An effective way to help any business grow is to conduct periodic customer surveys. It’s important to know what your customers think about your business, products and services. However, there are right and wrong ways to conduct customer surveys.
When done right, a customer survey can provide some essential insights into the mind of your average customer. When done wrong, it can be a waste of time and money that doesn’t really tell you anything new about your business. To help you get started, we’ve put together some helpful tips on conducting a successful customer survey.
Keep it Simple
Time is something that everyone is short on, and in our technological era, attention spans are short as well. Therefore, you need to conduct preliminary research and keep your survey questions short and targeted to the point. Draft 5 to 10 concise questions. Ideally, you want the customer to be able to complete the survey in less than 10 minutes, otherwise you risk losing their attention. Use as many multiple choice, rating scales and simple yes or no answers as you can.
Face-to-Face Talk
Having face-to-face talks with your customers can be a great way to gain honest insight into your business. When you’re speaking with a person one-on-one, you can learn a lot from their body language and tone of voice than you would be able to otherwise. However, this method should be employed along with other methods like phone and online surveys. Face-to-face talks can be more time consuming, and some people may be too shy to speak their truths in person.
Conduct a Phone Survey
Many successful businesses conduct phone surveys to learn more about their customers. This is the preferred survey method of JJsHouse.com, which is a leading online clothing retailer. They’ve used phone surveys to gather the opinions of thousands of their customers. This valuable insight has allowed them to tweak certain aspects of their business to offer exactly what their customers are looking for.
Online Survey
One of the most effective survey methods today is online surveys. There are plenty of online services, such as Survey Monkey, that can help you design your survey and get it out to a wide audience. This is the preferred survey method for trendy clothing retailer, VeryVoga.com. They’ve been able to gather and store thousands of online customer surveys that have helped their business grow.
Consider Incentives
A great way to get customers to participate in your survey is to offer an incentive for completing it. If the customer is offered a certain percentage off a product or service for completing your survey, they’ll be more likely to go for it because they’ll be receiving something in return for their time. Other incentives include free downloads or access to a special service.
After you put your first customer survey out there, evaluate the responses as they come in. Make sure you take action so that people know their opinions are valued. Use the survey responses to make reasonable tweaks and changes to your business to cater to what your customers want. Whenever possible, reach out to the customers who have taken part in the surveys and thank them for their valued opinions.
