customer survey methodology

Survey Methodology: Methods That Drive Customer Experience

"Curiosity killed the cat" – said no one in reference to customer feedback , ever.

While the old English saying is true about how asking too many questions can turn ugly in certain areas of life, being inquisitive about your audience is key to an effective customer experience strategy.

Still, it’s important to be equally attentive to trends and changes in audience behavior, as it is to determine a cohesive survey design approach.

So, how do you, as a marketer or user researcher, find the golden mean between structure and constant adjustment ?

I’m going to show you how understanding the fundamentals of survey methodology can boost the quality and relevance of your feedback collection strategy .

You’ll learn how to set your survey efforts up for success with the right tools, and types of insights you’re looking to derive.

Regardless of whether you’re new to survey design – or already have some experience, but never got around to catching up on the theoretical basics – you’ve come to the right place.

All set? Let’s begin!

What You Need to Know About Survey Methodology

If you search for the term “ survey methodology ” online, you’ll see it’s used interchangeably to describe all sorts of survey tools , questionnaire construction methods, or feedback collection hacks.

In fact, they all somewhat fall into the definition.

According to UCLA Labor Center , “ survey methodology is the study of survey methods and the sources of error in surveys ”.

Errors are all the factors that deviate your survey efforts from the desired outcome. Survey methodology studies aim at minimizing their occurrence in the future.

Now, depending on your previous experience with feedback collection, the word “survey” may bring various pictures to mind.

For some, it’s that evening call from the national opinion center prior to presidential elections. Others are more likely to think of the occasional website pop-up on their favorite online store, or live polls carried out in the street.

These are all examples of various survey instruments. But before we dive in, let’s think about the very core of all feedback collection:

Why do you want to survey your audience?

‍ Are you planning to collect feedback as a reactive measure to a single event , or do you want to analyze results for the same question across various points in time ?

Are you looking for structured responses that can be quickly analyzed with a data analysis tool, or do you want descriptive answers to open-ended questions ?

All these questions, among others, need to be taken into account if you want to optimize your survey design efforts.

So, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of various survey tools, and consider how some of the most popular customer satisfaction metrics can serve your goals.

Survey Instrumentation

At the highest level, surveys can be divided into two groups: questionnaires and interviews.

In questionnaires, it’s the participant, whereas, during interviews, it’s the researcher who notes down not necessarily answers, per se, but key takeaways.

Now, at first glance, you might contemplate drawing a line between the two – especially if you’ve come to this post with a plan to collect feedback through questionnaires only.

Potentially, interviews may seem like too much of an elaborate research method for your current needs. And, chances are, your gut feeling is just right.

‍ Still, the thing is, this might change quickly.

‍ As you derive more and more information about your respondents, there may come a day longer conversations will make a lot of sense – and a world of a difference for your product development plan. And, when the time is right, you’ll know exactly what tool to employ to expand your feedback collection efforts.

Another great thing?

Interviews and questionnaires are pretty much a marriage made in heaven. While they’re doing quite well solo, combined, they’re a whole other dimension of powerful feedback. One method can accelerate the efforts of the other – interviews can complement what you’ve already learned from questionnaires, and questionnaires can pre-qualify the right people for interviews. Pretty great, right?

So, let’s take a look at the ways you can ace the feedback collection game.

Questionnaires

Website questionnaire.

In a digitalized world like ours, no one needs to be convinced of the incredible potential of website feedback .

These surveys take on various forms – from large pop-ups in the middle of the screen, to discrete widgets on the edge of the browser window.

Here’s a general breakdown of what you can expect from website questionnaires:

• With the right tool, you can target an audience as broad or narrow as you like
• The fastest way to collect crucial feedback from your website crowd
• A highly effective way to measures customer satisfaction metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) .
• If overused, you can exhaust your respondents’ attention or patience and cause survey fatigue
• Without prior knowledge on your audience, you can target users inaccurately and receive unactionable feedback
• It may be difficult to receive answers to open-ended questions if you haven’t previously proven your respondents that their insights and time are valued.

Now, here’s the good news:

Using the best survey tools , you can make sure you don’t experience the downsides described above.

With Survicate, you can target relevant respondents right from the beginning, as you can easily import data you already have on your audience from external marketing and CRM tools.

Depending on your preference, you can also choose to run website questionnaires through your favorite customer communication tools. This approach, loved by many marketers, allows you to use the same tool for all audience communication, as well as cross-analyze and export survey responses within seconds.

Let’s proceed to another type of digital survey …

Mobile app questionnaire

These surveys run inside mobile apps , and are both relatively new and specific in terms of the beneficiary in mind.

Similar to website questionnaires, mobile app surveys are displayed to users who interact with the product/service.

• Ideal for companies that have mobile apps and want to know how users find their way around/what they think about the service
• You can reach users “on the go” – ideal for single-question surveys that are quick to answer
• You can target users contextually and ask highly relevant questions.

Potential cons:

• The threat of being quickly discarded, if too many steps or open-ended answers are required (i.e. inconvenience of typing on a small screen)
• If a questionnaire covers the entire screen or appears too often, there’s the risk of coming across as obtrusive.

Let’s carry on to the last online questionnaire on the list...

Email questionnaire

Similarly to website questionnaires, emails are one of the fastest ways to reach your audience. Assuming you’re using emails provided by your audience (which really is the only way to go), you can count on incredibly valuable feedback from users who have expressed interest in your service/product.

That is, of course, if you approach email surveys strategically.

• Similarly to website questionnaires, you can target specific segments of your email list.
• A quick way to reach an engaged audience – assuming emails have been provided to you willingly (for ex. newsletter list), your respondents are likely to be more engaged than those who only sporadically visit your page
• Effective for sending targeted customer satisfaction surveys
• Weak email subject lines can set you up for low response rates. Make sure to stand out!
• If you send out all your questionnaires to the same audience (i.e. no segmentation), you might disturb respondents who are sensitive about spam (which, of course, your emails are not).

Want to hear a pro tip?

It has been proven that embedding only the first question in an email, and displaying remaining questions in a new window (as opposed to emailing a full questionnaire) boosts survey completion rates .

Sounds like something you’d like to try? You can do so on a free Survicate account !

And here's what the same survey might look like when opened in a new window:

Now, let’s put digital questionnaires aside and take a look at some other options.

Traditional mail questionnaire

While it may come as a surprise, many survey methodology resources online report that mail surveys are the most popular feedback collection method.

Whether they’ve been dethroned by digital questionnaires remains unclear, though it certainly seems inevitable, given all the convenience online questionnaires bring.

Still, as of today, paper questionnaires are still appreciated in certain lines of business.

• You can collect feedback from clients who did not provide an address or phone number
• Respondents can fill the survey in when it’s most convenient
• Certain groups of respondents may trust a traditionally mailed survey more than an email.

Potential Cons:

• Feedback is collected slowly, and response collection can take months
• A lot of paperwork – responses need to be handled and scanned individually if any modern-day analysis is to be performed.

Telephone questionnaire

Not as common as they were back in the day, but still a favorite of many companies that rely hugely on sales and customer service teams.

• Response rates are high if the respondent actually speaks to a human .
• Response rates can be very low if the call is automated
• May come across as obtrusive if calls are initiated too often or at the wrong time
• Since the introduction of GDPR, and after the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal, respondents have become reluctant to reveal information on the phone.

In-person questionnaire

These used to perform much better decades back before online surveying methods emerged. Nowadays, face-to-face questionnaires have mostly taken the form of meetings via video conferencing software.

As they’re quite time-consuming, today the approach is mostly carried out among random respondents (i.e. on the street), at an incentive to the respondent, or among very specific, carefully selected members of the audience (which, in its own right, might require previous pre-qualifying questionnaires).

• Good for modestly-sized feedback collection goals
• If carried out on the street, it provides a good overview among random respondents
• People tend to be more invested in questionnaires in person, and might be more prone to respond to open-ended questions.
• Time-consuming, both for the respondent and researcher
• In-person questionnaires with carefully targeted groups often require running pre-qualification surveys weeks ahead.

Which leads us to...Interviews

According to Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research , there are two main criteria to think of when we distinguish interviews. These are:

Interview structure

• Structured (question order is predetermined, researchers only go off script to clarify the question or ask for more details)
• Semi-structured (questions are predetermined, but the researcher is at liberty to use informal language and tweak wording)
• In-depth (questions aren’t predetermined, the conversation relies mostly on one’s subjective point of view/opinion).

Number of participants

• Individual interviews

In-person interviews : these will be invaluable if you’re looking to read between the lines – especially if you adopt an in-depth or semi-structured approach. In the same way as in the case of in-person questionnaires, respondents are more prone to answer more precisely when addressed face-to-face.

‍ Phone interviews: Similarly to phone questionnaires, the response rates are high – even more so, as interviews can’t (at least, as of yet) be effectively carried out without a fellow human researcher on board. There is a significant difference though – while phone questionnaires remain on script, interviews, with their more open nature, encourage sharing opinions and, as an effect, often collect insights of highly subjective, emotional nature.

• Focus groups

While these aren’t necessarily interchangeable with other surveys that made the list, it’s worth noting nonetheless. Focus groups are a way to trigger discussion on a given subject among several participants. It is an amazing way to uncover your audience’s attitudes, as it not only promotes openness but also shows how diversified opinions evolve throughout a live discussion.Now that you know all the survey instrumentation options, the question is:

What are some telltale signs you’d benefit from a mixed approach?

Here are a couple of examples:

• You’ve been uncovering recurring behavior within a group, that can’t be explained through correlating other behavioral or attitudinal data.
• Your respondents are less prone to answering open-ended questions than they have before and leave more and more empty fields.
• Your respondents answer open-ended questions, but the responses are less insightful than you’ve imagined. Also, you don’t know how to formulate a questionnaire that triggers a detailed response anymore.
• There’s a very specific user group you’re increasingly interested in hearing more from – ideally, in a less structured, individual way.
• You’ve been measuring specific customer metrics via surveys (for example, NPS survey or CSAT survey, as explained below) but the results have been introducing confusion. You don’t really know what your respondents think anymore – or, more importantly, what they’re actually evaluating.

If you're looking to start surveying your user base, sign up for Survicate's 10-day free trial and get access to all Business plan features today.

We’re also there

Customer Satisfaction Surveys: A Comprehensive Guide

While one of our favorite ways to gather customer feedback focuses on active listening during one-on-one sessions with customers, customer satisfaction surveys provide an opportunity to poll users on questions that might otherwise go unanswered.

But here’s the thing: Customer satisfaction surveys are only valuable if you ask the right questions, in the best way, at the perfect time. That’s why building and deploying an effective and valuable customer satisfaction survey is no small feat.

Today, we’ll look at some proven ways to turn your surveys into a reliable source of insightful customer information.

Why customer satisfaction surveys are important

Let’s first talk about why customer satisfaction surveys matter for today’s businesses.

Customer satisfaction is one of the few levers brands can still pull to differentiate themselves in crowded and competitive marketplaces. Today, the brand with the best customer experience usually wins.

That’s because, as Qualtrics put it , “High levels of customer satisfaction … are strong predictors of customer and client retention, loyalty, and product repurchase.”

Not to mention, poor customer satisfaction can actively harm your brand. The average American consumer will tell 16 other people about poor customer experiences, and it takes brands an average of 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.

In other words, the stakes are high when it comes to customer satisfaction and experiences today, and customer satisfaction (or CSAT) surveys are one of the most effective ways for your brand to keep a pulse on how customers are feeling.

When you have access to the data customer satisfaction surveys provide, you can actually take action to improve your customer satisfaction and get proactive about the problems customers face.

That means you can turn negative customer experiences around and improve your overall product and service to delight more customers — leading to better loyalty and retention, higher sales, and less churn overall.

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10 customer satisfaction survey best practices

The efficacy of your customer satisfaction data relies on getting honest and accurate answers from your customers. So it’s no surprise that most of the problems we see with customer satisfaction surveys revolve around getting accurate answers from respondents:

No matter what you do, research has shown that there will always be a small minority of people who will lie on your survey, especially when the questions pertain to the three Bs: behavior, beliefs or belonging. ( Here’s a review of this topic from Cornell University.)

Furthermore, sometimes people will give inaccurate answers completely by accident. Numerous publications have noted that predicting future intentions can be quite difficult (like whether or not they’ll buy from you again), especially when done via survey.

Fortunately, research also offers solutions to these consistent problems with surveys. A joint study by Survey Monkey and the Gallup Group offers some good insights on creating and structuring surveys that can keep these problems to a minimum.

Below, let’s look at the study’s most important takeaways so you can get a clear picture of how to improve your surveys.

1. Keep it short

Your main goal is to be clear and concise, finding the shortest way to ask a question without muddying its intent. It’s not just about reducing the character count — you also need to cut out unnecessary phrasing from your questions.

At the same time, overall survey length remains important for keeping abandonment rates low. Think about the last time you sat around and excitedly answered a 30-minute questionnaire. It’s probably never happened.

2. Only ask questions that fulfill your end goal

In short, be ruthless when it comes to cutting unnecessary questions from your surveys.

Every question you include should have a well-defined purpose and a strong case for being included. Otherwise, send it to the chopping block.

For example, depending on the survey’s purpose, it may not matter how a customer first came in contact with your site. If that’s the case, don’t ask how they found out about you. Do you really need to know a customer’s name? If not, again, don’t ask.

Including questions you thought “couldn’t hurt to ask” only adds unnecessary length to your survey — length that could send survey respondents hunting for the “back” button.

3. Construct smart, open-ended questions

Although it’s tempting to stick with multiple-choice queries and scales, some of your most insightful feedback will come from open-ended questions that allow customers to spill their real thoughts onto the page.

However, nothing makes a survey more intimidating than a huge text box connected to the very first question. It’s best to ask the brief questions first and create a sense of progress. Then give survey takers who’ve made it to the closing questions the opportunity to elaborate on their thoughts.

One strategy is to get people to commit to a question with a simple introduction, and then follow up with an open-ended question such as, “Why do you feel this way?”

4. Ask one question at a time

We’ve all been hit with an extensive series of questions before: “How did you find our site? Do you understand what our product does? Why or why not?”

It can begin to feel like you’re being interrogated by someone who won’t let you finish your sentences. If you want quality responses, you need to give people time to think through each individual question.

Bombarding people with multiple questions at once leads to half-hearted answers by respondents who are just looking to get through to the end — if they don’t abandon you before then. Instead, make things easy by sticking to one main point at a time.

5. Make rating scales consistent

Common scales used for surveys can become cumbersome and confusing when the context begins to change.

Here’s an example: While answering a survey’s initial questions, you are told to respond by choosing between 1-5, where 1 = “Strongly Disagree” and 5 = “Strongly Agree.”

Later in the survey, however, you are asked to evaluate the importance of certain items. The problem: Now 1 is assigned as “Most Important,” but you had been using 5 as the agreeable answer to every previous question. That’s incredibly confusing. How many people missed this change and gave inaccurate answers completely by accident?

6. Avoid leading and loaded questions

Questions that lead respondents toward a certain answer due to biased phrasing won’t get you valuable or accurate feedback. SurveyMonkey offers a great example of a leading question to avoid:

“We have recently upgraded SurveyMonkey’s features to become a first-class tool. What are your thoughts on the new site?”

This is a clear case of letting pride in your product get in the way of asking a good question. Instead, the more neutral, “What do you think of the recent SurveyMonkey upgrades?” is a better option.

When the goal is to honestly learn something, don’t risk annoying your participants (and muddying your data) with leading questions or other tactics designed to get the responses you want to see.

7. Make use of yes/no questions

When you’re asking a question that has a simple outcome, try to frame the question as a yes/no option.

The Survey Monkey study showed that these closed-ended questions make for great starter questions because they’re typically easier for customers to evaluate and complete. For example:

“Did our support team make you feel valued as a customer?”

The response to this question doesn't require a scale — "highly valued," "valued," "not valued," etc. — a simple yes-or-no option is simpler for the customer and should give you all the information you need. Plus, you can follow it with an open-ended question, such as:

"What did our team do to make you feel valued?"

8. Get specific and avoid assumptions

When you create questions that assume a customer is knowledgeable about something, you’re likely going to run into problems (unless you are surveying a very targeted subset of people).

One big culprit is the language and terminology you use in questions, which is why we recommend staying away from industry acronyms, buzzwords and jargon, or references.

Similarly, one of the worst assumptions you can make is to assume people will answer with specific examples or explain their reasoning. It’s better to ask them to be specific and let them know you welcome this sort of feedback:

“How do you feel about [blank]? Feel free to get specific; we love detailed feedback!”

9. Think about your timing

Interestingly, the Survey Monkey study we referenced above found the highest survey open and click-through rates occurred on Monday, Friday, and Sunday, respectively.

There was no discernible difference between the response quality gathered on weekdays versus weekends, either, so your best bet is to seek out survey-takers first thing during a new week or to wait for the weekend.

Many companies conduct customer surveys once a year, or at most, once per quarter. And while that’s great, it’s not enough to keep a real pulse on customer satisfaction — you don’t want to wait 90 days to find out your customer is unhappy.

Between full surveys, you’ll want to keep a keen eye on your customer satisfaction ratings and other metrics. Reporting tools (such as Help Scout reports ) can help you turn every conversation with a customer into a feedback session.

10. Offer survey respondents a bonus

In some cases, it makes sense to entice customers to take your survey: A variety of data show that incentives can increase survey response rates. These incentives could be a discount, a giveaway, or an account credit.

The key here is to find a balance between incentivizing customers enough that they’re willing to take the survey without giving away the farm. Your incentives need to be something your brand can financially handle — which is why we often recommend credits or free trials in lieu of unrelated gifts or extensive discounts.

Now, you may worry that offering survey respondents a freebie may detract from the quality of your responses. But studies show that likely isn’t the case.

Customer satisfaction survey examples

Now that we’ve talked about best practices for customer satisfaction surveys, let’s take a look at how those look in the wild. Here are a few examples of brands doing customer satisfaction surveys right, highlighting what makes each example great.

