5 Ways to Build Customer Satisfaction Survey Templates

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

A customer satisfaction survey is the deployment of questionnaires containing many different questions sent to customers to achieve the business's analysis and measurement goals. How important is this activity, and what should you keep in mind when rolling out survey forms? Follow along with SimERP in the article below.

Why Survey Customer Satisfaction?

In this era of integration and fiercely competitive markets, customer satisfaction is the key factor determining a company's success. When customers are satisfied with your product/service, they may stay with the business longer, helping to increase revenue and bring in new potential customers. That is why surveying customer satisfaction is absolutely essential, for the following reasons:

Measure Your Campaigns

The questions in a customer satisfaction survey template, depending on the purpose of the business, cover many different areas and aspects — customer service, the performance of the customer care team, app features, company policies and procedures, and more — so they help you measure many of your campaigns quickly. Asking about the company's recent products and activities is a good sign that customers are paying attention to you. In addition, asking customers how they heard about and reached your business reveals whether your marketing campaigns are working as predicted.

Identify What Needs Fixing

Some business owners may use customer satisfaction surveys after experiencing a drop in sales, a high churn rate, or a sudden spike in negative reviews, and so on. In such cases, depending on the survey's purpose, you can craft the appropriate survey questions. Then, through analyzing and measuring customer satisfaction, you will spot the shortcomings in your business processes and put the right corrective solutions in place.

Test New Ideas

You want to launch a new idea but worry it will not attract customers' interest? Sending out surveys with improvement proposals for a certain product/service/feature will get you positive feedback from customers. Once you know customers' wishes and the features/activities they care about most, you can easily grasp their needs and implement the ideas with the most positive responses, increasing the effectiveness of your customer acquisition and retention campaigns.

Retain Customers Effectively

Sending out customer satisfaction surveys not only gives you data for goal-oriented analysis, it also builds customer goodwill — because asking for their input is an act that shows care and appreciation. Review customers' answers carefully, apologize and express regret over complaints, and sincerely thank customers who give you positive feedback.

Top 5 Methods for Surveying Customer Satisfaction

To survey customer satisfaction effectively, you need a meticulous plan with a suitable method of execution that achieves your stated survey goals. Below are the top 5 customer satisfaction survey methods suggested by SimERP.

In-Person Survey

The in-person survey is a method that lets you engage directly with consumers and gather feedback face to face. This type of survey is usually conducted in homes or crowded places (supermarkets, parks, shopping malls, and so on) to collect enough respondents to meet the stated target. However, in-person interviewing is time-, resource-, and cost-intensive for the business.

Email Surveys

Email surveys are the method of sending questionnaires to customers via email. According to statistics from Statista, about 4.1 billion people use email every day, and this figure is expected to grow to 4.5 billion by 2025. Precisely because of this potential, many businesses today emphasize email surveys — the response rate is only around 3–5%, but it costs little and yields more honest responses.

Telephone Surveys

This is the type of survey conducted by calling customers directly to get their feedback on the product/service. Its measurability is not high, because it includes only a few short open-ended questions focused on product evaluation. Also, the survey response rate is usually low, since not many customers are willing to respond.

Online Surveys

Online surveys target Internet users by sharing the survey in groups, communities, websites, social networks, and more. This survey method saves time, resources, and cost effectively, even though the response rate is usually very low.

That is why many survey-for-money/gift websites have sprung up to encourage consumers to respond more. Simply by registering an account and taking part in surveys from brands on different topics that interest you and that you have knowledge and experience with, you accumulate corresponding points and receive attractive gifts (cash, vouchers, promo codes, and more) as soon as you earn the required points. However, this method has a drawback: you cannot comprehensively verify the honesty and reliability of each piece of survey feedback.

Tracking Behavior Across the Internet, Social Media, Wi-Fi, and Big Data

The Industry 4.0 era is booming, with 1.7MB of data per person created every second and 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated by humans every day. That is an enormous number — and it will multiply many times over in the years ahead.

The method of tracking behavior across the Internet, social media, Wi-Fi, and Big Data is how you analyze the data collected from consumers' own online behavior. Today, many platforms support businesses in doing this. Depending on the nature and business objectives of your company, you can choose platforms with the features that fit.

6 Types of Questions in a Customer Satisfaction Survey Form

Depending on the survey goals, every business will have a different customer satisfaction questionnaire. Below are 6 basic question types you can apply in your customer survey form.

