5 Steps to Build a Targeted Customer Survey Script

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Customer surveys are an essential activity in any business strategy. What customers want, the obstacles they encounter when interacting with your business, and their feedback on product/service quality — all of these are valuable data that help you evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, product quality, customer service, and areas needing improvement in your operations. So how do you create an effective customer survey script that achieves your desired objectives? Follow along with SimERP in the article below.

Why should you build a customer survey script?

A customer survey script is a set of questions aligned with the survey objectives, requiring responses from the person conducting the survey. It is always an indispensable activity in any business. So what benefits does designing a script bring you?

Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty

To improve products/services in a timely and effective way, you need to know how customers feel and what they want. A customer survey script helps you do this through a set of questions aligned with your survey objectives. By analyzing the results, you can devise effective solutions that improve the customer experience, build goodwill, and create loyalty.

In addition, sending surveys shows customers that your business cares about them, making them feel valued and aware of how important their contribution is to the company's development.

Improve products and services

Building a customer survey script and deploying it at the right time with the right audience gives you valuable feedback for improving products/services or building new features. Beyond questions about product/service experience, you can ask customers which features they want improved or created, and gather their thoughts on new ideas and initiatives for your upcoming campaigns. Capturing needs and trends in time helps the business make the right improvements to retain customers and compete more effectively.

Collect customer data

Through targeted customer surveys, you can collect demographic information such as gender, age, marital status, and preferences. This lets you segment customers and develop personalized outreach strategies suited to each segment.

Measure business performance

A key reason to build a customer survey script is measuring business performance. Through customer feedback, you can easily compare data year over year to evaluate and adjust operating plans, or see how results from positive and negative feedback stack up against your original projections.

Steps to build a targeted customer survey script

Plan the survey script

Every campaign begins with detailed, careful planning. Planning helps you and your staff work toward clearly defined goals, with specific steps to achieve them within the required timeframe. The stages in a customer survey script plan may include: defining objectives, choosing survey tools, and identifying the channels for deploying the survey.

Define objectives

Here are the questions you might consider when defining the objectives of your survey:

• What are you trying to learn?

• Why do you want to learn it?

• What will you do with the data you collect?

Keep in mind: the more specific the objective, the more effective the subsequent steps and the more useful the data you collect. Many businesses skip the objective-setting step and run surveys without a plan, ending up with very low response rates and no idea why.

At the same time, avoid vague, generic goals such as "increase sales," "improve customer service," or "learn about customer information." Instead, replace them with more specific objectives such as: identifying the difficulties customers face when visiting your company's website, surveying target customers about existing mobile app features, or gathering customer feedback on a particular product/service.

Choose deployment channels

Today, the most common survey channels are:

• Direct phone calls

• Manual paper distribution

• Online channels

• SMS

Whichever channel you choose — or however you combine them — you still need an effective deployment plan covering the survey time slots and timing that will yield a high response rate.

Choose survey tools

Today there are many providers of free and paid tools with a wide range of survey features. Depending on the nature and objectives of the business, you can choose survey tools with the features that fit.

For surveys via online channels (email, social media, etc.), you can choose popular tools such as SoGoSurvey, SurveyMonkey, TypeForm, and Google Forms. These tools not only let you create many questions (even unlimited ones) across different topics with attractive designs, but also allow simple data exports and reporting.

Design the customer survey script

Once you have a complete plan, the next step is to design the customer survey script. To do this, design questions aligned with your objectives, flexibly using different question types. Below are suggested questions for common survey topics.

Product usage

Product surveys are no longer unfamiliar to businesses that want to analyze customer feedback data to evaluate business performance, adjust products/services in time, or lay the groundwork for more effective future campaigns. Through your supply, adjustment, and marketing efforts, customers develop stronger brand awareness and customer retention improves. Questions you can ask on this topic include:

• How often do you use the product/service?

• Have these products/services met your needs?

• Are our products/services easy and pleasant to use?

Demographics

Demographics are essential for marketing and sales teams. Segmentation not only helps you visualize your target customer group, but also lets you use the data collected to pursue the prospects with the highest conversion rates. Some questions to consider:

• How old are you?

• Your gender is:

• Your current place of residence is:

• Your marital status is:

Asking personal questions can feel intrusive to many customers and make them uncomfortable. Since your ultimate goal is honest information, don't make these questions mandatory. Give customers the freedom to answer in order to make the survey as effective as possible.

Customer satisfaction scales

In many cases, your survey objectives regarding aspects of the product/service/business do not match what customers actually want resolved. To address this, you need to determine the metrics that measure customer satisfaction most effectively, using hierarchical scales, Likert scales, binary scales, and so on. Each metric corresponds to a scale with different levels for measuring satisfaction. Depending on your survey analysis objectives, choose the appropriate scales.