In-app examples

The project management tool Asana makes a point of gathering feedback on customer satisfaction regularly throughout its software. Occasionally, when working in the tool, a survey will appear at the top of the screen asking how likely you are to recommend the tool:

Asking for feedback while someone is actively using your product is great because they're engaged with the product and their experience with the product is fresh in their minds.

Of course, Asana knows that busy business professionals don’t have time to complete a lengthy survey while they're in the middle of working, so they keep it short and simple. Customers only have to click a rating to provide their feedback. After clicking the rating, customers are provided with an opportunity to submit written feedback if desired.

Another great example is Twitter. Twitter makes a point to regularly survey users about all manner of product usage and satisfaction, and their surveys get several things really right.

For one, the copy that invites users to take part in the survey appears right on their Twitter timeline.

The copy also does a great job of setting expectations — it promises “a few quick questions,” and that’s exactly what the survey delivers. Twitter keeps their questions (and the survey as a whole) brief, showing users a progress bar so they always know where they stand within the survey.

Plus, the experience of going from tweet to survey and back to the user’s timeline is seamless and natural.

Email examples

This email survey from Amazon is a great way to gather specific feedback that helps other customers when shopping on the platform. Instead of asking the customer to write a review, it simply asks about the fit of a recently purchased piece of clothing.

Some people simply will not take the time to write a detailed review of a purchase, but with this simple, targeted, one-question survey, Amazon can gather the feedback it needs to make sure future purchasers of this item know which size they should buy to be satisfied with their purchase.

At Help Scout, we regularly check in with customers to gauge their satisfaction with our software and support. At times, we've sent new customers this onboarding email to find out how they're feeling about their ability to use Help Scout:

If a customer clicks on the survey question, they're taken to a succinct, five-question Typeform survey with only one open-ended question to save customers' time.

We also make it easy for customers to provide feedback after every interaction with our Customers team with a brief two-question survey:

Sample customer satisfaction survey questions

Now, we know it can be difficult to come up with customer satisfaction survey questions that tick all of the best practice boxes we mentioned before. So to make things a little easier on you, we’ve pulled together 19 sample questions, based on common customer satisfaction survey questions. You can pull these questions directly and copy/paste them into your own surveys, or tweak them as you see fit.

General survey questions

In your own words, describe how you feel about [brand or product].

How can we improve your experience with the company?

What's working for you and why?

What can our employees do better?

Do you have any additional comments or feedback for us?

Product and usage questions

How often do you use the product or service?

Does the product help you achieve your goals?

What is your favorite tool or feature?

What would you improve or add if you could?

Which of the following words would you use to describe our product?

If you could change one thing about our product, what would it be?

Customer support questions

How would you rate the quality of your customer support experience?

Did our support team completely resolve your issue?

How long did it take us to resolve your problem?

Did our support team make you feel valued as a customer?

How easy did we make it to handle your issue?

Loyalty and retention questions

How likely are you to buy again from us?

How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?

What would you say to someone who asked about us?

Get valuable feedback with a customer satisfaction survey

Customer satisfaction surveys are a potent and valuable tool in your brand’s fight to win customer hearts and loyalty. With the feedback they provide, you can improve your product, your service, and the overall customer experience — leading to higher revenue and more loyal customers.

If you’re ready to build your survey right now , here are a few high-quality customer satisfaction survey templates we recommend:

A simple and comprehensive customer satisfaction survey template from Survey Monkey

A short and sweet customer survey template from Microsoft Office

A dynamic and customizable customer satisfaction survey template from Typeform

A short and simple customer survey template from JotForm

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Kiera abbamonte.

Kiera is a a content writer who works with SaaS and ecommerce companies. Located in Boston, MA, she loves cinnamon coffee and a good baseball game. Catch up with her on Twitter or KieraAbbamonte.com

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How to design a customer experience survey.

8 min read When designing a customer experience (CX) survey, your goal is to create happier customers, willing respondents, and ultimately a more successful business. Here’s the ultimate guide to setting up a great CX survey.

What is a customer experience survey?

A customer experience survey is a questionnaire used to explore the customer experience (CX) by asking customers how they feel. It’s typically used by a business to find out how well they are performing, and where they need to improve to achieve or maintain great CX.

Why use customer experience surveys?

Customer experience surveys help you to get an overall measurement of your current CX standards. Experiences are personal and every customer will have different feedback, so it’s important to ask as many people as possible so that you have a representative sample of your customers. From there, you’ll be able to see overall trends like where your CX is strongest and where, and how, you can improve it.

Your customer experience survey can also help you find out what kind of expectations your customers have of you and whether these are being met.

How to choose the right CX survey questions

Your customer experience survey questions should give you enough detail to gather insights you can act on, but not be so exhaustive that respondents are over-taxed and end up zoning out – or even dropping out – of your survey.

Remember, your questionnaire has two functions.

• It helps you discover how customers think and feel about your brand
• It allows you to measure your progress over time by quantifying your performance in measurable units.

With that in mind, aim to include a mix of metrics-based questions with more exploratory items that give your customers room to express themselves.

These might include:

• NPS (Net Promoter Score) to measure customer loyalty and brand advocacy
• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) to measure how well you are meeting customer expectations
• CES (Customer Effort Score) to find out whether doing business with you is smooth and easy
• Likert scale questions that allow customers to express degrees of agreement or disagreement with statements
• Multiple choice questions that allow respondents to select one or more answers from a list
• Open text fields . These provide insights that you may not have been looking for with closed questions, and with tools such as text analytics software , it’s now easier than ever to analyze them and pull out insights, and actions, from thousands of open-text responses.

Understand the key drivers at every touchpoint

Use customer journey mapping to identify every touchpoint so that you’re clear on what you’re measuring and why. By locating customer experience data within your customer journeys, you’ll start to uncover the key drivers of your customer experience and identify how they affect key business metrics like revenue, customer lifetime value (CLV) , or churn.

Follow survey best practices

As with any kind of survey, make sure you follow best practices to make your research as successful as possible. We recommend that you:

Make your survey short

Taking surveys is effortful for respondents, so keep your questionnaire as short and to-the-point as possible. Limit yourself to 10-15 questions maximum.

Tailor to your target population

Adapt the language, examples, and graphics to best suit the people you want to reach.

Use plain language

Keep the language clear and direct. Write in user language, thinking about the people in your respondent pool and their level of education and understanding.

Stick to one topic per question

Never try to pack more than one subject or opinion into a single question – even if you’re feeling the constraints of survey length. Doing this will only muddle your data.

It’s all too easy to introduce bias when writing survey questionnaires. Check your survey carefully to make sure there are no leading questions or positive/negative wording that could influence the respondent.

Keep distractions to a minimum

Use simple, clear fonts and minimal branding. Don’t use images or illustrations unless they are a meaningful part of a question.

Consider incentives

Offering a small incentive, such as entry into a draw, can improve survey response rates and completion rates.

Test thoroughly before sending it out

And once you’ve tested, test again.

Decide when to send it

Timeframes for survey research can vary depending on your business goals, resources, and audience makeup. Some customer satisfaction surveys only make sense at a certain point in time, while others are more general and can be sent out periodically. For example:

• Post-purchase evaluation: Feedback from an individual customer at the time a product or service is delivered, or shortly afterward. Again, this will depend on the product. For example, if the recipient bought a pair of trainers then you might send the survey earlier than if the recipient bought a new car.
• Periodic satisfaction surveys: Feedback from targeted groups of customers to provide periodic snapshots of customer experiences. An annual customer survey is an example of periodic satisfaction surveys.
• Continuous satisfaction tracking: Regular surveys (daily, monthly, or quarterly) that provide continuous satisfaction feedback on post-purchase evaluations over the entire customer lifecycle. More and more channels are being used for this too, as businesses try to meet the customer where they are in real-time.

Remember, if you’re sending periodic or continuous surveys, the goal is to collect like-for-like data, so make sure your questionnaire is consistent and resist the urge to make any tweaks or changes unless they’re absolutely necessary. Even changing question order can affect your results.

Choose your distribution channels

Where do you want your survey to appear? These days, it’s possible to collect feedback from customers at almost any point in their journey, using a wide range of channels (with more appearing all the time). The range of possible channels might include:

• Social media
• Website intercept
• Chatbot integration
• In-store tablet or touchscreen
• In-store manual push-button terminal
• Push notification

Essentially, you can easily survey your customers wherever they happen to be.

When you use a survey engine with omnichannel integration , you can distribute your survey almost anywhere, using secure unique links to help track responses back to the individuals you want to reach and avoid unwanted participation.

Wherever and whenever respondents take your survey, the results should always be accessible via a centralized platform where you can pool your responses and carry out analysis of your data.

Analyze your results

The final step in the journey is to analyze your survey results and turn your findings into positive action.

Before you do this, it’s important to clean your survey data. This will help you to remove any responses from ‘satisficers’ – respondents who avoid engaging meaningfully with a survey and can potentially skew your data. They may respond randomly, continually select ‘don’t know,’ or agree with everything.

Then you’re ready to process your data and uncover the insights that will help you improve your CX.

Survey data processing methods range in complexity and depth, from classic methods like crosstab analysis and graphical representation to statistical tests and predictive analytics . To learn more about what’s possible, read our guide on how to analyze survey data

Download your free CX survey template

Developing a CX survey questionnaire isn’t as simple as it might first appear. That’s why we’ve taken some of the hard work out of creating a survey and provided free, downloadable customer experience survey templates you can use with your free Qualtrics account.

• Customer satisfaction survey template
• Customer service survey template
• Store purchase feedback survey template
• Online purchase feedback survey template
• NPS survey template
• Website satisfaction survey template

Get started building surveys today

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Ai & customer experience 13 min read, customer experience transformation 15 min read, customer lifecycle management 19 min read, customer experience automation 11 min read, customer centricity 16 min read, customer data platforms 14 min read, customer experience insights 12 min read, request demo.

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Simplifying Customer Survey Creation

Table of contents

Step-by-step guide to creating customer surveys.

‘Ughhh, another brand, another customer survey!’

Do your customers feel this way whenever you send them a survey?

Yes, surveying customers and collecting feedback is important. But think about your customers for a second: they probably receive hundreds of such surveys from various brands they engage with. It’s completely understandable if they’re feeling frustrated. 

But from your standpoint, you want your customers’ opinion. You want to make decisions based on what they need and what they expect. 

So, how do you get them to answer – and, most importantly, complete – your surveys? 

It all boils down to the manner in which you design the customer survey. Yes, there’s some method to the madness. 

In this article, we’ll explore:

Table of Contents

What are customer surveys.

A customer survey is a systematic research method used by businesses to gather feedback directly from current, past, or potential customers about their perception, experience, and expectations related to a product, service, or overall brand experience. 

Such surveys typically consist of a series of structured questions and are presented to customers in various forms – online surveys, telephonic interviews, mailed questionnaires, or face-to-face interactions.

The objective of these surveys is to identify areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, understand customer needs and preferences, and gain insights that can lead to improvements in product design, service delivery, or overall business strategies. 

Get Immediate Customer Feedback

10 Types of Customer Surveys

Here are some of the different types of customer surveys:

#1 Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey:

#2 net promoter score (nps) survey:, #3 customer effort score (ces) survey:, #4 product/service feedback survey:, #5 market research survey:, #6 post-purchase feedback survey:, #7 website or app feedback survey:, #8 customer service feedback survey:, #9 voice of the customer (voc) survey:, #10 churn survey:.

A Detailed Guide to Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Importance of Customer Surveys

Customer surveys are invaluable tools for businesses and organizations to gain insights directly from their primary stakeholders – the customers. Such surveys typically consist of a series of structured questions and are presented to customers in various forms – online surveys, telephonic interviews, mailed questionnaires, or face-to-face interactions.

11 Steps to Create Customer Surveys

Here’s a step-by-step guide on creating customer surveys:

Step 1: Define the Objective of Your Survey

Before designing any survey, it’s crucial to understand why you are conducting the survey in the first place. This means clearly defining the objective or the specific information you wish to obtain. Knowing the objective will not only guide the types of questions you ask but also how you’ll analyze and use the responses.

Suppose you own an online clothing store and recently launched a new line of summer dresses. 

Your objective might be to understand how satisfied customers are with the fit, material, and design of the dresses. With this clear objective, your survey can focus on these specific areas, ensuring that the feedback is relevant and actionable.

Template for Defining Survey Objectives: Survey Objective Form – Survey Name: (e.g., Summer Dress Feedback Survey) – Purpose of this Survey: – [ ] Product feedback – [ ] Customer service evaluation – [ ] Website usability – [ ] Other: (any other vital point) – Specific Objective: (e.g., To gauge customer satisfaction with the fit, material, and design of our new summer dresses) – Key Information to Obtain: (List down the main points you want your survey to address based on the objective. For our example, it would be: fit of the dress, quality of material, design appreciation.)

Once you have a clear objective, the process becomes more streamlined as you have a direction and focus for your survey. Each subsequent step will revolve around achieving this primary objective.

Step 2: Select the Right Survey Platform

Selecting an appropriate survey platform is crucial. The platform you choose should cater to your audience, be user-friendly, and provide the features necessary to achieve your objectives. Factors to consider include: ease of use, customization options, data analysis capabilities, and distribution methods.

Let’s continue with our online clothing store scenario. If the majority of your customers shop via mobile, you’d want to choose a survey platform that’s mobile-responsive. You might also want a platform that easily integrates with your e-commerce site or email marketing tool.

Survey Platform Evaluation Checklist

Platform Usability: Is the platform user-friendly for both survey creators and respondents? -Yes -No Mobile Responsiveness: Can respondents easily complete the survey on mobile devices? -Yes -No Customization: Can you customize the survey to align with your brand (colors, logo, etc.)? -Yes -No Integration Options: Can the platform integrate with your website, email system, or CRM? -Yes -No Data Analysis Capabilities: Does the platform offer features to easily analyze and visualize survey results? -Yes -No Cost: Does the platform fit within your budget? -Yes -No Recommendation: Based on the above criteria, would you choose this platform? -Yes -No

Choosing the right platform is a foundational step. It will influence how respondents interact with your survey and how you gather and analyze the results. The platform should complement your survey objectives and make the entire process smoother.

Simply Insert Customer Surveys into Email

Step 3: Design and Structure your Questions

The design and structure of your survey questions are vital to obtain accurate, unbiased results. Questions should be clear, concise, and avoid leading the respondent to a particular answer. There are various types of questions you can use, including multiple-choice, rating scales, and open-ended questions.

For our online clothing store, a mix of question types can be useful include:

When designing your questions:

The clearer and more straightforward your questions are, the more accurate feedback you’ll receive from respondents.

Step 4: Ensure Logical Flow and Grouping

Ensuring that your customer survey has a logical flow makes it easier for respondents to follow and complete. 

Group related questions together to maintain coherence and avoid confusing or overwhelming participants. Also, starting with general questions and gradually moving to specific ones can help the respondent ease into the survey.

Survey Flow Template:

Survey Name: Summer Dress Feedback Survey Section 1: General Feedback -Overall satisfaction with the summer dress collection -How likely are you to recommend our summer dress collection to a friend? Section 2: Specifics on Design and Appearance -Feedback on color choices. -Comments on dress patterns and design elements. Section 3: Fit and Comfort -Rating on dress fit. -Feedback on material quality and comfort. Section 4: Open Feedback -Suggestions for design improvement. -Any other comments or feedback. When structuring your survey: -Think like a respondent. Make sure the flow feels intuitive. -Use section headers to clearly indicate different topic areas. -If the survey is lengthy, consider providing a progress bar or indicating how long the survey typically takes to complete. This can help set expectations and reduce drop-off rates.

A logically structured survey not only increases the completion rate but also ensures the feedback is structured in a way that’s easier to analyze.

Measure Customer Satisfaction Without Complicating Things

Step 5: Include Skip Logic and Conditional Branching

Skip logic and conditional branching are advanced survey features that help tailor the survey experience based on a respondent’s answers. By doing so, participants are only presented with questions relevant to them, leading to a more personalized and accurate survey experience.

In the context of the clothing store, if a respondent indicates they haven’t purchased a summer dress, you can use skip logic to direct them away from detailed product-specific questions and maybe ask about the reasons they didn’t make a purchase or their general preferences.

Skip Logic Template for Summer Dress Feedback Survey

Question: Have you purchased one of our summer dresses? Options: -Yes -No If ‘Yes’ is selected: Proceed to the next question about specific feedback on the dress. If ‘No’ is selected: Skip to the question: “What factors influenced your decision not to purchase our summer dress?” When implementing skip logic: -Clearly map out the respondent’s potential paths. A flowchart can be handy here. -Ensure that the survey experience feels smooth. There shouldn’t be any abrupt jumps or transitions. -Test the survey multiple times to ensure the logic works correctly and that respondents aren’t accidentally skipping important sections or getting stuck in a loop.

Remember, the main goal is to make the survey as relevant and frictionless as possible for each participant, ensuring higher completion rates and more accurate data.

Step 6: Test the Survey Before Launching

Testing your survey is essential to catch any issues or inconsistencies before it reaches a broader audience. This step allows you to double-check that questions are clear, the flow is logical, and that all technical aspects (like skip logic) work as intended.

Example: For our summer dress collection feedback survey, you might have a small group of colleagues or trusted customers take the survey. After they complete it, ask for feedback on clarity, length, and any technical hiccups they experienced.

Survey Testing Feedback Form

Survey Name: Summer Dress Feedback Survey 1. Clarity of Questions: Were all questions easy to understand? -Yes -No If “No”, which questions were confusing?  2. Survey Length: Was the survey: -Too long -Just right -Too short 3. Technical Issues: Did you encounter any technical issues or glitches while taking the survey? -Yes -No If “Yes”, please describe the issue.  4. Flow and Logic: Did the survey flow feel logical? -Yes -No -Were there any sections or questions that felt out of place or redundant? 5. General Feedback: Any other comments or suggestions for improving the survey? When testing: -Choose a diverse group of testers to get varied feedback. -Encourage honesty. Let testers know that their feedback is crucial for the survey’s success. -Make necessary revisions based on feedback. It’s better to take the time to adjust now rather than discover issues after the survey is live.

