The theory behind an online satisfaction survey

Online satisfaction surveys have become indispensable. They’re the most popular means of administering a survey, providing very structured and quantitative results. That said, it’s not the easiest method by any means! When creating your survey, it’s essential to define the collection method and objectives beforehand. Let’s take a look at the theory together.

WHAT METHOD SHOULD BE USED TO GATHER CUSTOMER FEEDBACK?

When creating any good survey, you should select your distribution method beforehand. A good survey with few respondents isn’t going to be much use to you!

There are two ways of getting a more in-depth insight into your customers’ satisfaction levels:

• push channels let you seek out customer feedback via email, text, your website, a mobile app, etc.

• pull channels facilitate spontaneous customer feedback via social media, POS material, mobile apps, etc.

Whatever channel you choose, we advise not over-doing it by creating marketing pressure. The survey should reach the right person at the right time. For example, our client Save gathers customer feedback on the spot. This way, they can immediately invite unhappy customers back to the point of sale. As for survey distribution, that’s a whole other issue. We recommend reading our ebook outlining the various collection channels you should use to gauge customer satisfaction levels.

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THE SURVEY SHOULD BE ADAPTED TO YOUR AIMS

Before choosing your questions, it’s important to know the aims of your survey and how it will be analysed before being put to good use. This may relate to customer knowledge, management, public relations, or marketing purposes.

• For customer knowledge: Pre-determine how you will analyse your survey before creating it – standard analysis, cross-referencing, barometer, etc. For example, if you want to know the satisfaction rate per age group, you should ask those identifying questions in your survey.

• For management: Customer feedback is a great way of managing your co-workers. If you use a customer-centric approach with high managerial stakes, you’re bound to maximise the survey’s reliability. Some question types hinder more elaborate answers. In this article, we’ll look at what question types you should use.

• For your online reputation: Gathering new customer feedback can help you manage your online reputation if many customers are giving spontaneous feedback on your business over the internet. As such, you get all your customers talking, even the most loyal ones, and can integrate this feedback into Google’s search results. Here, survey response rates should be maximised via very simple and direct questions.

• For PR: Customer satisfaction surveys can help boost branding campaigns, as well. Customer feedback is a great way of enhancing your public image on a wider scale. In fact, many businesses today capitalise on customer feedback in their branding. In this case, be sure to ask general satisfaction or recommendation questions at the start of the survey.

• For marketing: If you’re aiming to create segmented marketing campaigns based on customer satisfaction, it’s important to finalise the specifics of these campaigns before creating the survey. You wouldn’t ask the same questions in a campaign to win back detractors as you would for a recommendation campaign geared towards promoters.

We advise getting the whole business involved in goal-setting. Everyone should be involved in the project!

By being clear about your goals, you’ll know what’s needed as far as psychological and psycho-cognitive information (values, motivators, judgements, perceptions, etc.), behavioural tendencies (frequency, duration, etc.), and individual characteristics (age, gender, etc.). All you need to know now is how to ask your questions properly.

At Critizr, we firmly believe that online satisfaction surveys shouldn’t be sent out haphazardly. Reaching out to your customers is no trivial matter and the way you gather their feedback should be fully-optimised. To do this, you need to identify collection goals and use the appropriate means of gathering feedback. How you build and structure your survey is also essential for receiving optimal response rates.