Create a Customer Survey and Receive Feedback from Your Customers

1. Why should companies conduct customer surveys?
2. How can you create a customer survey?
3. What questions should be included in a customer survey?
4. What methods are available to conduct customer surveys?
5. How can you increase participation in a customer survey?
6. How can you evaluate and use the results of a customer survey?
7. Are there specific industries or company sizes in which customer surveys are particularly important?
8. How can customer surveys be integrated into a customer relationship management strategy?
9. Which tools are available to conduct customer surveys online?
10. Conclusion

We all want satisfied customers and work day in and day out to make our customers happy so they remain loyal to us and, of course, generate a higher Customer Lifetime Value. But can we really pull this off? To figure this out, you should simply ask for customer feedback - for example, through a customer satisfaction survey.

In this article our guest author, Caroline Blauth, explains why and how you can create customer satisfaction surveys. We will give you specific tips on how to create a catalog of questions about customer satisfaction with sample questions for your survey! We also reveal how you can get as much customer feedback as possible. Because: The feedback of your customers is an important resource for your CRM strategy. Lastly, you will receive tips on which tools you can use to create customer surveys for free and for a fee. Enjoy reading!

Why should companies conduct customer surveys? 

If you have not yet conducted customer surveys, this is the second best moment to start, right now. The very best is in ten minutes, when you have finished reading this article. :)

Customer surveys can deliver valuable insights and form the basis for many decisions. We often have a gut feeling about what our customers want or think. But unfortunately, our gut feeling is not a relevant KPI in the next strategy meeting. That's why it's even more important to know your customers' desires and needs and to be able to underpin this with metrics. Customer surveys help tremendously in this. You can find out how satisfied or dissatisfied your customers are, what they want from you and your product or service, which competitors you should take a closer look at, and so on. Customer surveys support you in making your existing assumptions measurable, but they are also a helpful tool if you still have no idea what your customers expect. In this case, a customer survey provides an initial sentiment, which you can then refine by adding further relevant information (or conducting further surveys).

How can you create a customer survey?

When you want to create a customer survey, first decide what insights you want to generate and which colleagues from which departments will find this information relevant. Ideally, you should inform all relevant stakeholders in advance that you plan to conduct a customer survey. This way, all departments have the opportunity to contribute their questions and interests to your survey questionnaire.

The first step is to collect the broad subject areas that should be covered in your survey. If you find it difficult to ask the questions, you can also find complete sample surveys or individual sample questions on the internet. These insights could already be interesting for you, as you may notice which questions are common and where overlaps exist between the teams. Maybe as early as this stage, you could pool all efforts, so that several teams collaborate on a single topic.

In the second step, you can consider which questions you can derive from the collected topics. Then you should draft an initial version of specific questions, which you should ideally discuss once again with the colleagues involved.

What questions should be included in a customer survey?

Your customer survey should obviously answer the relevant questions that you have developed with your team. However, don't overdo it with a questionnaire that's too long. If answering the questions becomes too burdensome, the respondents will either abort the survey or only answer your carefully prepared questions half-heartedly. Therefore, make sure that your customer surveys are not too long and that the participants don't feel that some questions are repetitive. Ask precise questions that are unambiguous to answer. At the beginning of the survey, you can indicate how long it should take to complete it. This can help to keep the participants stay engaged. It is then of course important that the time estimate is realistic. So it's better to give an honest estimate of six minutes instead of three minutes because it sounds better.

It might also make sense in your questionnaire to test the attention of your survey participants a little by including an answer option, or even a question, that checks if they are reading the direction carefully.

Generally, you have several options to learn something from your customers. For example, you can ask them outright about their satisfaction with your company or your product or service. Another approach is to phrase the question a bit more indirectly, such as with the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS asks the question of how likely the respondents would be to recommend your company to an acquaintance or colleague on a scale of 1 to 10. From these answers, you can also draw conclusions about customer satisfaction.

Every survey you conduct should, in addition to the questions you would like to have answered, also request relevant demographic data. You can integrate these into the analysis of your customer survey. For example: Do women prefer a specific product from your portfolio than men? Are younger customers more satisfied with the service than the older ones? Do people from large cities have different needs for the platform than residents of rural areas?

What methods are available to conduct customer surveys? 

Customer surveys can be conducted using various methods. Basically, surveys differ between qualitative and quantitative surveys. Qualitative surveys generally help to get a rough impression. They are conducted to understand and describe the target group and the relations between them better. You can develop initial hypotheses about the target group based on this.

Qualitative surveys

Qualitative surveys are usually conducted as interviews. There are narrative interviews, where the interviewees can talk relatively freely on a topic, and guided interviews, where an interviewer asks questions and receives free, detailed responses. In addition, it is also possible to conduct so-called focus groups where several participants discuss a particular topic together. Ideally, qualitative surveys form the foundation for further quantitative surveys.

Quantitative surveys

A quantitative survey is usually the classic customer survey we think of, where you capture customer satisfaction with a questionnaire. Open or closed questions can be used. Open questions allow you to get detailed, even different answers from your customers. However, be aware that a larger effort for evaluation is required, since you have to view all the answers and consolidate them into answer clusters, before you can perform a quantitative evaluation.

In contrast, closed questions are easier to evaluate, because you only give the respondents the option to choose between different answer options. Of course, in this case, the knowledge gain may be less. For this reason, it is helpful to add an additional answer option "Another answer, namely ..." as a free text field, so that you allow respondents to add an answer that is not among your options. Even with the design of the closed questions - at least with online surveys - you can usually also have flexibility which allows you to shape the questions variedly. In addition to classic multiple or single choice questions for your survey, you usually also have other selection options, such as a drop-down menu, a slider or the like.