Open-ended questions

Open-ended questions let respondents freely express their impressions by typing answers directly into a text box. Giving customers free rein to write what they want makes the data more time-consuming to analyze, but it helps the business gather the honest, necessary information needed to achieve its survey objectives. Below are some open-ended questions you can apply to your survey.

• What obstacles do you face when using our product/service?

• What would you like improved about the product/service?

• How do you feel when using the product/service?

• What could our staff improve to serve you better next time?

Future actions after completing the survey

In the final section of the survey, you will usually address what happens after the customer completes it. These questions let you identify which customers are ready to engage with you in the future. This is very useful when you roll out changes and want updated feedback from the very customers surveyed earlier. There are many ways to phrase these questions; here are some you can reference:

• May we contact you to follow up on this feedback?

• Would you be willing to take this survey again in the future?

• If we update (insert product feature here), may we reach out again to discuss the changes?

>> See also: 12 Simple, Free Tools for Building Customer Survey Forms

Check and test the survey before sending

To avoid mistakes, risks, and unwanted feedback, after designing the questionnaire you should review whether the questions truly reflect your objectives and are well presented. For better results, you can send the survey to employees to test before sending it to customers.

Here are some tips for checking your customer survey script:

• Always make sure you have chosen the right survey tool

• Survey questions should be concise, focused on the issue, and aligned with the stated objectives

• Arrange the questions in a logical sequence across the customer journey

• Always use A/B testing for every survey to measure the effectiveness of your approach

• Always thank customers for contributing and taking part in the survey

Send, collect, and analyze survey results

Send the survey to target customers:

There are many ways to send your survey script to target customers. Here are the two main methods:

Sending the survey in person

When distributing the survey directly to customers, focus on the following factors to obtain high-quality responses:

• Large, clear survey text

• Clean printing, no smudges

• Telling target customers how much time the survey will take

• A reward such as a discount voucher included with the survey

Sending the survey online

Online survey distribution has two key considerations: the number of respondents and the quality of respondents.

You should use personalized survey tools such as JotForms or SurveyMonkey to make your online survey attractive and high-quality. You can also use Google Forms to create your survey, though customization options are more limited. Presentation matters — the other survey tools make it possible to run surveys on different platforms with a look tailored to your brand. This in turn makes your survey more credible, and naturally improves its quality too.

The number of respondents depends on the channels you publish the survey on to reach your target customers. However, always create a reward for people who fill out your survey — this motivates them to complete it rather than just scroll past. Here are two survey channels to consider:

• Social media: On platforms with a constant stream of different content, your survey description post needs to stand out and be brief. This will make people pay more attention to your survey.

• Email: For email, don't BCC customers and spam them en masse. It will make your email feel like junk mail and get ignored. Use an email marketing solution such as SimCRM or other email marketing software to personalize your email content. Email marketing personalization makes target customers feel deeply respected when they receive your email. This impresses customers and makes them more likely to read your concise message. You can check out some of SimCRM's email marketing modules, since they are completely free.

Collect and analyze survey results

Once you have collected the information from customers, to address the issues they raised effectively, you need to categorize the feedback into appropriate groups. Below is a common way to prioritize feedback:

Major product defects:

This category is for urgent issues that prevented customers from receiving the core value of the product/service you provide. As a result, they had a terrible experience with a high rate of negative feedback. Example: users cannot send messages in a messaging app.

Minor product defects:

These are complaints about secondary features or characteristics of the product/service that do not undermine its core value. Example: inability to insert icons in a messaging app.

Feature requests:

These are customers' suggestions to modify, improve, or add features to enhance their experience. Prioritize solutions for the most requested features, estimating the potential impact of improving/developing them and the opportunity cost of each option.

You can also categorize feedback manually using a spreadsheet — labeling specific columns and then creating PivotTables or V-Lookups — but this can be time-consuming. The best and fastest approach is to use applications recommended by providers for smart categorization and tagging, such as SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, and Typeform.

Address the feedback

After prioritizing the feedback, you need to devise solutions to address the issues. For negative feedback, the first things to do are:

• Sincerely apologize for the problems the customer experienced with the product/service

• Offer options that help the customer resolve the issue

• Recommend similar products/services with superior features

• Fix the mistakes

• Provide added value such as refunds or vouchers for future purchases

Conclusion: A customer survey script makes it easy to set direction and check for risks and errors before deployment, helping you achieve the best results. Through the implementation steps shared above, SimERP hopes you can easily create your own script and achieve your survey objectives.

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