A well-tested survey not only ensures a smooth experience for respondents but also ensures that the data you collect will be valid and actionable.

Step 7: Decide on Distribution Methods

The way you distribute your customer survey can significantly influence response rates and the type of feedback you receive. It’s essential to choose a distribution method that aligns with your target audience and survey objectives.

Example: For our summer dress feedback survey, you might distribute the survey via:

Survey Distribution Plan

Survey Name: Summer Dress Feedback Survey Target Audience: Customers who’ve purchased or shown interest in the summer dress collection. 1. Distribution Method: Email Campaign -Tool/Platform: (e.g., Mailchimp, SendinBlue) -Scheduled Date: -Follow-up Reminder: [ ] Yes [ ] No (If yes, specify date:) 2. Distribution Method: Website Popup/Banner -Tool/Platform: (e.g., OptinMonster, Sumo) -Start Date: -End Date: 3. Distribution Method: QR Code on Product Tag -QR Code Generator Tool: (e.g., QR Code Monkey, GoQR) -Implementation Date:  When deciding on distribution: -Think about where your target audience is most active and receptive. -Ensure your survey is mobile-optimized if you’re also collecting feedback via QR codes. -Monitor response rates. If they’re lower than expected, consider tweaking your distribution strategy or message to encourage participation.

Remember, the goal is to make it as easy and appealing as possible for your target audience to participate in the survey.

Step 8: Offer Incentives Wisely

Incentives can significantly boost response rates, but they need to be used wisely. The incentive should be relevant and appealing to your target audience. It’s also crucial to ensure that the incentive doesn’t introduce bias, where people participate just for the reward and don’t provide genuine feedback.

For this specific customer survey, you might offer a 10% discount on their next purchase or enter respondents into a lucky draw to win a free summer dress. This not only encourages participation but is also closely related to the product in question.

Survey Incentive Plan

Survey Name: Summer Dress Feedback Survey 1. Incentive Type: Discount on Next Purchase -Discount Percentage: 10% -Validity Period: (e.g., One month from the date of survey completion) 2. Incentive Type: Lucky Draw -Prize: Free Summer Dress -Draw Date:  -Terms & Conditions: (e.g., Must be 18 or older, one entry per person, etc.) Note to Participants: “Your honest feedback is vital to us. Please provide genuine responses to help us serve you better.” When offering incentives: -Clearly communicate the terms and conditions. -Ensure the reward process is smooth. If offering a discount, make sure the discount code works seamlessly. -Remember that while incentives can boost response rates, the quality of feedback is paramount. It’s better to have fewer genuine responses than many inauthentic ones.

Incentives, when used effectively, can be a great way to show appreciation to your customers for their time and effort in providing feedback.

Step 9: Monitor and Adjust in Real-Time

As responses start coming in for the survey, it’s essential to monitor the results and be prepared to adjust the survey, as necessary. This ensures that any issues are addressed promptly, and it allows you to get the most out of your survey initiative.

In the example we’ve taken, let’s say you notice that 70% of respondents are dropping off at question 5. Upon inspection, you find that the question is worded confusingly. Adjusting the phrasing or format of the question can mitigate the dropout rate.

Survey Monitoring Log Survey Name: Summer Dress Feedback Survey Start Date: Monitoring Date: 1. Response Rate: -Targeted Respondents: 1000 -Responses Received: 600 -Completion Rate: 60% 2. Dropout Points: -Major Dropout at Question #: 5 -Possible Reason: Confusing wording. -Action Taken: Reworded the question for clarity. 3. Feedback on Incentive: -Number of Inquiries: 20 -Issues Reported: Trouble applying discount code. -Action Taken: Fixed the code issue and informed affected respondents. When monitoring and adjusting: -Use analytics and reporting features available in your survey tool. This will help identify trends and potential issues. -Stay open to feedback. Sometimes, respondents might reach out directly with concerns or problems they encountered. -Regularly check in. The frequency will depend on your survey’s duration and volume of responses. For short-term surveys, a daily check might be needed, while for longer surveys, a weekly review might suffice.

Being proactive during the survey period not only ensures a smoother experience for your respondents but also guarantees more reliable and actionable feedback.

Step 10: Analyze and Interpret the Data

Once your survey has concluded, the next critical step is analyzing and interpreting the data collected. Proper analysis will allow you to gain insights, identify trends, and make informed decisions based on the feedback.

Example: From the customer survey example we’ve taken, perhaps you find that 80% of respondents loved the fabric, but 60% found the fit to be inconsistent. This insight can help you prioritize fit adjustments in the next product iteration while retaining the current fabric.

Survey Data Analysis Report

Survey Name: Summer Dress Feedback Survey 1. Key Metrics: -Total Respondents: 1000 -Completion Rate: 85% 2. Main Findings: Fabric Satisfaction: -Satisfied: 80% -Neutral: 15% -Unsatisfied: 5% Dress Fit: -Consistent: 40% -Inconsistent: 60% 3. Key Insights: -Most customers appreciate the fabric quality. -There’s a significant issue with the fit consistency, which needs to be addressed. 4. Recommendations: -Retain the fabric supplier and consider feedback for any new fabric choices. -Review the manufacturing process or sizing guidelines to improve fit consistency. When analyzing and interpreting data: -Use visualization tools (like charts or graphs) to make data more digestible. -Look for patterns and correlations, but remember that correlation doesn’t always imply causation. -Consider segmenting the data, for instance, by age or purchase history, to uncover more nuanced insights. -Keep your main objectives in mind. Always tie back your findings to the primary goals of the survey.

The power of a survey lies not just in data collection but in how you use that data to drive action and improvement.

Step 11: Share Findings and Implement Changes

Once you’ve analyzed and interpreted the survey data, it’s crucial to share your findings with relevant stakeholders and implement the changes based on feedback . Sharing keeps everyone informed, fosters a customer-centric culture, and ensures that insights lead to actionable steps for improvement. Close the feedback loop with customers. 

After the summer dress feedback survey, you might hold a team meeting to discuss the findings. Following the insights about fabric satisfaction and fit inconsistency, you could decide to collaborate with the design team to address fit issues while maintaining the popular fabric choice.

Template for Sharing Findings:

Survey Findings Presentation Slide 1: Introduction -Survey Name: Summer Dress Feedback Survey -Purpose: Assess customer satisfaction with the summer dress collection Slide 2: Key Metrics -Total Respondents: 1000 -Completion Rate: 85% Slide 3: Main Findings -Fabric Satisfaction: 80% positive feedback -Fit Consistency: 60% found it inconsistent Slide 4: Key Insights and Recommendations -Retain the current fabric choice. -Collaborate with the design team to address fit issues. Slide 5: Action Plan -Review the manufacturing process for fit consistency. -Conduct a follow-up survey after implementing changes. Slide 6: Questions & Discussion When sharing and implementing: -Make sure the findings are clear and actionable. Avoid jargon or overly complex data visualizations. -Encourage open discussion. Team members might have additional insights or suggestions based on the feedback. -Prioritize actions based on both the importance and feasibility of changes. -Continually measure the impact of the changes. Did customer satisfaction improve after addressing the fit issues?

Remember, the end goal of any survey is to gather insights that lead to meaningful actions. It’s not just about knowing what your customers think but about leveraging that knowledge for continuous improvement.

7 Hacks to Create Customer Surveys that Get Responses

If you’re looking to boost the response rate and quality of your customer surveys, consider the following seven hacks:

Lastly, always thank your respondents. A simple “thank you” at the end of the survey, or a follow-up thank-you email shows how grateful you are that your customers took the time to fill out the survey. 

Craft Customer Surveys with Ease

Understanding your customers is the cornerstone of any successful business, and surveys offer a direct way to gain those insights. 

With tools like Hiver , not only can you create efficient customer surveys, but you can easily analyze the feedback received. This makes it simpler to assess customer satisfaction, evaluate the quality of your service, and identify areas of improvement.

Remember, it’s not just about asking questions – it’s about understanding the answers and using them to grow your business. 

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What Is a Customer Survey?

Customer surveys can provide vital information about your target audience. Learn more about customer satisfaction surveys here.

A great way to get an idea of how your customers view your brand is by sending out customer surveys . A business makes products or delivers services specifically for its customers, so you need a way to gain insight into their thoughts and feelings. It’s imperative to know how your customers feel about your brand so you can determine what you’re doing right and what needs to be changed, which can be accomplished with customer surveys.

To optimize your customer satisfaction and improve sales for your business, it’s imperative to send out customer surveys. A customer survey is important so that you can assess customer satisfaction, perform market research, and measure customer engagement. Every business needs some way to gauge how their customers feel about them, and sending out a customer satisfaction survey is an easy yet effective way to do so.

Continue reading this article to learn more about why customer surveys are important, the elements that make up an effective customer survey, the different types of customer survey questions , and more.

What are customer surveys?

A customer survey is a method that a business can use to collect consumer feedback. The ultimate goal of a customer service survey is to assess how satisfied your customers are with your business. Rather than talking to your customers one-on-one, which can be time-consuming and overwhelming for both parties, sending out customer surveys is a more effective way of gauging your customer’s feelings.

There are many reasons why companies use surveys for customer satisfaction. It’s a way for them to get honest feedback about both the good and bad aspects of your brand. Identifying what your customers don’t like about your brand is just as important, if not more important, than identifying what your customers do like about your brand. And sending customer surveys is a great way to hear your customers’ unbiased reviews.

Surveys are also less invasive and overwhelming than one-on-one interactions. Customers can answer anonymously and from the comfort of their own homes, so they’ll likely feel more comfortable sharing their honest feelings. Companies will also send out customer surveys as a way to engage with their customers so that they can feel valued and cared for.

As a business owner, it’s important to know how to get customer reviews so you can get the necessary feedback you need for your business, and a customer satisfaction survey is a great way to get just that.

Why are customer surveys important?

A business operates solely for its clients, so understanding their feelings about your business is crucial. There are several reasons why customer surveys are important for businesses, such as:

• Improve products or services : A customer survey is a great way to gain insight into how your customers feel about your products or services so that you can make any necessary improvements. When you can pinpoint exactly what your customers are dissatisfied with, you can actively make the moves to fix them. That way, you can tailor your products or services to your customers’ needs, which can increase the likelihood of them purchasing from you again. When designing a customer survey, make sure to include product-specific questions to gather the feedback you need.
• Engage with customers : A successful business is one that puts in the effort to connect with its customers, which you can do with customer surveys. Connecting with customers is imperative for all businesses because connected customers are more likely to become repeat customers. Sending out customer surveys lets your customers know that you care about them and want to hear what they have to say, which will help them feel more emotionally connected to your brand. This also makes them more likely to recommend your brand to their peers and colleagues.
• Make informed decisions : Another benefit of customer surveys is that they can help you make more informed decisions based on data, which are imperative for the success of your business. Customer surveys tell you what changes need to be made and what should be kept the same about your products or services so that you can make better choices moving forward and allow your business to reach its fullest potential.
• Boost customer loyalty : Loyal customers lead to growth, and one way to boost your customer loyalty is with customer surveys. When a business has a high customer retention rate, that means they’re doing something right. Sending out customer service surveys can help boost customer loyalty because it indicates that you’re focused on creating the best possible products or services for your customers. In addition to customer surveys, there are various other customer retention strategies that you can use to increase customer loyalty, such as keeping in touch with your customers, resolving issues quickly, and delivering great service.
• Collect customer data : Customer surveys are also just a good way to collect customer data and gather demographic information about your target audience. Make sure to include a few demographic questions in your survey, like age, gender, education, and employment status. Knowing this information can also help you make better marketing decisions because you’ll have a better understanding of your target audience.
• Track progress : You should always be tracking your business’s progress, which is why you should continuously send out customer surveys so you can gauge how your business is performing over time. Tracking your progress makes it easier to identify obstacles and ways to overcome them, as well as your goals and what you need to do to achieve them.

Elements of an effective customer survey

There are a few key elements that make up an effective customer survey, such as:

• Use consistent rating scales : With every customer survey that you send out, make sure you use the same rating scales. Using consistent rating scales will make analyzing the results of your surveys much easier and less confusing.
• Ask meaningful questions : A customer satisfaction survey is only as good as the questions you ask. In order to get effective results from your customer surveys that you can use to improve your business, you need to ask meaningful questions that will prompt thoughtful answers.
• Use a variety of question types : In addition to asking the right questions, you also need to use a variety of question types, such as open-ended questions, multiple-choice questions, and demographic questions. The more questions you ask, the more insight you can get about your customers.
• Avoid assumptions : Don’t assume your customers will answer in a certain way or will explain why. If you want your customers to explain their reasoning, you need to specifically ask them to do so in the question.
• Remain brief : You should aim to keep your customer survey as brief and straightforward as possible. Not many customers will be willing to take an in-depth survey that’s going to take an hour to complete. Keep your questions brief so your customers can get through them quickly.
• Incentivize respondents : A good way to get your customers to take your survey is by offering incentives, such as a 20% discount on their next purchase or a free product. However, keep your incentives small to avoid causing bias.
• Pick the right time : It’s important to send out your surveys at the right time so you can get as many accurate responses as possible. You want to give your respondents at least one week to fill out the survey from when you send it out to when it’s due. Also, keep time zones in mind so that you don’t send out your surveys in the middle of the night.
• Test your survey : Before you click send on that email to send out your survey to all of your customers, make sure to test it first. You want to test your survey to ensure the wording is correct and all of the questions are properly formatted.
• Thank respondents : Once you’ve received responses from all your customers, make sure you thank them. Thanking your respondents is a common courtesy to let them know you appreciate their time and effort. You can do this with a simple thank you email, or you can send a gift card or discount.

Types of customer satisfaction survey questions

Now that you’re more familiar with why customer surveys are important and the elements that make up an effective customer survey, let’s discuss the different types of customer satisfaction survey questions. It’s important to include a variety of questions in your survey so that you can easily assess how your customers feel about your business.

These are some of the different types of customer survey questions that you can include in a customer survey:

1. Open-ended survey questions

Open-ended survey questions are questions that allow the respondent to write out their answer. Including open-ended survey questions is important because it gives your respondents free rein to express their feelings and concerns. These types of questions encourage honesty, which is ultimately what you want from your surveys.

To craft effective open-ended questions, you want to keep the question brief at first and then potentially follow up with some more in-depth questions. For example, your first question can be “How do you feel about (product name)?” and your second question can be “If necessary, how do you think we can improve that product?”.

Asking these questions in two parts is less intimidating for the respondent and encourages them to write more, so you can better assess their thoughts and feelings.

Some other examples of open-ended questions include:

• How can we improve your experience with the company?
• What's working for you and why?
• What can our employees do better?
• Why did you choose our product over a competitor’s?
• What would be one word you’d use to describe us and why?

2. Binary survey questions

Binary survey questions are the opposite of open-ended questions and offer only two options for answers, which are typically “yes” and “no.” By asking yes/no questions, you can quickly gather feedback without having to take the time to read through long responses. Binary questions will give you a general sense of how your customers feel based on a simple yes or no.

Because binary survey questions don’t provide as much insight into your respondent’s feelings as open-ended questions, you want to limit the number of these you include in your surveys. Only having two options for answers can make your respondents feel boxed in and like they don’t have another choice. With that said, binary questions can provide useful information that can be applied to your business.

Some examples of binary survey questions include:

• Were you satisfied with your experience with us? Yes/No
• Did you find what you were looking for today? Yes/No
• Is there anything else you need from us? Yes/No

3. Demographic survey questions

It’s crucial to include demographic survey questions in a customer survey so that you can better understand your audience. Asking demographic questions is essential so that businesses can create buyer personas that represent their target audience. When you have an idea of your buyer persona , you can create more effective marketing efforts that are targeted specifically to your target audience.

Asking these questions can help give you an idea of what audiences you’re performing well with, and what audiences you’re lacking. However, your respondents shouldn’t be required to answer demographic questions, so make sure to include that they’re optional.

Some examples of demographic survey questions include:

• What is your name?
• What is your phone number?
• Where do you live?
• What gender do you identify as?
• What is your email?
• What is your employment status?
• What is your marital status and do you have children?
• What is your education level?

4. Likert scale survey questions

Likert scale survey questions provide respondents with a variety of answers that range from one extreme to another, such as extremely unsatisfied to extremely satisfied. Likert scale questions will typically also include a neutral option for the answer.

Likert scale survey questions are good to incorporate in a customer survey because they’re easy to understand and give the respondent an option to be neutral. With this type of question, businesses can easily collect important, quantifiable data, like consumer beliefs and attitudes, without having to observe the consumer in action.

Some examples of Likert scale survey questions include:

• How satisfied are you with our service?
• Very satisfied
• Moderately satisfied
• Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
• Moderately dissatisfied
• Very dissatisfied

If you choose to include Likert scale survey questions in your customer survey, make sure you remain consistent with your rating scales. The more options you have for answers, the more confusing it can be to analyze your data. Aim to keep your rating scales as consistent as possible to make things easier for both you and your respondent.

5. Multiple-choice questions

Multiple-choice questions are a very straightforward way to assess your customer’s opinions. Multiple-choice questions are easy for the customer to understand and answer, and the answers are easy for the business to analyze. With multiple-choice questions, you can provide more answer options than with a binary question or Likert scale, but your respondents can’t go as in-depth as they can with an open-ended question.

Some examples of multiple-choice questions include:

Which one of our products do you use the most?

How often do you visit our website?

• A couple of times a week
• A few times a month
• Once every few months
• I never go on your website

Wrapping up: Using customer surveys

Using customer surveys is a great way to gain insight into your customers’ opinions so you can assess their satisfaction and make necessary changes to your business. Customer surveys are important for a myriad of reasons. Conducting customer surveys can help you engage more with your customers, boost your customer loyalty, improve your products and services, and more.

Creating and sending out customer surveys doesn’t have to be complicated, especially when you use Mailchimp. Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that brands can use to develop, launch, and grow their businesses. Mailchimp even offers free online survey tools that you can use to create your own effective surveys so you can learn more about your customers and grow your business.