Quantitative customer surveys can be conducted in several ways. In our digital everyday life, we naturally think of online surveys first. However, there are also other options, for example the classic face-to-face survey, where the questionnaire is filled out together by an interviewer and the respondent. There is also the option of written survey where the questionnaire is sent by mail to the participant. Phone surveys are another method to conduct a quantitative survey.

How can you increase participation in a customer survey?

The goal of your customer survey should be to generate reliable results. To do this, it is important firstly that the group of clients participating in the survey is representative for the entire group (in statistics, this is called the total population) to which the findings relate. This means that if you want to draw conclusions about your entire customer base, the group you survey (in statistics this is called the sample) should reflect this in the demographic data.

Make sure, for example, to pay attention to the distribution of genders, the age, the origin (city or countryside) or other data points that are relevant to you and your business model. On the other hand, it is also necessary to get a certain amount of responses to your customer survey, so that the results are statistically representative for the population. Depending on how large your total population is and how statistically secure you want to answer the questions, you should set the sample size. You will find helpful sample size calculators online that help you determine the right size of your survey group.

By setting the size of your sample, you now know how many of your customers should participate in the customer survey. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to reach this critical mass of the right people and get them to participate in your survey. For this, it can be useful to offer the participants a small return for their time and openness, the so-called incentive.

Consider here what makes sense for you and your business model: a voucher or discount code for the next order? A freebie to download? Sometimes a lottery with a high prize can work better than a small goodie for every participant. However, also make sure that the incentive is not too high or attractive. In this case, it could happen that people only participate because of the present or the possibility to win, which can negatively affect the quality of your results.

How can you evaluate and use the results of a customer survey?

Evaluating your customer survey form is not rocket science. In the first step, you should use the basics of descriptive statistics: calculate the means of the answers or give the percentage values that relate to the individual answer options. In general, a table processing program is sufficient for this – pivot tables make counting easy. Psst: many online survey tools already have evaluation modules included, which save you from the tedious manual calculations.

Once you've completed the statistical requirements, it's time to take it a step further: you could conduct endless analyses and research various correlations - relationships - between the answers to different questions. If you're not getting anywhere with your table processing program, you can conduct the evaluations with IBM SPSS or the program R-Studio for example.

Of course, it's important that these evaluations don't stay in a drawer or hard drive. Ideally, prepare the results in a presentation that makes it easy for outsiders to grasp the key findings and share the insights with the relevant stakeholders. The generated insights should of course be incorporated into your strategy development as well as in daily operations as a valuable resource.

Are there specific industries or company sizes in which customer surveys are particularly important?

As mentioned at the beginning, it's advisable for anyone to conduct customer surveys. Regardless of whether you work in a small start-up or a large corporation: knowing and understanding your target group and their needs can be a key factor for your success. Of course, you should adapt the implementation of your customer surveys to your company and your individual capacities. It's important to choose the right method for your survey. If you want to generate a deep understanding, it might be useful for a small, young company to plan a focus group. You work in a large corporation and want to quickly capture a mood picture of your customers? Send the NPS question by mail and you generate a meaningful indicator in no time.

How can customer surveys be integrated into a customer relationship management strategy?

Conducting customer or satisfaction surveys is not self-useful, but should help you adapt your service or product even better to the wishes and needs of your customers and build an ideal customer relationship. Therefore, they form an essential part in your Customer Relationship Strategy. Here, we can distinguish between different intentions. Perhaps you would like to investigate the satisfaction of your customers over time. For this it might make sense to conduct a large survey once a year with a comparable group of customers; alternatively, you can record satisfaction with the NPS after each order made in your online shop, for example.

Based on the generated insights, you can derive further measures. Ideally, you set measurable goals based on your first survey for a certain period – maybe you want to increase the referral rate, the NPS. In the following months, then plan measures that invest in this goal and check the NPS with another survey.

Tip: Be careful that your results are not influenced by other effects, such as the season. For regular surveys, it is advisable to conduct them annually in the same month. This ensures that your customers have actually become more satisfied and the differences do not originate from the varying satisfaction of buyers in Christmas and summer business.

Which tools are available to conduct customer surveys online?

If you want to create the customer survey online, there are many survey tools available for you to use to create a customer survey. For a detailed overview of Online Survey Tools, in comparison, check out OMR Reviews. Also within the extensive range of Flixcheck, such surveys are possible. These softwares for your customer surveys are usually paid for, but they are often – for testing or if you can make your peace with less functionality – offered in a free version.

Here are my personal top 3 for various applications:

If you use Google's services and you initially don't place much value on a large range of functions when creating your survey, you can easily create surveys online using Google Forms. The results can be directly transferred to Google Sheets and you can seamlessly start with the evaluation. There are no additional costs for you.

Typeform puts user experience at its center and will bring you joy both while creating the survey and to your respondents while filling it out. You can choose from many question types in chic design. For testing, you can create surveys with up to ten questions and ten responses per month for free. The paid versions cost between 25 € and 75 € per month in annual billing time.

SurveyMonkey is one of the best known tools and supports you with your customer survey from A to Z. You have a variety of question designs available, you can even access pre-made surveys. You can also perform a large part of the evaluation of your survey directly using the software. Surveymonkey can also be tried for free and you can create as many surveys with up to ten questions as you like. The paid rates are available from 39 € per month for individuals, the team rate starts from 99 € per month with annual billing.

Conclusion

The feedback from your customers is essential for you to be able to better tailor your product or service to the needs of your target group and thus meet your CRM. In this article, you have learned how to create a customer satisfaction questionnaire and what you should consider when asking for customer feedback. I hope you enjoyed the explanations and examples. Good luck creating your customer satisfaction questionnaire – our examples and tips for creating a survey will certainly help you. Keep in mind that customer feedback is a valuable resource for you! Conduct surveys regularly and let the gained insights influence your CRM measures!