Multiple-Choice Questions

Multiple-choice questions usually limit the number of answer options, preventing customers from fully expressing their impressions. However, using multiple-choice questions makes it easier to create and measure results when you use question types such as ordinal scales, binary scales, Likert, nominal questions, and semantic differential questions.

Ordinal-Scale Questions

This question type includes several multiple-choice items that measure degree on a point scale. Depending on your data analysis goals, you can use a 1–5 scale to rate the customer support team, or a 0–10 scale (the NPS score) to examine how likely customers are to recommend the product/service to others.

Example: How likely are you to recommend Product A to friends and colleagues? (0-10)

Binary-Scale Questions

With a binary scale, the respondent can choose only one of two options: Yes/No or Like/Dislike. When evaluating an experience, one customer's 4-star standard may be another customer's 5-star standard. Using binary questions in the customer satisfaction form avoids ambiguous, subjective ratings when there is no mandatory standard for scoring.

Example: Are you satisfied with the solution our consultants provided? Yes/No

Nominal-Scale Questions

A nominal question is a question with several different answers, usually related to information about the user. This question type helps you clearly identify and classify the customers answering the survey. In nominal questions you cannot use numeric values, and the answers can only overlap with the "All of the above" option.

Example: What is your marital status?

• Married

• Divorced

• Single

Likert-Scale Questions

A question type that cannot be missing from any customer satisfaction survey is the Likert scale. Likert-scale questions measure on a scale of 1–5 or 1–7, where 1 is the lowest score, indicating extreme dissatisfaction or complete disagreement. A score of 5 (on the 1–5 scale) or 7 (on the 1–7 scale) indicates the highest level of satisfaction and agreement.

The strength of the Likert scale is that it is very easy to understand and easy to complete, and it lets respondents choose the degree that expresses their feelings — so the data, once analyzed, yields more detailed results. However, the scale is limited in size, which can produce results that misrepresent the respondent's attitude.

Example: Are you satisfied with using our travel service?

• Very satisfied (5)

• Satisfied (4)

• Neutral (3)

• Dissatisfied (2)

• Very dissatisfied (1)

Semantic Differential Questions

Semantic differential questions are like the Likert scale in using a 1–5 or 1–7 point scale. But with the semantic differential, the survey creator uses only two groups of words at opposite poles with contrasting meanings. For that reason, this scale is also called the bipolar adjective scale.

Open-Ended Questions

No customer satisfaction survey is complete without open-ended questions. An open-ended question lets customers write anything they want. This lets customers freely express their impressions and emotions without being constrained by fixed answer options as in multiple-choice questions. However, this also creates a problem: customers have to put in more effort to type out what they want to say. In addition, the information entered into open-ended questions is often difficult to analyze and measure.

Example: What would you like our customer service to improve?

Things to Keep in Mind When Designing a Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire

Designing a sensible survey questionnaire saves time and effort for respondents while still ensuring all the content and data needed to analyze and measure results. Here are the tips you should consider when designing:

• Be short and concise: Survey length is also an important factor in reducing customer drop-off during the survey. So design the questions as short and clear as possible — this saves the respondent's time and effort.

• Only use questions that help you reach your goals: Cutting questions that do not serve your objectives is a way to make the survey more effective and save time for both yourself and the customer.

• Use different question types flexibly and appropriately.

• Ask one question at a time: Asking a pile of questions at once makes respondents feel annoyed and answer half-heartedly and indifferently.

• Be consistent with your scales: Whatever the context of the question, agree on the scale's point levels before using it to avoid confusing respondents.

• Avoid self-congratulatory questions: Be humble when asking questions and leave control of the answers to your customers themselves.

• Use Yes/No questions: This question format avoids ambiguous, inconsistent answers.

• Research carefully and avoid presumptive questions: Assuming customers know about a subject creates damaging problems: the customer really has no knowledge of the subject and does not understand the terminology you use. So only presume knowledge when the survey targets a specific customer group.

• Choose the right time to survey: Depending on the goals of the business, choose survey timing that corresponds to the stages of the customer journey. For example, surveying a customer immediately after they experience the product/service yields a higher and more honest response rate.

• Give respondents a gift: Many customers have a mindset of refusing surveys because they think it brings them no benefit and only costs time and effort. A small gift (research or study material, a discount code, and more) sparks customers' interest and encourages them to complete more surveys.

Conclusion: Using the various question types flexibly and in line with the business's original goals makes customer satisfaction surveys far more effective. Through the above, SimERP hopes you can design a suitable survey and achieve your desired goals.

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