In addition to survey tools, you’ll also get access to an expansive collection of helpful marketing resources when you sign up on Mailchimp. Mailchimp is here to help with everything from content creation to customer retention, so you can expand your business to new heights and accomplish all your goals.

Related Topics

• Customer Retention
• Audience Insights
• Customer Re-Engagement
• Segmentation
• Connect with Customers
• Target Your Audience
• Grow Your Audience

surveys | January 22, 2020

Customer Satisfaction Survey: How to Design & Analyze Them

Happy customers are a prerequisite of success and customer satisfaction surveys let you know if you’re doing a good job.

Happy customers motivate your team, accelerate growth, and fuel your business processes.

For customers to be satisfied, it’s necessary to understand what they think of you.

How do you know what they think? You ask them and measure customer satisfaction with surveys .

Customer satisfaction surveys are a common business strategy to help you understand how customers feel about your brand. It allows managers, marketers, and founders to enhance their strategies and improve results.

The problem:

Some entrepreneurs choose the wrong design and question types. As a result, the surveys get poor results and are analyzed improperly.

In this article, you’ll learn the different types of customer satisfaction surveys, get insights into the question types, and how to analyze your results and find issues (or strengths) to improve your business.

What is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?

Some sources refer to it as a “process of discovering whether or not a company’s customers are happy or satisfied with the products or services received from the company.”

Clear enough, right?

“A process” is a vague wording that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Another term would come in handy here:

A questionnaire .

So, a customer satisfaction survey is an instrument that helps a company measure the customers’ level of satisfaction with a product/service.

It’s a type of customer experience survey, for examining customer needs and understanding problems (or benefits) associated with your product. A hallmark of these surveys is the use of rating scales to measure sentiment.

Table of Contents

Why Use Surveys for Business

Consumers expect an exceptional experience with your company. 86% of them would even pay more for a better experience with your brand. The problem is, they share a negative experience two or three times more often than a positive one and one negative review can cost you up to 30 customers.

And that’s where customer satisfaction surveys can help.

A multitude of factors can play a role in impacting a customer’s experience, for example, a negative experience with an unskilled customer service rep can leave a lasting impression. Surveys will help narrow down on these factors. 

They allow you to identify unhappy customer groups and identify micro- experiences that contribute to it. With those insights, you’ll be able to make changes that have a positive impact on your business.

The benefits of asking for feedback via customer satisfaction surveys include:

• They give you insights on how to improve your product or service.
• They influence customer retention .
• You can identify happy customers which can be turned into brand advocates.
• They help you get data for significant business decisions and overall customer experience improvement.

While we’re on the subject of customer satisfaction surveys, it’s important to also give satisfaction surveys to employees. The better their job satisfaction , the better an organization will perform over time. Take it just as seriously as customer satisfaction.

Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

There are many types of surveys . The ones focused on customer satisfaction also have their own classification. They can also be delivered to respondents in many ways such as emails, website popups , etc.

A powerful use of customer satisfaction surveys is in finding customer satisfaction scores, identifying cohorts based on these scores, and measuring changes over time. This will determine if you need to invest heavily in improving their overall experience. 

Generally, satisfaction surveys range from 5 to 10 questions and it’s important to consider the following metrics.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)

CSAT is the most popular and straightforward customer satisfaction survey methodology. The questions here may be binary-scale (yes or no, happy to sad, etc.) or ordinal from 1 to 10.

With quick-to-answer and straightforward questions involved, you can get a higher response rate. If you’re tracking the number over time and suddenly get a lower score, it may be indicative of an issue that needs immediate attention.

A simplified version of the CSAT is an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey which seeks to measure customer loyalty. Here, you ask a scaled question for customers to rate how likely they are to recommend your brand.

Also, you can use the CSAT as transactional surveys : Send them at crucial moments of a customer journey to understand the interaction. For example, you can send it after a customer has completed onboarding, purchased your product, or talked to your customer support team to evaluate the experience.

CES (Customer Effort Score)

CES is a metric to measure the effort a customer used to find information, get or use your product/service, receive the answer to their question, etc.

Usually scored on a numeric scale, CES helps improve issues that may frustrate customers the most.

Here you ask customers to respond to a statement with a 1-5 rating, where one is for “strongly disagree,” and five is for “strongly agree.” Customer Effort Score surveys can be used in a variety of situations such as usability testing and product research.

While quantitative “ Customer Effort Score Survey ” metrics reveal clear verdict on whether current experiences align with expectations, qualitative insights illuminate complex emotional dynamics that numbers alone fail to expose.

Though “Customer Effort Score Surveys” efficiently gauge precise satisfaction levels, open-ended discourse with participants before and after identifies friction points that statistical models overlook by themselves.

Just as composite research blending quantitative and qualitative techniques grants multidimensional perspective, “Customer Effort Score Surveys” followed by discussions unlock deeper empathy guiding strategic prioritization beyond data-driven deductions.

Customer satisfaction survey question types

All question types have both pros and cons. Your task here is to design a question so it’s easy to answer and provides you with precise feedback.

Here are four types of questions to ask in surveys.

1) Multi-choice questions.

These questions provide a set number of answer options (more than two) for a respondent to choose from. Focus on questions you believe have significant merit for further analysis. Keep your business goals in mind and consider what you’ll do with the data.

Multi-choice questions work well when you need to collect the information that would help you segment an audience: their geolocation, demographics, interests, etc. With that information, you can create cohorts and compare CES or CSAT across customer groups and make changes accordingly.

Multiple-choice questions include rating scale questions (also known as ordinal questions), binary scale questions, nominal questions, and semantic differential questions.

All these questions are also known as close ended , as they ask users to choose from a distinct set of particular responses.

They’re useful because it doesn’t require much effort to answer. You’re more likely to get a response here than, for example, from open-ended questions where users need to consider the question and their answers thoughtfully.

2) Binary scale questions.

It’s a type of multiple-choice question where you give respondents two options to choose from: yes or no, happy or sad, good or bad, etc. They are also known as dichotomous , providing a simple binary distinction.

The benefit of dichotomous questions is their simplicity. Users are more likely to answer them because it won’t take much time or effort to choose between the options.

• Did our product meet your expectations?
• Do you find this article useful?
• Was your experience at the website satisfying?

3) Open-ended questions.

These questions allow customers to provide you with an in-depth and original response rather than a short “yes” or “no.” You get to see things from the perspective of a respondent.

The challenge here:

Open-ended questions are more time- and resource-intensive to analyze. Customers write in their own words, can express their thoughts haphazardly, and you may get lost in their critical essays .

Examples of open-ended questions:

• What were the main reasons you chose us?
• What is the most significant feature of our product for you?
• What could we do to improve your experience with our service?

The best methods to analyze open-ended questions are spreadsheets, graphs , and word clouds.

4) Likert scale questions.

These are a powerful way to understand a customer’s experience and satisfaction with your brand. Likert scale questions are ordinal ones, but they’re worth an individual mention. 

They help evaluate how users feel about something and are a 5- or 7-point scale ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree to find out what people think of certain things.

Your scale can measure variations such as quality, likelihood, frequency, importance, etc. Just determine what you need customers to measure and design a Likert scale accordingly.

How to Design a Customer Satisfaction Survey

According to studies , 42% of companies don’t survey their customers. But those who do can go wrong in many places when designing and delivering customer satisfaction surveys.

The wrong format, questions, and delivery place/time can put a crimp in getting an accurate picture of your customer experience.

How do you avoid that?

Choose the right questions and consider their quality.

Each question should relate to the audience and their particular experience so they can give you relevant information. Strike a balance between going too broad and too specific; otherwise, you won’t get enough meaningful data to analyze.

When you keep the questions clear and the answer choices specific, respondents won’t get distracted from your survey and will be more likely to complete it.

Also, avoid asking questions that are too personal such as gender, age, or income unless you can justify it. Or, at least, make them optional to answer. As a rule, customers are hesitant to give out personal data.

Also, each question should meet your brand’s vibe. Creating a unique brand voice is like painting the personality of your company, guiding the vibe for all your messages. Customers love when your business speaks to them in a consistent and clear way. Why does it matter? Because it makes them feel valued and respected, resulting in happier clients and lots of positive feedback.

Limit survey questions and answer options

52% of respondents won’t spend more than three minutes on a survey so organize questions accordingly. It’s better to get limited results from a short survey rather than no results from a long one.

Offer up to five questions and answer choices but try not to go beyond ten. If it’s not a rating scale then don’t use more than 5 – 7 answer options. Finally, avoid asking survey respondents to calculate something. For example, a question like, “estimate your chances to come back to our website as a percentage” is likely to be skipped.

Avoid vague language and professional jargon.

Write questions and answer choices in the most precise language possible. For example, ratings such as “Great!” or “Excellent!” are indefinable. What does “excellent” mean, and for whom? Consider something more definite and based on your customer experience: “very delighted!” or “Not delighted at all” are good alternatives to try.

Also, speak the language your customers use. They may not understand your professional abbreviations or jargon in questions unless they are from the same industry.

Finally, consider the readability of your customer satisfaction survey questions. Check spelling and grammar, or you risk losing brand credibility.

Use online editing tools or at least read your text out loud before sending it to customers.

Deliver surveys in the right place and time.

Surveys are most effective right after a customer’s experience. Do your best to send them after a customer performed a significant action and consider limiting the amount of time respondents have to answer the questions.

Also, never hassle customers for not completing your survey. You may remind them once or twice, but don’t make it a habit.

Tips for Analyzing Customer Satisfaction Survey Results

Once you’ve gathered the answers, it’s time to analyze the results of your customer satisfaction survey. Most managers have no idea how to do that right.

They haven’t prioritized three or four key metrics that drive their business. Attempting to monitor and improve everything at once wastes time and takes energy away from what does matter.

Get clear about your metrics —preferably 3 to 4 —and create a data analysis plan on how you’ll organize and “read” the survey data. You’ll need to cross-tabulate, filter, and crunch the numbers to draw conclusions.

The method you use to analyze your data isn’t as important as using the same method over time. That way, you can be sure of comparing relevant data.

Think of a visual presentation for survey results: Make a flyer , a graph, a chart, or an infographic. It helps to compare the latest results with those of past data and think of the further steps to take for positive changes.

Customer satisfaction surveys allow you to understand your target audience and their needs better which will help you improve your business in many ways. Yes, these surveys can come in many forms and measure different criteria.

Your task is to prioritize your business metrics and use the corresponding research questions in surveys to find insights for improvements.

Start now, listen to your customers, draw conclusions — and business benefits won’t take long to come.

Lesley Vos is a professional copywriter and guest contributor, currently blogging at Bid4Papers.com . Specializing in data research, web text writing, and content promotion, she is in love with words, non-fiction literature, and jazz. Visit her Twitter @LesleyVos to say hi and see more works.

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15 Customer Experience Survey Best Practices For Collecting Valuable Feedback

11 min read

When it comes to customer experience survey best practices you have to consider the timing, placement, wording, and the right audience segments, among other things.

In this article, we’ll share 15 of our survey best practices to help you factor in the aforementioned and make the most of customer feedback .

• A customer experience survey is a questionnaire designed to help a business capture customers’ thoughts and feelings about a product.
• Customer experience surveys help you make data-informed decisions, identify areas for improvement, and eventually increase customer retention.

15 Customer experience survey best practices:

• Replace long-form surveys with microsurveys to avoid fatigue.
• Use different types of surveys in different contexts. The most common customer experience surveys include NPS , CES , and CSAT.
• Collect both quantitative and qualitative customer insights .
• Trigger customer satisfaction survey questions contextually using segmentation .
• Incorporate both active and passive surveys for two-way feedback collection.
• Reward survey respondents for detailed and lengthy surveys.
• Avoid biased questions in your customer satisfaction survey.
• Personalize your survey by adding photos and micro-videos to it.
• Include a progress bar for higher survey response rates.
• Distribute the surveys via multiple channels such as email, chatbot , in-app, and social media.
• Leverage AI to generate simple and concise microcopy for your surveys.
• Make the survey more relevant to different target audiences with localization .
• Use slideouts and banners to pre-notify your customers before sending lengthy forms.
• A/B different iterations of your survey to find the one that gets the most responses.
• Follow up on customer feedback and close the loop.
• Userpilot can help you build surveys (from scratch or using templates), trigger surveys based on user activity, and tag survey responses to identify patterns. Book a demo to learn more today!

What is a customer experience survey?

A customer experience survey is a method of uncovering customer sentiments about their interactions with your brand across different touchpoints of the user journey.

What are the benefits of running customer experience surveys?

Below are some advantages of conducting customer experience surveys:

• Inform product decisions: Surveys help you understand customer expectations. This is vital because it means your product development /improvement efforts will be based on precise data, not assumptions.
• Identify areas for improvements: Contextual surveys are great for spotting friction in your product. A quick CES or CSAT survey after a customer interacts with specific aspects of your product can reveal the friction points.
• Increase customer and client retention rates: Collecting and implementing feedback tells customers that you care about their experience and opinions about your brand and they will have more reason to stick with your brand . Not to mention the fact that your users will be excited about sharing feedback next time, knowing you’ll implement—or at least—consider their thoughts.

15 customer experience survey best practices for collecting insightful feedback

Anyone can create CX surveys, but it doesn’t guarantee high response rates and accurate answers. Triggering your survey at the wrong time, making it too long/short, or sending it to the wrong audience will skew your results.

Here are some best practices to follow if you want to save time and maximize customer feedback.

Replace long-form surveys with microsurveys

Too many questions in one survey will result in bad-quality data. Customers either get tired and stop answering or rush to complete the survey, inevitably providing incomplete/inaccurate answers.

So, keep your surveys short and focused on one goal. It’s always better to do a few microsurveys at small intervals than a long, dreadful one with never-ending questions.

Use different types of surveys across the customer journey

A user’s context and experiences vary as they move down the customer journey, so it makes sense to implement different survey types. Let’s consider some:

NPS surveys to measure customer loyalty

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys allow your company to measure loyalty in a given period.

It involves using an 11-point scale (0-10) to ask customers about the likelihood of recommending you to friends and colleagues. High NPS scores show customers are happy with your brand and vice versa.

You can launch NPS after customers complete the onboarding process , make a transaction, or after any other meaningful interaction.

NPS surveys can also be relational and be sent to customers sporadically to keep tabs on product health. But be careful to send your NPS surveys sparingly. 2-4 times a year is ideal; anything more than that and you risk survey fatigue .

Customer effort score surveys for identifying friction points

The customer effort score (CES) survey measures the perceived effort of a user when interacting with your product.

It’s a no-brainer that customer motivation reduces when they exert much effort to use a tool. The problem is you may not realize where users are struggling as you are an expert at using your own product. A quick CES survey can reveal touchpoints that require a lot of cognitive load on the user’s part.

You can launch a CES survey after a customer engages with a new feature for the first time, completes an in-app guide, and pretty much at every important touchpoint.

Customer satisfaction score surveys for gauging CX at different touchpoints

Conducting customer satisfaction surveys help you gauge satisfaction on a granular level and understand how each specific interaction makes users feel.

You can trigger this survey type at almost every customer touchpoint—post onboarding, after using a feature for the first time, after account renewal, etc.

Your CSAT surveys can also follow interactions with a customer service representative. Measuring customer satisfaction in this context will help you instantly understand how well your support team is performing, and you can address any dissatisfaction before it escalates.

For example, consider the survey below. You could reach out to customers that respond with a negative emoji, try to know why they’re dissatisfied , and offer immediate solutions.

Collect both quantitative and qualitative customer insights

You need both for a holistic view of the customer experience.

Quantitative surveys are easy to fill, so many customers will respond. This quick data will show you facts about your company and customer base at a glance. Quantitative insights are typically collected using different close-ended questions, multiple-choice questions, the Likert scale, etc.

Qualitative surveys use open-ended questions to allow customers to express themselves. The collected data is more actionable and tells you what exactly you can do to improve the customer experience.

Trigger customer satisfaction surveys contextually using segmentation

Survey timing and placement matters. You don’t want to ask users questions about aspects of your tool they don’t use and know nothing about.

Imagine signing up for a free trial of a tool and a few days in, the company sends you a survey asking for feedback on a paid feature. How confusing and unprofessional, right?

How do you avoid these mistakes? The answer is simple – with user segmentation .

With the right software, you can properly segment your users based on the plan, NPS score, and product usage and ensure you’re sending surveys to the right cohort at the perfect time.

Incorporate both proactive and reactive surveys

Proactive surveys are company initiated. It’s you taking surveys to the customers and asking for feedback. On the other hand, reactive surveys are passive always-on widgets that allow users to submit feedback when they want to.

Proactive surveys are good for capturing valuable real-time feedback and are especially useful when you want to act on the data immediately.

Use reactive surveys to show customers that you’re always open to feedback. Just knowing they can launch your app at any time and submit feedback helps to build trust between you and the customer.

Personalize your survey by adding photos and micro-videos to it

People relate to other people, not companies. That’s why it’s important to give your brand a personality and humanize it.

Customers will be extra motivated to share thoughtful responses when they see a picture or micro-video of someone from your company.

And this isn’t hard to implement. Userpilot allows you to easily add pictures and videos when building in-app surveys on top of modals.

Leverage AI to generate simple and concise microcopy

A good microcopy is short, on point, and has a vocabulary clear of technical jargon or complex terminology. But we all know how hard and time-consuming it can get trying to fit your survey questions into a microcopy that makes sense.

Artificial intelligence can help. With the right AI writing tool, you can:

• Paraphrase questions for better flow and clarity.
• Write short introductions outlining the purpose of your surveys.
• Increase/reduce text length with just a button click.

Avoid biased questions in your customer satisfaction survey

One mistake people often make is writing survey questions that directly or indirectly influence specific answers. Your results will be skewed, and your survey goals will be defeated.

