How to Use Client Satisfaction Surveys
Posted: June 29, 2022 - By Health DevData suggests that over 90% of unsatisfied customers will be quick to leave and never come back before even considering complaining if you repeatedly provide them a negative experience. Today’s consumers are fully aware that the next best thing is always only one quick search and a few clicks away. They won’t hesitate to go on the hunt for more effective solutions that can succeed where you fail.
Performing regular client satisfaction surveys is the fastest route to keeping happy clients, well, happy. Most importantly, asking for client feedback can help you identify your primary shortcomings so that you can take action to improve them. The valuable customer insight that surveys provide will give you the tools you need to enhance the overall customer experience of your brand. Getting firsthand information from your current clients is essential to gaining and retaining customer loyalty, helping you thrive in the increasingly competitive business landscape.
What Is a Client Satisfaction Survey?
In today’s complex business world, data is power. Gathering relevant information on customer satisfaction directly from the source — your clients — is essential to making educated decisions for building a robust strategy to improve the customer journey. That’s where client satisfaction surveys come in handy. The results of the surveys could help you change your business for the better and retain more customers while you’re at it.
Customer satisfaction surveys are an essential gauging instrument to help you better understand both what your customers like about you and where you might be falling short of the mark. When you ask the right questions, you’ll be able to effectively assess how happy your current customers are with what you offer them and get a complete overview of how they perceive your brand, product, service, and processes — for better or for worse.
To build a solid customer satisfaction survey, you need to first define the outcomes you want it to help you achieve. This way, you can better determine what you’ll be asking and how. A good survey needs to be long enough to give you sufficient customer insight — but it should not extend to the point of becoming tedious. This could cause your customers to abandon the survey halfway through, leaving you empty-handed. A good rule of thumb is to keep it between five and 10 questions in different formats.
How to Use Client Satisfaction Surveys to Increase Client Retention
Client satisfaction surveys can help you identify potential flaws and weaknesses in your company that could negatively impact its future. Obtaining customer satisfaction feedback will bring to light factors you could be overlooking that could be causing your clients to disappear without warning. Learning this information sooner rather than later will help you make the necessary improvements to retain your client base and even attract more buyers.
Showing interest in what your customers have to say will make them feel valued by your brand, making them more likely to make repeat purchases and even recommend you to those in their inner circle. Additionally, paying attention to negative feedback makes it less likely to get out of hand. A timely response to an unhappy customer will reduce the chances of them spreading the word about the negative experience they may have had.
Carefully Craft Different Types of Questions
To get the answers you need to improve your business and give your clients a more positive experience, you’ll need to plan your customer satisfaction survey questions thoroughly. Here are some of the question formats you can use to make your next client satisfaction survey a lot more effective and easier to respond to.
Multiple Choice Questions
As the name suggests, these questions provide respondents two or more answer options. They can have a single or multi select approach, meaning you can instruct your customers to either pick only one answer or pick more than one, depending on your needs.
Multiple-choice questions are less complicated and time-consuming than other formats that require your customers to elaborate on their points. They also provide you with more straightforward answers that will add more value to your business plan in the long run.
Binary Scale Questions
This type of satisfaction survey question only has two possible answers. The most common binary scale questions are those the respondents can answer with a simple “yes” or “no,” “true” or “false,” or “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Essentially, we’re talking about a much simpler single-select multiple-choice type of question that doesn’t require respondents to put much thought into it.
Rating Scale Questions
Customer experience surveys are great for identifying customers’ level of satisfaction with your brand. And what better way to obtain a measurable answer than including rating scale questions? Also known as ordinal questions, these inquiries display answers on a scale of any range for the respondent to pick the option that best represents how they feel.
Nominal Questions
This type of multiple-choice question provides respondents with a naming scale where only variable labels hold significance. These are used to make distinctions between different categories of answers, like what a customer may be using your product for or which of your competitors they’ve heard about or even tried. Nominal questions have no numerical value and cannot overlap unless you add an “all of the above” option.
Track Both Customer Satisfaction Score and Customer Effort Score
The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) are two different key performance indicators that allow you to understand your customer satisfaction levels. For your company to remain successful, you’ll need to keep the former high and the latter low. Reducing customer effort has been proven to significantly increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Customer surveys can help you track these metrics. All you need to do is include relevant rating scale questions that help you identify whether you’re making it easy for your clients to solve their problems. The answers to these questions will help you focus on the specific areas where your customers may need a little extra help.
