in completing the survey.
So formulate your questions well with consistent metrics among your target audience to track their evolving opinions.
Be mindful of your phrasing. It needs to be personalized for each group while making sure you get consistency in metrics.
Incorporate numerical scales. This will enable you to get simple positive or negative responses such as in a 1-10 ranking or a scale yielding “disagree,” or “disagree” responses.
Multiple-choice questions can be helpful in learning about products or the customer experience perception.
My personal impression is that asking open-ended questions reveals the most-thorough information.
Check out this beginners guide on survey data analysis from Chattermill that lays out types of data, peak times to send out surveys and how to know the data you collect is statistically significant.
Or, take a look at the visual recap below:
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“When you think of customer research, chances are you think of surveys. Used alongside other strategies, they can be an important way to learn more about your customer’s needs, wants and habits.”
-John Rampton
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