Here are the types of survey questions you want to avoid:

• Leading questions: These questions are written in a way that guides respondents to a particular answer. The phrasings imply there’s a correct answer, so respondents often don’t try to think of anything contrary. Leading questions can sometimes be coercive, e.g., “Our customer service team treats you right, don’t they?”
• Loaded questions: This is similar to leading questions, but takes a more assumptive and accusatory approach. Example: “As a product manager, will you use this tool to improve your onboarding completion rates?”
• Double-barrelled questions: These surveys ask two questions at once and provide room for only one answer. Example: “How satisfied are you with our XYZ feature and your latest interaction with the support team?” It might seem like two harmless questions, and respondents could just provide an answer for both. But customers may have different opinions about the new feature and their support interaction, so they’ll be unsure which response to give.

Pre-notify your customers before sending lengthy forms

We mentioned earlier how using a progress bar when sending long surveys is essential. Another strategy you can use is pre-notifying respondents about your survey length.

Asking for consent prepares the customer’s mind for your survey. It also ensures a frictionless experience because they already have an idea of what to expect before clicking.

You can use website banners or slideouts to send your notification.

Reward survey respondents for more extensive feedback

It’s always a good idea to cheer your customers up and show you appreciate their contributions with a small gift.

The rewards you give don’t have to come at an additional cost for yourself. Typical examples of SaaS include access to premium features and discounts.

Be cautious with rewards though, only offer them when asking for detailed feedback from loyal customers. Otherwise, respondents will become incentive-driven and just answer surveys to get something in return and not out of a genuine desire to help.

Include a progress bar for higher survey response rates

Sometimes you can’t avoid your surveys getting long because of the kind of data you need to collect. This is where progress bars come in.

Adding a progress bar to your surveys serves as a gamification element that pushes users to complete the process—just seeing that you have only a few steps left motivates you to want to finish what you started.

Distribute the surveys via multiple channels

In-app surveys are highly effective but don’t limit yourself. Embrace a multichannel approach – meet customers where they are and assess their experience with your brand at other touchpoints .

You’d be amazed how feedback gotten from different channels can lead to significant customer experience improvements.

For instance, simple surveys triggered via social media/website chatbots can uncover insights to enable you to optimize your social media page/website and convert more visitors.

Wise sends NPS surveys through email . This kind of survey will have a good response rate because it’s unobtrusive and triggered immediately after a key interaction.

Make the survey more relevant to different target audiences with localization

Localization is about adapting to the culture and language of customers in different target markets. In this particular context, it refers to translating surveys into your respondent’s native language.

Implementing this will help you break linguistic and cultural boundaries. It’s also a great example of personalization and inclusive design. Your customers will appreciate you going the extra mile and will be more likely to provide thoughtful and detailed feedback.

A/B test different iterations of your survey

A/B testing helps you identify surveys that resonate best with your audience and elicit the most responses.

• Question types
• The wording of the question
• Any other variations you can think of

Note the differences and stick to the version your customers like the most.

Follow up on customer feedback and close the loop

Closing the feedback loop with customers lets them know you didn’t just gather their opinions for the sake of it. And they’ll be more willing to provide feedback next time.

So how do you close the feedback loop?

• Collect more details where necessary.
• Apologize if needed and let them know you’re working on the problem.
• Implement solutions and inform users of changes you’ve made.

How Userpilot can help you Improve customer experience

Customer success and product teams use our platform to create engaging customer surveys, track the results, and find insights to improve CX.

Here are three main ways Userpilot can help:

Customize survey templates or build from scratch – all without coding!

Don’t have time to think about every aspect of your survey? Userpilot has predefined forms you can use to make surveys in seconds.

You can also create from scratch with an easy-to-use visual editor.

Trigger user surveys at relevant milestones with custom events

An event is an action or series of actions a user takes while engaging with your product.

Think of them as goals or milestones—for example, reaching the activation point is a common milestone in SaaS. But before the user gets there, they’ll have to engage with multiple features and perform some actions.

You can use Userpilot’s custom events feature to define when a user reaches a specific milestone. With this data, you can trigger a survey when an event happens (highly contextual feedback can be collected this way).

Tag NPS survey responses to identify patterns and trends

Many companies struggle to analyze and make sense of survey responses. Userpilot’s tagging feature solves this problem.

You can tag qualitative NPS responses to instantly see the number of people mentioning a particular topic. This makes it easier to spot patterns correlating with low or high satisfaction scores.

Customer surveys are a powerful tool to help you learn about customer experience and take proactive steps to improve your products and services.

Making surveys a regular practice and always closing the feedback loop will ensure users feel more comfortable with your brand, driving retention and loyalty.

Ready to begin implementing the customer experience survey best practices discussed in this article? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how to build surveys in minutes without coding.

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Unlocking customer insights: maximizing surveys for actionable feedback

Last updated

27 June 2023

Reviewed by

Tanya Williams

The more you understand your customers, the better you can create products that meet their needs, market to them, identify shifts in buyer behavior, gain competitive intelligence, and thus increase your chances for success.

• Say hello to customer surveys

When it comes to understanding your customers, there is barely anything more effective than customer surveys. Customer surveys are a landmark tool for candid conversations with the consumer and the key to evaluating feelings and behavior.

Using customer surveys, you can identify growth opportunities, capitalize on strengths, and cultivate a more positive relationship with your customers.

Read our detailed guide on customer surveys to help you maximize them to get actionable feedback that will drive growth in your business.

• What is a customer survey?

A customer survey is an instrument for collecting consumer feedback about your products or services. It gives you insight into the degree to which your solution meets the needs of your consumers.

Customer surveys measure customer engagement and satisfaction, evaluate expectations, and perform market research . The responses you get will help you understand why some customers stay while others leave.

Customer surveys may take several forms, including:

Paper-based documents

In-person surveys

Online surveys

Telephone surveys

Consistently collecting and acting on this feedback will help your company:

Offer better customer experiences

Improve products or services

Strengthen your brand image

At least 80% of the companies that see year-over-year growth use customer surveys to collect customer experience data.

Different types of customer survey

Four significant types of customer surveys can help you understand the voice of the customer (VoC) and follow the customer journey for real-world insights and data-driven decisions:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) : This calculates the likelihood that a customer will recommend your brand, product, or service to their colleagues or friends on a scale of 0–10

Customer effort score (CES) : This is a type of customer survey that measures how easy it is for your customers to use a product or service, or to get the customer support they need to fix a problem—usually on a scale from "very easy" to "very difficult"

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) : This is a simple but valuable assessment of customers' satisfaction with your brand, products, or services on a scale of 1–10. CSAT ratings are easy to calculate for an immediate understanding of overall customer satisfaction or the level of satisfaction with a product, service, experience, or a particular feature of any of these.

Churn survey: This is a survey that seeks to understand why a customer is discontinuing the use of your service or product. It can highlight areas you need to improve to prevent future churn.

• Benefits of customer surveys

Take a look at our top reasons why you should consider customer surveys for your business:

Gather input for product development

If your business plans to build a new product, use customer surveys to gather input from your client base. Seeking customer feedback in the product-development stage gives you insight into their needs and preferences. It is also an opportunity to rope in ambassadors for the product.

Avoid mistakes

Even for established and successful brands, product development is no mean feat. There are so many moving parts (including software and production), increasing the chances of error. In addition, even after the product launch , there are other aspects, such as delivery and customer support, that you need to carefully monitor.

Asking questions to your customers through surveys will help uncover blind spots and fix them in a timely fashion.

Understand how customers perceive your business

No two customers are the same. However, when you ask them a range of open-ended and specific questions, you can get a detailed picture of how negatively or positively clients perceive their interactions with your brand.

Identify patterns

After a series of customer surveys (followed by careful analysis of the results), you should be able to identify patterns and commonalities. Use these patterns as a framework for decision-making in your business.

Determine priorities

Customer surveys help you determine what comes first, especially when you have budgetary constraints. Feedback from customer surveys enables you to shift your business priorities, depending on the needs and preferences of the consumer.

For instance, if a certain segment of your business receives a consistently low score, there is an urgent need for improvement. On the other hand, highly rated areas warrant continued investment.

Evaluate how changes are received

After implementing changes (especially based on previous customer feedback), a customer survey will help determine whether the change resulted in a more negative or positive experience.

Retain customers

Asking customers for feedback about your products and services shows them they matter to you. It makes them feel even more valued when you implement the feedback quickly. This demonstrates your commitment to them, increasing retention.

• Planning and distributing customer surveys

Contrary to popular opinion, a great customer survey does not generate a huge number of responses. A great customer survey provides actionable feedback to improve your products for your target customers.

The following steps will help you plan and design a great customer survey that will help you gather actionable feedback for your business.

1. Define research objectives

Similar to the first step of all other campaigns and initiatives you undertake within your business, you need a clear-cut goal before conducting a survey.

However, defining (and refining) your survey objectives isn’t as simple as saying you want to “know more about your customers” or “enhance your customer service.”

Using such vague objectives will, ultimately, result in vague conclusions once you have gathered information from your customers. When developing survey objectives, consider the following questions to help you narrow your focus:

What do you want to learn?

Whom will you ask?

What are you going to do with the information you collect?

A few examples of good customer survey objectives include:

To get feedback from online customers to determine whether the checkout process is streamlined or not

To identify the customers’ needs you are not meeting, to improve the overall customer service

 To determine the aspects of your service customers find most valuable

The objective of your survey can also be to use it as a benchmark survey to compare against future surveys, or after you have implemented changes based on previous feedback.

2. Choose the right survey method

Surveying your customers can be done in several ways using a variety of resources and techniques. The survey method you choose depends on several factors, including:

Customers' comfort level

The type of information you want to gather

To choose the right survey method, start by determining how your customers can best communicate their thoughts. For example, if you want to assess customer loyalty and advocacy, a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey will be your best bet. 

Consider a post-purchase survey (PPS) if you want to learn more about your customers' buying journey or a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey if you are a service-based business.

3. Developing the survey questions

Now you know what information you’re looking for and have identified a suitable survey method, it is time to develop the survey questions. Start by determining whether your respondents can easily narrow down responses with multiple-choice questions or whether they need open fields to provide detailed feedback.

As a rule of thumb, when developing survey questions, have concrete, measurable, and achievable goals in mind. Each question you include must have a well-defined purpose and a strong case for being included. Also, consider diversifying question types (e.g., include both open-ended and closed-ended questions).

• Interpreting survey results

Accurate interpretation of the survey data is critical. What your respondents have to say will be valuable only if you correctly analyze the survey results.

While accurate data interpretation can be quite taxing on your company (requiring significant effort, resources, and cutting-edge technology), the payoff comes when you’re finally able to shift business goals/priorities, delight your customers, and fix problems based on the insights you gain from the survey.

Take a look at the following steps for interpreting survey data .

Analyze the survey results

When you have gathered all the data you need, start analyzing the responses while keeping in mind the research objectives of the survey. Choose your analysis method according to your questions and the survey method you use. 

Analyzing quantitative data (from closed-ended questions)

Closed-ended questions give you quantifiable data (i.e., numerical data). Customers have to answer these questions in a specific way, such as selecting a 1–5 rating, giving a 'yes' or 'no' answer, or choosing from a range of options.

You can analyze this data with charts, comparison tables, or graphs to get actionable feedback. Programs like Google Sheets and Excel are excellent for quantifiable data, allowing you to easily cross-tabulate for subgroups, compare and filter data, calculate percentages, and more.

Online survey tools such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey have in-house graphs and charts, which make analyzing surveys even easier. Analyzing the feedback from closed-ended questions helps measure and compare how users feel or think about your service or product.

Analyzing qualitative data (from open-ended questions)

Open-ended questions give you qualitative data (i.e., descriptive, word-based data). Respondents can answer in any way they choose, in their own words.

While these questions give you fine-grained detail and super insightful customer feedback, they take more work to analyze. Traditionally, you had to read through all open-ended survey responses and hand-annotate, which was tedious and could lead to inaccuracies.

Fortunately, with advances in artificial intelligence (AI), there are text-analysis tools (such as MonkeyLearn, Microsoft Azure, Lexalytics, Amazon Comprehend, and IBM Watson) that automate the process of analyzing the open-ended responses in your customer surveys for immediate results and powerful insights.

If you realize you have not received the feedback you were looking for, the analysis step is the perfect opportunity to go back to the drawing board and optimize your survey for your research objectives.

Identifying trends and patterns

Carefully examine the analyzed data to identify trends, patterns, or behavior. If you have any past data, use it to understand how things have changed and find explanations for this using the insights you have gained.

Also, study your current data and compare it to past industry insights to help you gather fresh ideas for the future or predict future trends.

Drawing conclusions from survey results

After analyzing data and discovering trends and patterns, it’s time to draw your conclusions. Think about the story your data tells, what you have learned, and what questions you now have. At the very least, your conclusion and findings should highlight areas of strength and performance challenges, and make appropriate recommendations.

• Using survey results for business strategy

There are several ways you can use the results from your customer survey in your business strategy. These include:

Improving products and services

The outcome of your customer surveys will help you determine which aspects of your products and services need improvement. For example, if you find out customers are unhappy with a product feature, the design team can enhance it based on the feedback.

Further, you can track this product feature metric in your subsequent surveys to gather customers' sentiments about the feature after the changes.

Identifying new business opportunities

Customer survey results give you actionable feedback on how your brand can best serve customer needs. This could mean offering new services or product lines that your survey shows are in high demand.

A new service or product you build in response to customer feedback in the survey increases chances of success, improves customer loyalty , and encourages repeat business.

Enhancing customer experience

Customer survey results will help you find out how well your products meet customers' needs or how satisfied they are with the different aspects of your service. This feedback highlights possible bottlenecks you may not have been aware of and guides you on the best course of action to maximize customer satisfaction .

• Customer survey best practices

Take a look at the following top tips for getting the most out of your customer surveys.

Keep the survey short and focused

Keep your customer surveys brief and concise if you want a high response rate. The length of the survey has an inverse correlation with the survey completion rate.

For optimal results, aim for a survey where customers will answer fewer than ten questions in under five minutes.

Offer incentives to encourage participation

Consider giving your customers incentives to encourage them to take the survey. These incentives may be monetary rewards (e.g., gift cards, cash, coupons) or physical gifts (like free coffee mugs or notebooks). Some brands tend to give charitable donations in exchange for survey responses which is a powerful way to appeal to customers with strong charitable inclinations.

Also, ensure you strike a balance between incentivizing customers enough that they are willing to take your surveys without giving away the farm.

Guarantee respondents' anonymity and privacy

Including intrusive personal questions in your survey may put off respondents. As a rule, don’t ask intrusive demographic questions such as income, gender, or age without making the responses optional.

Also, reassure respondents that they will remain anonymous and that their data is private and will be used solely for the purposes of the survey.

Use clear, concise language

Vague, leading, and complex questions ruin the experience for your customers and result in unreliable responses. Write clear, easy-to-understand customer survey questions to get reliable and helpful responses.

This isn’t about reducing the word count. It’s about cutting out any unnecessary phrases. You also need to avoid asking more than one thing in a single question.

Test and refine survey questions

Before deploying your survey, test it with your target audience. Instead of sending it to every customer at once, send it to a smaller target group and see what results you get.

Follow up with these customers and ask for their input on improving the survey experience. When you are confident you have created an effective survey, you can send it to your client base.

• Challenges and limitations of customer surveys

While there are a lot of advantages to using customer surveys, this technique also comes with its own set of challenges. Let’s take a look at the main ones:

The potential for bias in survey results

One of the key challenges with customer surveys is data interpretation bias. Usually, this occurs when you have a hypothesis or theory in mind and are keen on discovering data patterns that support it while overlooking those that do not.

Since this pitfall results from subjective desires, you can overcome it by analyzing data with a team of objective members. Another way of overcoming bias is by resisting the temptation of drawing conclusions before data exploration is complete.

Limitations of sample size and representation

Another common problem with customer surveys is using a small sample size or under-representing your client base. The bigger the sample size , the more accurate and reliable the results.

In addition, if you only survey your most loyal customers, you will likely get inaccurate findings. Always ensure your data pool is big enough and your whole clientele is adequately represented before you begin to draw insights upon which to base your findings.

Respondent fatigue and low response rates

However loyal your customers are, they won't sit through a 30-minute customer survey. Others may be unable to participate, and skeptical customers may blatantly refuse. To overcome this challenge, improve your customer survey experience by keeping your surveys brief and always incentivize when you can.

• Groundbreaking customer survey examples

Below are some excellent real-world customer survey examples to inspire you to use customer survey data to enhance customer experience.

Salesforce collaborates with clients to innovate

Salesforce built the IdeaExchange to collect and manage suggestions from customers about new features. After customers submit their ideas, they can search for them and vote on the features they want the company to adopt.

Once an idea gets 2,500 points (or 250 votes), it is reviewed by the product development team for consideration.

Udemy learns from their students

Udemy is a global online learning platform that offers streamable online courses. The dynamic customer demographic for Udemy requires different marketing strategies tailored to each location to achieve the best outcome.

According to Udemy, “Customer research helps them stay proactive and continue to innovate with user feedback in mind.”

Simple survey questions such as, "How did you come to find out about Udemy?" allow them to determine which advertising channels work for them and which do not.

Also, Udemy relies on customer feedback to explore the performance of its machine learning-based auto-captioning. Using metrics like rating surveys or satisfaction scores, Udemy can determine whether they need to improve auto-captioning.

Uber leverages the voice of the customer to enhance user experience

The reason behind Uber's success is not difficult to guess. Uber's secret sauce for outstanding customer service is listening to their customers. Uber uses real-time feedback about customer experience to correct issues, big or small, while ensuring only the best drivers are allowed on the road.

After a ride, an in-app survey pops up on the customer's screen, asking the customer about their riding experience, then seeks ways to enhance satisfaction.

Hyatt used customer feedback to surpass the average industry score of 75 in customer satisfaction

Hyatt has become a household name in the hospitality sector, thanks to the brand's willingness to listen to and act upon the concerns of their customers. 

The hotel chain collects customer feedback through multiple channels and then seeks to resolve complaints and improve customers' experience in every way possible. Their primary channels for collecting customer feedback are social media (Instagram and Twitter) and website surveys.

Netflix uses feedback to offer movie recommendations to customers

Netflix provides a simple, easy-to-navigate customer survey with multiple-choice and long-form response options. Using the insight from customer feedback, Netflix perfects customer experience.

The brand creates personalized experiences for its subscribers and goes as far as giving movie recommendations that resonate with customers’ interests and preferences .

Amazon has used customer feedback to become a trendsetter in the ecommerce sector

Everyone knows Amazon is a powerhouse when it comes to delivering great products and unforgettable experiences. Behind this success lies customer feedback.

Amazon continuously conducts surveys to gather feedback that helps improve customer experience. For example, if you contact Amazon's customer support team, Amazon sends you a survey to help them determine whether your issue has been resolved and what the company can do to improve customer experience.

• Future trends in customer surveys

The impact of technology on customer surveys

In a fast-paced tech world, customers expect you to listen and take action immediately when they leave feedback. It is the only way to prevent your customers from walking out the door; you can no longer rely on annual or bi-annual survey data.

You can leverage cutting-edge tech solutions to meet the demands of your customers. These allow you to quickly measure customer experience (CX) at each touchpoint along the customer journey, analyze the results in real time, and resolve problems at supersonic speeds.

The potential for personalized surveys 

It's a tough time to be involved in customer experience as expectations are rising while trust and engagement levels are declining. At such a time, your customers want more personalization, empathy, and human interactions, or they will bail out.

That's why you need to build personalized experiences when asking your customers for feedback. For instance, after rolling out a new product feature, ask users questions about their experience—based on their role, industry, age, location, etc.

Collecting this segmented feedback allows you to pinpoint where to make improvements for customers with different needs. You can adopt this trend if you want to increase the response rate and get the specific feedback you need to drive user-based decisions and product changes.

The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning

The popularity of communicating with customers via different channels, including chatbots, live chat, customer support teams, and social media, has led to using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help businesses collect and analyze customer feedback .

AI and ML enable you to capture feedback at critical customer journey touchpoints, like when they land on or leave your website, complete an onboarding process, or when they speak to a customer service agent.

While AI helps you to communicate with users and capture the fine-grain details of their experiences, it should not fully replace human interactions and support.

Collecting customer feedback is akin to tapping a gold mine of invaluable information—for winning customers' hearts and loyalty. However, your skills in collecting and analyzing data determine the quality of insights and how helpful they are in identifying problems and enhancing products and services.

With careful planning, a good survey format, and objective analysis of the results, you can garner enough information to improve your services, products, and overall customer experience —leading to higher revenue and more loyal customers.

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• Methods for creating a customer survey questionnaire

• Customer Experience

If you want to future-proof your company, your goal should be to establish customer experience management in your company.

Customer surveys are a key element in this process, enabling you to learn more about customer satisfaction in your company.

Designing, conducting and evaluating these surveys in such a way that they produce meaningful results is not as easy as you might think.

Therefore, in this article you will find the most important methods and practical tips to develop an optimal approach for conducting customer surveys.

🎯 The most important summarized:

• Before creating the questionnaire, consider what stage of the customer lifecycle your survey participants are in, what sample size makes sense, what topic area your survey will cover, what your goal is, and how often you want to survey your customers.
• The best way to create a good questionnaire is: keep it short. The shorter the survey, the more participants will finish it.
• The order of questions plays a crucial role in the quality of your results. The most important principle: Your method of sorting the questions is based solely on the participants.
• Once the customer survey is complete, you should conduct a pre-test beforehand. This will give you information about whether there are any content-related or technical errors in your survey.

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Table of contents

Preliminary considerations for creating a customer survey

A methodical approach to a customer survey is characterized not only by the correct structure of the questionnaire, but also by structured advance planning.

So before you start actually creating your questionnaire, think carefully about the following topics to determine important key points of your survey:

• What stage of the customer lifecycle are your survey respondents in? You will deal differently with customers who are in the initiation phase than with customers who are in the active product use phase, for example. Think about what you want to find out and which customer group you want to survey.
• Consider what sample size makes sense, because you will rarely conduct a full survey.
• What is the subject area of your survey? Will you conduct a multidimensional customer survey, i.e. deal with several topics or only with one survey topic? 
• What is the goal of your survey? What do you want to investigate, why do you want to investigate it?
• What is the planned frequency? How often will you conduct your survey? Once? At regular intervals? After improvements have been made?

If you’re unsure about any of these points and need tips and methods to go along with them, download our customer survey design manual.

This blog post is an excerpt from the manual, which mainly explains how to create the survey. However, in the manual I also explain these preparatory steps in detail. 

But if you are already clear about all these topics, then we can dive straight into the method for creating the questionnaire for your customer survey.

Method for structuring the questionnaire

The best method for creating a good questionnaire is: keep it short.

The shorter the survey, the more participants will finish filling it out.

More important than the number of questions here is how long it actually takes to complete and how tedious it is. This is another reason why there is no golden rule for how many questions is the right amount.

Questions about demographic data

Almost all surveys start with the so-called demographic data. For example, age, gender, place of residence and the like.

Think very carefully about what you need to ask here. Many people like to express their opinions, but don’t want to reveal personal data about themselves.

First and last names can be difficult for some people. The exact age, on the other hand, for others. And when it comes to income, most people’s willingness to provide information reaches its limit.

Therefore, it has proven useful to ask only for the following data:

• Age group (e.g., in four to five groups such as 18-29, 30-49, 50-65, >65)
• Gender (female, male, divers/no specification)
• Country where you spend most of your time

Keep the following in mind when creating the demographic questions:

• Less is more Besides these three questions, you should only ask everything else if you really have a reason to do so. Therefore, ask yourself if the answer to a question will change the results of the survey and if it will have an impact on your analysis. If you can’t answer that with certainty, it’s better to leave the question out in case of doubt.
• Icebreaker From a methodological perspective, demographic data at the beginning of a survey has an added benefit: Respondents are used to answering these questions and find it easy to give the answers. It’s an easy way to get your customers off to a good start with your customer survey.
• The beginning or the end? In rare cases, it may make sense to ask for the demographic data at the end. You do this if the things you asked before are valuable even without that info. Because users may not want to answer the demographic questions.

Open and closed questions

Generally, questions are divided into two types:

• Open questions: These are those in which users freely report – so they usually see a text box in which they type their answer.
• Closed questions: This is where you provide the answer choices. The simplest case: “Do you know our product?” • Yes • No

Deciding for open or closed questions

Think through the following points to help you distinguish between open and closed questions, not just from your gut, but with method:

• Your goal: speed and convenience In general, it is important to know that closed questions are much faster to answer. Closed questions are therefore more convenient for customers. And closed questions are also more convenient for you. Because reading, understanding and structuring the customer’s texts takes a lot of time and effort. Especially with larger samples. With closed questions, on the other hand, you can see the results at a glance.
• I am satisfied with the turnaround time
• I always felt well informed about the processing status
• The communication worked smoothly
• The device arrived well packaged

Finally, you can use a combination of both question types and specify “Other:” as the last answer option, followed by a free text field.

In this way, you give those who did not find themselves in the given answers an opportunity to report their particular case.

Which answers should you make mandatory?

As a company, you naturally want all your questions to be answered. And yet, you should think carefully about which questions you make mandatory. Think about the following points when defining mandatory questions:

• Which questions are so important that the user cannot leave them unanswered?
• Caution: In general, every mandatory question carries the risk that customers will abandon at this point.
• The environment matters: If survey participants only have to answer five questions, your survey can handle more mandatory questions than a survey with 20 questions, for example.
• However, if customers skip a question, it can also mean that they can’t answer a question. Therefore, you should provide a “don’t know,” “unsure,” or “don’t specify” option for such mandatory questions.

Would you like to learn more about customer surveys with easyfeedback?

Method for sorting and ordering the questions in your customer survey

The order of the questions plays a decisive role in the quality of your results. Most important principle: Your method of sorting the questions is based solely on the participants.

For example, if both the marketing and support departments have questions in your survey, you tend to sort the questions into two blocks. This may be a clear structure for you – but probably not for the customer.

Dramaturgy of the questionnaire

A good method is to have some dramaturgy in your survey.

• You start with a few easy questions to warm up. Demographic data, for example, is a good question to ask here. Ideally, these are all closed questions with few possible answers.
• Then you can go into more detail. One or two open questions would be conceivable now, if you have to collect qualitative data. But then there should always be a block of two or three closed questions. That way, the customer has the feeling that he or she is constantly moving forward and is not stuck in one area for too long.
• The most difficult questions are best asked shortly after the halfway point.

Dealing with difficult questions

Tasks can be difficult for two main reasons:

• The users feel that the question is too personal. These can be questions about financial circumstances, for example, but also those about politics, faith or lifestyle habits (diet, sport, drugs, sex).
• The answer is difficult for the customer. This means they have to think about it for a longer time.

It’s best to pose such tasks only after the user has already completed a good part of the survey. Then, for one thing, he is already in the flow. And on the other hand, they are less likely to abandon the survey because they fear that their previous input will have been in vain.

And finally, you’ve already gotten responses to the first half of the survey. Therefore, you should make sure that the absolutely essential questions are asked as early as possible. This way, you can at least partially use the answers of dropouts for evaluation.

Tips for formulating questions in your customer survey

First tip: Do not formulate the questions in the group. Ideally, you should define the goals, target group and procedure together as a team. How this information is then elicited through a survey should be in the hands of a single person.

Usually the others in the team want to see the finished questionnaire again. That’s fine, but it’s best to present the customer survey to everyone together. This gives you the opportunity to explain the method you used and how the structure came about.

Avoid leading questions, formulate clearly

If you are interested in honest answers, you should formulate your questions as neutrally as possible. We rarely do this in everyday life, and sometimes neutral questions sound a bit awkward or awkward. Nevertheless, this is always the best way to go.

Instead of:

You better ask:

And it is also good to be as specific as possible, so that all users understand the same thing and do not interpret the task differently.

Do you just ask:

It may be that one customer thinks of everything he has ever seen on your site. But another one might only think of the (special) offer he just clicked on in the company newsletter and landed on the website through it.

Therefore, such a formulation would be better:

Avoid answering tendencies

The order in which you ask questions matters more than you might think. There are many exciting factors here, known from psychology. Some of them are particularly interesting for creating questionnaires.

Positive / negative influence

Let’s take an example: Your company is known for having an excellent selection, customers praise that over and over again. The service, on the other hand, has been lacking lately.

If you let customers rate the selection first and then the service, the service will perform slightly better than expected. If, instead, you first ask about the service and then about the offer, the offer will score worse.

No one is immune to this, even psychologists who are aware of such influencing factors succumb to it – it’s human.

Therefore, a simple trick is to display such questions in the customer survey in random order. This is called randomization. This way, the response tendencies balance out in total and you get solid results for your evaluation.

The so called anchoring is used more often by sales people: For example, they first name the price of a competitor’s luxury item and only then name the price of their own product – which thus appears more favorable to us humans than if the sellers had only named their price.

In the same way, people tend to make higher estimates when they have read large numbers beforehand. They don’t have to have had anything to do with each other either.

So if you first ask people how many inhabitants Berlin has, their estimates will be higher for the following question about how often Germans go on vacation each year.

So be careful if you ask several numerical questions in a row in your survey. A good method is to separate them by a few other questions without numbers. Or you can use the randomization method again.

Yes-say tendency

The yes-say tendency means that most people tend to answer questions in the affirmative. If you want to counteract this, formulate your questions in such a way that they are more likely to be answered in the negative.

So instead of:

You do this, for example, when you ask for a brief explanation of the answer in the next question. This way you will get more people to provide valuable information here and you can learn more about their customer satisfaction.

Tendency towards the middle

Then there’s the tendency toward the middle. That is, if you give your customers a multi-level answer (such as “very good – good – neutral – bad – very bad”), then many respondents tend to take the middle value.

Tendency towards mildness/harshness

Finally, the tendency towards mildness/harshness: this means that the top and bottom ends of a scale are selected by customers in the survey with above-average frequency.

Depending on the task at hand and the character of the customer, the tendency toward the middle or the tendency toward mildness/harshness may be more pronounced.

There is not much you can do about these tendencies. Make sure that your questions are formulated in an understandable way. That they are neutral and not suggestive. And keep the possible tendencies in mind.

Selecting and presenting question types

When setting up the survey, many CX managers face the challenge of choosing an appropriate question type to best present a question. In the following sections, we’ll cover how best to go about this.

The three most commonly used forms of how you enable responses are:

• Radio buttons

Additionally, there are:

Popup & pulldown menus

Matrices & tables.

• Sort lists or ranked lists

Radio buttons & checkboxes

Radio buttons have the property that only one option can be active at a time. For example, for a question to which the user can only answer yes or no – both are not possible.

In addition, a radio button cannot be reset to its default state – once the user has made his selection, he can only select another radio button in the same answer field, but not nothing.

If a question allows multiple answers to be selected (multiple choice), not just one, then use checkboxes.

Text fields

There’s not much to say about text boxes – just two things:

• The size of the text box implicitly conveys to respondents how much text you expect. If the text box only has room for ten characters, most will give one-syllable answers. And those who want to write more may get annoyed.
• Make sure the text is legible. Set the font size to about 16 point so that anyone on any device can easily see the content.

Too small of a text box or too small of a font in the text box will, sometimes unknowingly, cause stress – and thus worse responses.

Menus are generally only second choice. With menus, respondents in your customer survey have to click more – they have to open the menu and then select content from it. Even more unfavorable: They do not immediately see which answer options are possible.

Rule of thumb:

• If you have fewer than seven answer choices, a column of radio buttons or checkboxes is fine.
• Up to 14 answer choices, two columns will do.
• If there are more choices, consider splitting the question. Or offer a free text field.
• If all this is not possible, then use a menu.

If you have a lot of answer options, it makes sense to opt for the scale method. This allows your customers to give differentiated answers. There are not only yes or no, but also options in between. For example, you specify

Then you have a three-level scale, which is rather unusual. Mostly you work with 5- or 7-level scales, like:

In general, you need to make two main decisions for your customer survey when using scales:

• How many response options do you offer? This is always a trade-off: the fewer, the easier it is to answer. But it may also be that some customers want more levels. And the more levels, the more differentiated the picture you end up with. Therefore, less than five levels are not useful for ratings. Seven levels are also common. However, more than seven levels are rarely seen and won’t help you learn more.
• Should the scale be even or odd? Experts have been arguing about this question for decades. From my point of view, the current state of research is to work with odd scales. This allows customers to give neutral answers. This seems better than forcing them to choose sides in the survey.

Scales that you use to measure agreement with a statement are called Likert scales. For instance:

• rather agree
• partly-partly
• rather does not apply
• does not apply

If you have several questions of the same type that belong together in terms of content, it is best to combine them in a table when creating your customer survey – this is also referred to as a matrix.

This is common, for example, with the Likert scales just mentioned. It could look like this in your survey:

However, if the questions do not belong together in terms of content, you should not present them together in your customer survey either. This is not only confusing for the user, but also for you during the evaluation.

Sorting lists or ranking lists

Finally, there is one last type of answer: the ranking or sorting list. Here you give several terms and ask the respondents to put them in a certain order.

You can use this, for example, to ask about the importance of different categories. This could look like this in your customer survey:

Survey fine-tuning and pre-testing

Time for the finishing touches. You’re pretty much done, but here are a few important tasks to take time to finish up:

• Give instructions and guidance to survey participants: Clear instructions are especially important for online surveys.
• Manage expectations and explain why you are asking the questions and what will happen to the answers. Mention approximately how long it will take participants to complete the customer survey.
• Include a progress indicator when implementing online surveys; this motivates participants.
• When error messages appear, make sure that they are worded in a friendly manner so that users remain motivated.
• Thank the user at the end of the customer survey. It’s also best to explain again what you will do with the results.

The customer survey test

Once the questionnaire for your customer survey has been drawn up, you should pause for a moment before letting the customers go at it.

With a pre-test, you have three to five users from the target group answer the questionnaire in advance. As an emergency solution, you can also ask colleagues from the company for help. It is important that the colleagues put on the customer’s glasses.

If you use the pre-test method, the following findings are important for you:

• Content test: Are the questions correct, logical and understandable? How do the participants perceive the scope, structure and language of the questionnaire?
• Technical function test: Do all answer mechanisms work, are mandatory questions also in the system as such, are branching correct, etc.?

Questionnaire templates for customer surveys

If you follow the methods described in this article, you will quickly realize that every customer survey must be tailored to the needs of the company, to your products and to your customers.

Only then will your survey deliver the results that are important for your company. But to give you some inspiration, the easyfeedback team has created some templates for you to use as a basis for your customer survey:

• Template: Customer feedback on the experience with the company website 
• Template: Survey on customer satisfaction with your product / service
• Template: Survey on customer satisfaction with customer support
• Template: Customer survey on cancellation 

You can also use these templates directly for further processing. Simply select the option “Create new survey” in the easyfeedback tool, here you will find all templates for further use.

If you want to find out what your customers’ needs are with your survey, take a look at the blog post 12 questions for your customer survey to detect customer needs.

You can simply copy the questions from the post or download a sample questionnaire in Word format.  

Conclusion: Methodically good and professional customer surveys mean work

As you can see, designing customer surveys isn’t witchcraft, but it is a bit of work if you want to do it professionally. The following points are the most important ones:

• Define clear goals
• Start small
• Conduct several shorter customer surveys rather than one large one
• Plan the structure from the respondents’ point of view
• Start with questions that are easy to answer
• Make a good mix of easy questions (mostly closed questions) and more difficult ones (tend to be open-ended questions)
• Give participants clear, simple, and brief instructions
• Do a pre-test and tweak the questionnaire before the survey starts.

If you follow the method recommended in this post, customers will feel comfortable answering the survey, you will have few dropouts. And above all, you will be able to use good and usable answers for a meaningful evaluation.

If you would like more details on one or the other point, then take a look at our manual on designing customer surveys. Here I cover individual topics in depth and give you a comprehensive method for creating your customer survey.

Image credits cover image: Graphic survey elements: Designed by slidesgo / Freepik ; Photo young woman: Designed by drobotdean / Freepik

More on the topic of customer surveys & customer experience:

• • Customer Experience: Focus on the customer
• • Customer Journey: A central component of the customer experience
• • The 5 phases of a Customer Journey
• • Customer Journey Map: The visualization of the customer journey
• • Your way to an effective customer experience strategy
• • Examples of relevant touchpoints in the B2B customer lifecycle
• • 10 metrics to measure Customer Experience
• • Everything you need to know about the Net Promotor Score (NPS)
• • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – Measuring Customer Satisfaction easily
• • Customer Effort Score (CES): How much effort do your customers have?
• • Positive customer experience with customer experience management
• • 12 practical examples for improving the customer experience
• • Measure customer satisfaction
• • Proving customer satisfaction with key performance indicators
• • 8 untypical measures to improve customer satisfaction
• • 8 reasons why increasing customer satisfaction doesn’t work
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The 7 customer survey types for a world-class CX program

Creating a great customer experience ( CX ) is important—but where do you start?

At their core, customer experience programs uncover how customers interact with your brand, product, or service. The best CX programs ask the right questions in the right way at the right time to the right audience.

Luckily, there are several tried and true methods of collecting and analyzing customer data. In this post, we’ll walk you through 7 customer survey types that can be leveraged to contextualize your customer feedback and dramatically improve your CX program.

Launching a customer experience program

So, let’s start with the basics. A customer experience program refers to the processes and methods relating to understanding a customer’s interactions with a given product or service.

According to a  recent Ecoconsultancy and Adobe survey , the 3 areas of focus for organizations when it comes to their customers are: (1) making their experience as valuable as possible, (2) making their experience personalized, and (3) making their experience easy to understand.

This being said, most organizations aren’t sure how to get from where they are to a personalized, easy CX program. The success of a CX program often depends on a company’s ability to effectively capture customer data, so choosing your method of capture is the first and most important step. Customer data could come from interactions with the product (user metrics) or conversations with employees, such as salespeople and customer support staff (anecdotal evidence).

Some of the most important CX data comes from surveys.

Surveys can take the form of market research surveys, where surveyors are looking to better understand a buyer’s persona and characteristics. Customer surveys, by contrast, are used by companies to ask targeted questions to existing customers.

A well-crafted survey can provide a wealth of insights around how customers think about your market, product, or service, and enable you to better solve customer problems, reduce the risk of them leaving, and accelerate your business’s growth.

What is a customer experience survey?

A customer experience survey is a questionnaire used to explore how customers feel about a brand, service, or product. The results of the survey will inform how well a business is performing and shed light on what part of the CX lifecycle needs to be improved.

Customer experience survey types

There are a variety of customer experience surveys that can be employed to collect customer feedback. Each survey type provides a different customer insight and should be used at a specific point in the customer experience lifecycle, so choose wisely!

In this post, we will help you understand and effectively use the following surveys:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys

Customer satisfaction score (csat) surveys, customer effort score (ces) surveys.

• Visual rating surveys
• Custom surveys
• What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score ( NPS ) is a method for understanding customer satisfaction and loyalty. Created in 2003 by Fred Reichheld, a partner at  Bain & Company , the NPS system has been widely-adopted across all industries.

The score is a derived from asking customers a single question: How likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?

This initial question is followed by an optional freeform follow-up question, so your customers can explain why they chose that rating.

In a nutshell, NPS is used to assess overall brand, product, or service satisfaction from a quantitative and qualitative perspective.

How is NPS calculated?

Respondents are asked to select a number between 1 and 10, with 1 being “not likely at all” to recommend and 10 being “very likely”.

Those who select 1-6 are considered “Detractors”, while those who select 7-8 are “Passives”. Ideally, you have a large number of results coming in the 9-10 range, the “Promoters” of your product or service.

To  calculate your NPS , you want to subtract the percent of Detractors away from your percent of Promoters. For example, if 60% of responses were Promoters and 15% were Detractors, your Net Promoter Score would be 45.

Note: NPS is expressed as a number, not a percentage. The lower bound for NPS is -100 (all Detractors) and the upper bound is 100 (all Promoters).

Why does it matter?

NPS provides a  convenient benchmark  for your product’s success. Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix have Net Promoter Scores in the 60-70 range.

Net Promoter Score also provides a snapshot of customers who have problems (Detractors) and who love your product (Promoters). Answers to the open-ended follow-up question explain what you need to improve to turn your Detractors into Promoters.

Because NPS is easy to report, it becomes a powerful benchmark. Executive teams can set a quarterly NPS goal and track whether that goal is met or not – a great first step in making your CX program data-driven.

How to best leverage NPS surveys?

Industry-leading organizations, from Southwest and USAA to Zappos and Amazon,  utilize NPS . Moreover, NPS is a key metric for anyone  looking to discover how their product or service  is performing in the market.

Brick-and-mortar stores measure NPS to understand how well their store experience is working, from the store layout to the customer service. Meanwhile, fast-growing startups can use NPS surveys to better segment customers and understand how their product can be refined to drive more growth.

How to best create and deliver NPS surveys?

Net Promoter Score surveys are quick and painless surveys, both for the company and the customer. The best way to create an NPS survey is to use an NPS software solution like Delighted.

While Net Promoter Score surveys can be used anytime in the customer lifecycle, the best way to start your NPS survey program is to send it to customers who have had time to experience your product, and then follow up on a monthly to quarterly basis to assess your brand as a whole.

How to best analyze and act on the feedback?

Once Net Promoter Score data is collected, it’s important to know why users selected the answers they did.

Analyzing NPS survey results includes understanding the three cohorts: Promoters, Neutrals, and Detractors. This information can be used to personalize outreach to respondents, more effectively utilize their feedback, and  improve their overall experience .

Once you understand who the Detractors are, you can create specific marketing or customer support programs (like 1-on-1 calls) to help them be successful. These campaigns can reduce churn and help save existing accounts.

Companies can also turn Promoters into advocates – asking Promoters to provide testimonials or referrals. Promoters are also great candidates for upselling and cross-selling because they clearly understand your value proposition.

• What is CSAT?

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a measure of a customer’s contentment with a specific situation. A CSAT survey has two parts, a question and an open-ended response.

A CSAT survey asks: How satisfied were you with this product or interaction? Respondents can choose options 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).

CSAT surveys are used to understand contentment with a specific feature, interaction, or transaction.

How do you calculate CSAT?

Respondents who select 4 or 5 are considered “Satisfied Responses,” and the formula for CSAT is:

CSAT = (Total Number of Satisfied Responses / Total Number of Responses) x 100

When calculating CSAT, be sure to round final results to the nearest whole number.

Unlike other survey types, CSAT offers granular insights into a specific customer interaction. This provides a detailed view of how a particular digital or in-person experience exceeds, meets, or misses a customer’s expectation.

Customer satisfaction surveys should be utilized throughout the product lifecycle in order to dissect how different aspects of the product are performing, such as signup, onboarding, and after using core features.

How to best leverage CSAT surveys?

CSAT surveys are used by any organization looking to analyze specific customer interactions. Customer satisfaction surveys are ideal for business leaders looking to understand sentiment at a single point in time.

In other words, the value of CSAT is its ability to quickly assess how satisfied your customers are with your offering. Organizations should follow up within 24 hours of an interaction.

Common use cases for CSAT surveys include:

• Right after a customer support conversation
• Following a product demo with sales
• After a visit to a service center or retail store
• Once an introductory course or onboarding is completed

How to best create and deliver CSAT surveys?

The best way to create CSAT surveys is to use an online survey tool like Delighted’s customer satisfaction survey software . This allows your team to focus on getting the survey out quickly, instead of working on writing and formatting the survey.

CSAT surveys are also a flexible survey type, being able to be delivered by email, pop-ups on websites, and in apps.

It is best practice to send the survey in the channel where your customers would normally interact with you or your product. For example, if you have an ecommerce store, you can have a link to fill out a CSAT survey after checkout or in a follow-up email.

How to analyze and act on feedback?

Customer Satisfaction surveys provide a high-level view into your interactions with customers. While looking at the summary data may be helpful, it should be a jumping off point to segment and analyze the data.

Popular segmentation methods include evaluating CSAT by department (sales vs. customer support), by region (North America vs. Europe), by use case (mobile app vs. website), and by product offering (Subscription A vs. Subscription B).

• What is CES?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a measure of how much effort was required for a customer to complete a specific action. CES surveys break apart the end result (which may be satisfying) with the process of getting to the result (the effort).

CES surveys are a great way to understand how seamless a particular process or flow is in your product or service.

How do you calculate CES?

Start off by sorting your responses into ranges. For example, disagree would be all responses between 1 and 2, neutral is 3, and agree would be 4 and 5. Customer Effort Score focuses on the “agree” range. To find your CES take the number of responses in the agree range (4 and 5) and then divide by the total number of respondents.

For example, let’s say you have 10 customers who marked 4 or 5, with 20 total customers who completed the survey. This means that 50% of respondents fell into the agree range, giving you a CES score of 50. The higher your score, the more effortless your experience.

Why does an “effortless experience” for customers matter?

Today, customers are conditioned to expect instant gratification.

Closely tracking the amount of effort required to reach an intended result can provide key insights – with the goal of having a seamless experience that fosters user happiness and retention.

Companies looking to improve funnel metrics and conversion rates would particularly benefit from CES surveys.

How to best leverage CES surveys?

Customer Effort Score is a powerful survey for people evaluating how users reached the intended result.

There are particular sections of the customer journey , such as onboarding or checkout, that are good targets for CES. If you anticipate roadblocks, you can trigger a CES survey and see how customers faired.

How to best create and deliver CES surveys?

The best way to  create a Customer Effort Score survey  is using existing survey software, which has CES built-in. This method allows you to select CES survey and quickly get surveys out to respondents.

CES surveys can be delivered across a number of channels, including website, in-app, and email. Given that effort is related to a particular interaction, sending a follow-up email with a survey link is the best practice.

CES is a powerful tool because of its specificity.

Companies use CES surveys to understand where their product or service is meeting customer expectations, and where things are confusing, slow, and laborious.

The results of a CES survey can be utilized to make changes to marketing, sales, pricing, customer support, and more. CES survey results also make great candidates for A/B tests (to see which variant leads to lower customer effort).

Visual rating (star, smiley, thumbs up/down) surveys

Visual rating or emoji surveys refer to surveys that allow customers to interact with a graphic rather than select a number or provide a written response. Visual rating surveys are intuitive, fast, and visually impactful.

There are three main visual rating survey types:

• Star surveys
• Smiley surveys
• Thumbs up/down surveys

Why choose a visual rating survey?

Visual rating surveys provide a seamless way for customers to provide feedback. Instead of offering a long written survey, a 30-second survey can provide insights into how a current experience is going.

How to best leverage visual rating surveys?

Star surveys are best used after a specific service is offered, such as a hotel stay or ridesharing trip. These situations are nuanced and the 5-star method allows for a good level of customization.

Smiley surveys are best leveraged in follow-up messages to better understand customer or employee satisfaction.

Specifically, smiley faces are intuitive, as well as language agnostic and great for websites or services that have multi-lingual customers.

Thumbs up surveys capture raw customer feedback since customers only have two answer options – “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Common use cases include:

• Directly following a support conversation
• In-product after a specific feature is used
• To quickly gauge if customers are enjoying your new app
• At the bottom of a webpage to capture its effectiveness

How to best create and deliver visual rating surveys?

Visual rating surveys are best created using a survey solution that comes out-of-the-box with support for  5-star surveys ,  smiley face surveys , and  thumbs up surveys .

When crafting these surveys, be sure that the question you’re asking makes sense with the scale. For example, in a star survey, ensure that 1 star means “poor” and 5 star means “great.”

The best delivery method for a visual rating survey is the one that allows for users to answer in an organic way. If you have an online product, look into providing a quick thumbs up or down survey on the website.

If the experience was more complex (like a hotel stay, flight, or ride), then provide a follow-up survey 24 hours after the fact.

When using a smiley survey, keep the message short and focused on satisfaction. The message below is easy to read and does not lead the respondent into feeling a certain way about your brand, product, or service.

Keep a thumbs up survey specific. Ask a direct question about an experience or a recommendation provided by your service.

Visual rating surveys are a quick way to gather large amounts of customer data. They also serve as a starting point to launching more detailed customer experience programs, like follow-up surveys or customer calls.

The best way to analyze these survey results is to segment users into buckets, and create a plan-of-action for each group.

Custom surveys with additional questions

What are the benefits of a custom survey.

A custom survey is a survey type that includes targeted questions, specific to your market, product, or service. Custom surveys uncover details about the customer experience not otherwise possible.

For instance, your team can  ask follow-up questions  to expand on what survey respondents previously mentioned.

When should you use custom surveys?

Custom surveys are the best fit for understanding why a customer experience exceeded, met, or fell short of expectations. For instance, ask customers what part of the experience was lackluster (NPS or CSAT) or particularly difficult (CES).

How to best create and deliver custom surveys?

It’s important to partner with the right survey solution. Specifically, a company that allows for flexibility in generating custom surveys and sending via multiple channels.

You can also use  conditional logic  to guide survey takers down a particular path, saving them time and ensuring you get the best quality responses.

How to best analyze and act on feedback?

When you receive custom survey feedback, break down responses into three sections: Fix Now, Fix Later, and Fine As Is.

This filter will help your team prioritize what can be improved now, increasing the customer experience. Don’t get bogged down in having too much information and being unable to act!

Successful CX programs rely on knowing how, when, and why to survey customers.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)  surveys provide a great assessment of your brand’s appeal and competitive differentiators.

Similarly,  Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)  surveys uncover valuable information about a customer’s overall satisfaction with your product or service.

Customer Effort Score (CES)  surveys are best deployed to understand a specific roadblock or frustration that users may face. CES is an aide for all companies looking to build seamless experiences.

Visual rating surveys  are the most visual and quickest survey types to fill out. Use star surveys, smiley surveys, and thumbs up surveys to gauge customer sentiment in the “here and now”.

Finally, for a deeper understanding of your customers’ experience with your brand, use  custom surveys  with additional questions.

Now that you understand how to appropriately use the 7 customer survey types, you are one step closer to launching a world-class customer experience program.

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11 Easy Steps to Conduct an Effective Customer Satisfaction Survey 

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Introduction

Customer satisfaction is a critical metric to track when evaluating the success of your business. According to a new Oracle survey , 77 percent of people who purchase your product or service will become loyal customers if your business makes them feel important and appreciated. 

But how do you learn their thoughts and feelings about your business? Through customer satisfaction surveys .

Customer satisfaction surveys will give you a snapshot of customer sentiments, helping you identify areas of improvement so you can take actionable steps to develop better products and services that meet their needs. 

The survey doesn’t have to be overly complex or take endless hours to complete. These 11 easy steps will teach you how to create effective customer satisfaction surveys . 

What Is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?

A customer satisfaction survey is a tool businesses use to measure customers’ satisfaction levels based on their experience with the business. There are many different types of customer satisfaction surveys , including phone surveys, email surveys, and in-person surveys. 

However, email surveys are most popular because they enable you to reach out to hundreds and thousands of people at a go. Reliable email marketing software helps to streamline this process. 

Although customer survey questions aim at garnering customer feedback, the results can help you measure the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and advertising efforts, as well as to evaluate quality control processes and employee performance.

11 Easy Steps to Conduct an Effective Customer Satisfaction Survey

1. define your goals and objectives.

The first thing to do when conducting customer satisfaction surveys is to be clear about the outcome you are looking for. Setting objectives helps you measure your project’s success and see whether they are improving over time. 

When defining your goal, think about the changes or improvements you’re about to implement in your business. Here are some thoughtful questions to help you set smart goals for your survey.

• Do you want to use the survey to benchmark performance against competitors? 
• Do you want to use customer feedback to determine how well employees perform?
• Will you create survey questions to determine how your customers rate existing products or services?
• Do you want to hear their suggestions about a new product you’re about to launch?
• Do you want to learn their willingness to recommend your business to friends and family?
• What are some actions you can take immediately after analyzing your survey results?
• What are some short-term company goals you can meet through surveying?

2. Select Your Survey Tool

With modern technology, it’s easier than ever to conduct a customer satisfaction survey. Several customer survey software are available today to help you set up an online survey and draft the right customer survey questions for your campaign. 

With industry-leading CRM software like Pipeliner , Zoho , HubSpot CRM , and Freshsales , you can customize your survey extensively by building from scratch or setting it up rapidly using pre-designed templates. 

Even business process management (BPM) software like Quixy , Workato , and Pipefy can help you customize and automate your consumer satisfaction surveys . 

Another benefit of using software like these is that they employ the net promoter score methodology, which helps measure audience engagement . Tools that employ the net promoter score methodology also reveal the customer effort score — a measure of how much effort it takes to answer your customer survey questions . This metric will help you optimize your surveys to encourage participation. 

3. Choose Your Survey Template

Pre-designed templates can help you save time on survey creation. Creating and managing surveys from scratch can be time-consuming, so using a template can reduce the amount of work you need to do. 

Besides speeding up the process, creating your customer survey questions with templates can help you improve accuracy and participation. You can expect better results because these templates are expertly-designed and optimized to drive engagement.

HubSpot, for example, can help you model the customer survey questions and design from the top 23 global brands . Imagine what it feels like to create your customer satisfaction surveys after the likes of Netflix or Uber.

4. Customize Your Survey Template

Customizing your survey template involves adding your company’s logo, branding colors, and mission statement to the survey. This step is necessary for several reasons. 

First, it allows you to highlight your brand and build trust with respondents. Second, it lets you identify gaps or inconsistencies in your survey questions. Finally, customizing your survey increases brand recognition and prevents customers from forgetting about your business.

If you don’t have solid branding elements yet, try using graphic design software like Figma or Adobe Suite to create some. While customizing your survey can improve participation rate, be careful not to overdo it. 

Branding your survey excessively can make it look like a marketing pitch, which can turn off respondents. When it comes to branding, less is more.

MORE: Explore different Figma pricing options .

5. Map Out a Timeline

Creating a timeline for your customer survey is how to ensure that you have enough time to define your survey campaign goals, research your customers, brainstorm the appropriate questions, and create engaging customer satisfaction surveys . 

Even though survey templates and automation software help reduce the workload and save time, effective customer satisfaction surveys still require a quality time investment. 

There is no magic formula to determine how much time you need to create a customer survey. The amount of time depends on the complexity of the survey at hand. 

We recommend you use task management software like Monday.com and ClickUp to help you create simple timelines for your survey campaign. One thing to remember is that it’s not a race against time but more about setting realistic goals and sticking with them until they’re complete.

6. Draft Clear Questions

Customer survey questions should be clear and specific enough for respondents to understand and answer effortlessly. A customer satisfaction survey is not an interrogation so it should be a simple questionnaire that participants can engage with. At the same time, it shouldn’t be so easy that it becomes pointless.

When drafting the questionnaire, think about how that question connects with your end goal. Be careful with leading questions. 

For example, instead of asking, “How satisfied are you with our service?” Ask a question like, “What is the one thing that would make you most happy with our product?” 

Also, try to combine open-ended and closed-ended questions as best as possible. Closed-ended questions tend to be easier to understand but may not cover all the nuances of the surveyed issue. In contrast, open-ended questions can give respondents more room to express their thoughts, but it may be more tasking and time-consuming.

7. Review Your Survey

Proofreading is essential to any project, whether it’s an academic paper or a customer satisfaction survey. Before sending your customer survey, make sure it’s clear, concise, and easy to complete. 

Avoid unnecessary questions, and be sure to include all relevant details. Check the net promoter score on your survey tool to measure audience engagement .

Several tools are now available to help you proofread your work. A writing assistant software like Grammarly can detect wrong spellings and punctuations in your text and recommend the correct options. Besides saving you time, Grammarly helps you to save the cost of hiring a professional proofreader.

8. Create a Captivating Headline

Writing a captivating email subject line is critical to customer surveys. If your email subject line doesn’t grab readers’ attention, they might ignore or delete it before even opening it. 

Your headline is your best shot to make a lasting impression, so try to include powerful words and phrases that can capture their attention.

A good headline doesn’t have to be long or overly wordy. Keep it short and sweet so that it’s easy for people to engage with. Here are some examples of catchy email headlines to try.

9. Write an Effective Survey Invitation

An effective survey invitation gets your target audience to respond to the call to action, which translates into more customer feedback. It must summarize the purpose of the survey and explain to your customer why they have been selected to take the survey. 

You should also provide a realistic time estimate of how long it will take to complete the survey. 

Additionally, provide a contact where respondents can forward their questions. Recipients will easily trust you if they see that you’ve provided a means to keep in touch. 

After including these contents, write a concise CTA, including the link to the survey. To drive more engagement, embed a snapshot of the first question in the survey. Finally, thank your recipients in advance for their feedback.

10. Segment Your List

Segmenting your customer survey list allows you to target specific audiences, such as repeat customers or first-time buyers. One of the most effective ways to improve the quality of customer satisfaction surveys is to provide targeted feedback. 

When your customer survey questions are tailored to each respondent’s needs and interests, you can expect greater engagement and an overall increase in customer feedback .

So how do you segment your list? 

The answer is email marketing software . Email marketing services like Mail Chimp and EmailOctopus offer plenty of segmenting options to help you target your audience based on shared data.

11. Review and Send

Once you’ve completed every other step, review the email invitation to ensure it is clear and concise. Check for grammatical errors and test the links for functionality. Analyze your net promoter score and everything else. If you’re satisfied with what you have, you can use your email marketing tool to schedule sending.

Ideally, your survey software will show the number of people who have completed the survey, those who didn’t respond, and those who left it halfway. 

After some time, send a reminder to people who ignored your invitation and those who didn’t complete the survey. Avoid sending too many reminders. If your customers don’t respond after two reminders, it likely means that they are not interested.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, remember that customer satisfaction surveys are not an end, but a means to arm yourself with the right information to continually improve customer service. You might want to consider incentivizing your survey to improve the participation rate. 

For example, you could offer your customers a discount on their next purchase if they complete the survey.

Adaline Lefe Mary John

A great researcher and creator, Adaline is responsible for planning and managing content for all our websites. She has over 10 years of experience in creating and managing content.

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Customer Satisfaction Research: What it is + How to do it?

Customer satisfaction research is essential for businesses looking to build long-term customer relationships. It provides organizations with essential insights into their customers’ thinking and tastes.

Customers who are satisfied with the quality of service are more likely to become loyal customers. In this blog, we will explore customer satisfaction research and how to do it for customer-centric success.

What is customer satisfaction research?

Customer satisfaction research is a systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data that allows companies to measure the satisfaction level of customers when purchasing a product or service from their brand.

This research is useful to identify satisfied customers who are loyal defenders of your brand and who are dissatisfied to follow up on their demands.

There are many reasons to measure customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction research offers great insights, so your team can focus on meeting customer expectations or flagging potential issues that may affect your business growth.

Importance of conducting a satisfaction study

Customer satisfaction research allows business managers and owners to discover that keeping current customers costs less than getting new ones.

One way to collect information about customer satisfaction is by conducting online surveys, which will help you make the necessary changes to improve your business and maintain customer loyalty.

Responding to customer complaints and concerns don’t always mean knowing their needs. Satisfaction surveys allow companies to understand what is working, what needs to be improved, and why.

To provide better customer service, it’s important to understand how they feel and allow them to explain why they feel that way. Only then can you adapt your services and offer an experience that makes you stand out from the competition.

Companies carry out satisfaction studies for different objectives. Among the most important uses of this mechanism are:

• Know what are the areas that need to be improved in the business.
• Know the opinion of customers about your brand. 
• Find out what the true needs of customers are.
• Create better customer retention strategies.
• Know if the market strategies that are carried out are working. 
• Meet customer expectations.

How to carry out customer satisfaction research?

Customer satisfaction research takes several steps to get a thorough and accurate insight into your customer experiences and perspectives. Here’s a step-by-step method you can follow for carrying out customer satisfaction research:

Step 1: Define Research Objectives

Defining precise and well-structured research objectives is an essential first step in every customer satisfaction research project. These objectives will guide you through the whole research process and ensure that the research remains focused, relevant, and connected with your business goals.

To define research objectives, follow the steps outlined below:

• Identify the Objectives: Start by identifying the overall objectives of your customer satisfaction research.
• Break Down Objectives: Divide the purpose into specific objectives. Each objective should be specific and address a different component of customer satisfaction.
• SMART Criteria: Make sure your objectives are SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Prioritize: If you have several objectives, prioritize them according to relevance and potential impact.

Step 2: Select Research Methodology

Selecting an appropriate research technique is a vital decision that will define your overall research process. Your approach will influence the type of data you gather, the level of insights you get, and the general validity of your findings. Here are some examples of research methodology.

• Surveys: Surveys are a popular and versatile method for collecting data on customer satisfaction. You can gather qualitative and quantitative data through structured questions.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the most straightforward of the customer satisfaction survey methodologies. Surveys are well-suited for measuring customer satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and other quantitative metrics.

• Interviews: Interviews will enable you to have in-depth interactions with customers. You can get valuable qualitative insights into customer experiences through phone interviews or in-person chats.
• Focus Groups: In a focus group, a small group of customers shares their experiences, ideas, and impressions in a guided session. This strategy encourages group interactions by allowing participants to respond to each other’s comments.
• Observations: Observational research refers to directly monitoring customers as they interact with your products or services. This strategy will provide you insights into user behavior and reactions in real time.

Step 3: Develop Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Developing well-crafted customer satisfaction surveys is an important stage in customer satisfaction research. It serves as the primary tool for gathering customer data and insights.

A well-crafted customer satisfaction survey will ensure that you get relevant and meaningful data. It will also motivate you to make improvements and increase customer satisfaction. You can develop a robust customer satisfaction survey by following the steps below:

• Define Research Objectives: Before developing survey questions, ensure you understand the research objectives. Determine which aspects of customer satisfaction you want to measure and what insights you want to get.
• Choose Question Types: Remember the research objectives when creating customer satisfaction survey questions. Select appropriate question types that align with your research objectives. It will help you to capture different dimensions of customer satisfaction. To quantify responses, include closed-ended questions with Likert scales, multiple-choice options, and ranking scales. Include open-ended questions. It will encourage your customers to provide thorough comments and insights.
• Order and Flow: Organize the survey questions logically, begin with general questions, and then proceed to more specialized and complicated topics. Keep a balance between qualitative and quantitative questions.
• Avoid Leading Questions: Leading questions will unintentionally influence your respondents and compromise the accuracy of their responses. So, avoid including leading questions and design questions that are neutral and unbiased.
• Incorporate Demographic Questions: Demographic questions (e.g., age, gender, location) will help you to segment responses and analyze satisfaction across different customer segments. So include it.
• Mobile-Friendly Design: Make sure your survey is mobile-friendly and displays properly on different screen sizes.

Step 4: Sampling Strategy

Sampling ensures that the findings are representative of your whole customer base. It will enable you to make correct decisions and judgments. A well-planned sampling method will help you reduce biases and increase your findings’ generalization.

Depending on your research objectives and available resources, you can use a variety of sampling methods . Here are a few common approaches:

• Simple Random Sampling : It ensures that every person in the population has an equal chance of being chosen.
• Stratified Random Sampling : This sampling method divides your population into subgroups based on specified criteria.
• Convenience Sampling : This method selects participants who are easily accessible, such as customers who frequently visit your physical store or online store.

Step 5: Data Collection and Analysis

In this step, you will collect data from your target audience, arrange and evaluate the data systematically, and generate useful insights to make informed decisions.

Use statistical tools to analyze trends, correlations, and distributions for quantitative data. Calculate measures such as averages, percentages, and standard deviations. You can visually represent the findings using graphs, charts, and tables.

Use qualitative analysis tools for qualitative data. Content analysis, thematic analysis, and sentiment analysis are all common methodologies you can use. These strategies will help you identify repeating themes, attitudes, and patterns in open-ended responses.

Step 6: Implement Changes

The implementation phase of customer satisfaction research is where insights and recommendations are implemented. Here, you will turn data-driven findings into real improvements that directly influence the customer experience.

Create a detailed implementation plan for each identified improvement. Implementing changes based on research findings involves careful planning, cooperation, and a dedication to providing greater customer value.

Define specific tasks, time frames, responsible parties, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of each effort. Prioritize the actionable recommendations that are most likely to improve customer satisfaction and retention significantly.

Step 7: Communication and Regular Feedback Loop

Transparency is essential for maintaining trust and credibility with your customers. Share the research’s findings and the responses that were made. Let your customers know that their opinions are taken seriously and have resulted in concrete improvements.

Customer satisfaction will remain a dynamic and changing emphasis of your business strategy if you establish a continual feedback loop. Here are some tips for creating and keeping a consistent feedback loop:

• Scheduled Surveys: Conduct customer satisfaction surveys quarterly, semi-annually, or yearly. 
• Incorporate Feedback Mechanisms: Integrate feedback mechanisms into various touchpoints, such as post-purchase follow-up emails, customer service interactions, or feedback forms on your website.
• Feedback Analysis: Analyze the customer feedback you received from each cycle in detail. Identify recurring themes, popular trends, and problem areas.
• Action Planning: Create action plans for additional improvements based on the newly acquired insight.
• Implementation: Implement the suggested modification and changes in every relevant part of your business.

Advantages of carrying out a satisfaction study

Carrying out a satisfaction study has great benefits for your organization:

• Obtain valuable information from customers

Doing customer satisfaction research allows you to obtain information about your customers, determine how happy they are with your company, and correct what is wrong.

• Establish priorities

The satisfaction study results allow you to discover which areas of your business need more attention, such as customer service, the sales closing process, etc.

• Customer retention

If your customers are satisfied with your products, it is possible that they will stay in your business. Maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction is extremely important to the overall success of your organization. 

• Maintain your reputation

A satisfaction study allows you to interact with consumers and show them that you care about their needs and opinions. In particular, they offer to improve the customer experience if you make the changes.

• Maintain customer loyalty

If you want to maintain customer loyalty, a satisfaction survey will give you the opportunity to listen to their feedback and improve your brand.

• Get new customers

People feel more confident buying from transparent companies, so post the feedback you get from current customers to show that you allow any kind of feedback and value it. 

• An advantage over the competition

There is a lot of competition in the market today, so any advantage you may have needs to be made known. Show current and potential customers the areas in which you excel.

Conducting customer satisfaction research with QuestionPro

One of the best ways to find out the opinion of customers and their needs is through online surveys, which allow you to collect information and perform data analysis to make better business decisions.

With QuestionPro, you can find out how satisfied your customers are by asking a Net Promoter Score question, which will let you know if consumers are promoters or detractors of your brand. 

Other types of questions that will help you gather information for your study are: 

• Multiple Choice Questions
• Closed questions
• Open text questions
• Order and Ranking Questions

You can track customer satisfaction and measure how happy your existing customers are with your business, brand, and customer initiatives by using QuestionPro’s customer satisfaction survey templates and survey questions. These customer satisfaction survey examples help ensure a higher survey completion and response rate for your market research.

Find out what customers think! Carry out customer satisfaction research and collect the necessary information to improve the consumer experience. Contact us and learn how to measure customer satisfaction using QuestionPro.

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6 Proven Methods for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

91% of unhappy customers will never buy from you again ( Liveworkstudio ). The number one objective of any business should therefore be to create happy customers. Businesses that do, grow and flourish; those that don't, stagnate and perish.

But for the #1 objective it's poorly presented in companies' metrics to track. This is partly because measuring customer satisfaction is not as straightforward as e.g. measuring revenue streams or website visitors, making it hard to set up clear goals.

There are, however, some great methods and metrics out there designed for exactly this purpose. Let's go through some that you can apply in your business today.

1 Customer Satisfaction Surveys

The customer satisfaction survey is the standard approach for collecting data on customer happiness. It consists of asking your customers how satisfied they are, with or without follow up questions. Three useful variations:

• In-App Surveys
• Post-Service Surveys
• Long Email Surveys

In-App Surveys. With this you integrate a subtle feedback bar inside your website, with generally not more than one or two questions. It’s one of the methods with the highest response rates, thanks to the fact that the customer is asked for her opinion while she’s engaged with your company. In-app surveys are especially handy to measure some of the standard customer satisfaction metrics, like NPS or CES covered below.

The 8 Core Principles of Good Customer Service

Performance in any field is guided by a few core principles. Here are the ones governing the quality of customer service.

Good tools for in-app customer surveys are Floq and SurveyMonkey .

Post Service Surveys. This type of survey focuses on the customer’s satisfaction with a specific service she’s just received. You ask it right after the delivery, when it's still fresh in the mind. This can be done in email support with a rating link in the mail, or in live chat with a rating view that appears after the chat. It can also be done over the phone, but it's somewhat problematic because it takes more time from the customer, and she might not feel comfortable sharing an unfiltered opinion.

In certain cases, you have a face-to-face touchpoint with your customer after the service, for example in a restaurant. This is an excellent opportunity to collect feedback on the spot using a tablet. A great iPad survey tool is Survey Anyplace, which also offers offline surveys : you can collect survey responses without internet connection and sync the data afterwards.

Email Surveys. The above survey methods aren't suitable for in-depth insights about your customer happiness. Why are they happy or unhappy? Email surveys, on the other hand, are a good tool for this. Although they have a downside of low response rates (10% - 15%, according to SurveyGizmo ), they do allow your customer to take their time in answering multiple questions. Google Forms is an excellent free tool for this purpose. Find a survey template here . Also check out this list of Survey Questions Do's and Dont's .

2 Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This is the most standard customer satisfaction metric, asking your customer to rate her satisfaction with your business, product, or service. Your CSAT score is then the average rating of your customer responses.

The scale typically ranges between 1 – 3, 1 – 5, or 1 – 10. A larger range is not always better, due to cultural differences in how people rate their satisfaction. An article in Psychological Science , for example, showed that people in individualistic countries choose the more extreme sides more frequently than those in collectivistic countries.

An American is more likely to rate a service as “amazing” or “terrible” than for example a Japanese, who will stick to “fine” or “not satisfactory." Such differences are important to be aware of with an international customer base.

Simpler scales are more robust to cultural differences and more suited for capturing service quality. This is why the US government uses a simple emoji-based CSAT question for its feedback, and why the live chat survey example above uses a 5-star rating.

The charm of the CSAT metric comes from its directness. The downside, however, is that satisfaction is hard to estimate, even for the customer. It’s directed at a sentiment , which is fleeting and mood dependent.

3 Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the likeliness of a customer referring you to someone, and it’s probably the most popular way of measuring customer loyalty . Customer are asked how likely they are to recommend you on a scale from 1 to 10.

The strength from NPS is that it's not about an emotion of satisfaction, but about your intention of referring – which is easier to answer. It cuts down to the question of whether the product is good enough to put your own reputation on the line.

Calculating your NPS score is quite easy. Take the percentage of respondents who fall within the ‘promoter’ category (10 - 9) and subtract the percentage of ‘detractors’ (0 - 6).

Some tools for measuring NPS work with email questionnaires. Examples are Trustfuel NPS (free) and Promoter.io (paid). Others work with in-app surveys, like Wootric (freemium). The Net Promoter Network offers a a benchmark report to give you insight about how you compare in your industry.

One added benefit of NPS is that it directs your customers’ attention towards referring, an option they might not have thought about before.

4 Customer Effort Score (CES)

With this method, customers aren’t asked for their satisfaction or likeliness of referring, but for the effort it took them to have their issue solved — generally on a scale from 1 (very low effort) to 7 (very high effort).

Your aim is, of course, to lower this average score. According to CEB , 96% of customers with a high effort score showed reduced loyalty in the future, while that was the case with only 9% of those who reported low effort scores.

This idea for a customer satisfaction metric was introduced in the Harvard Business Review article Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers .

It challenges the accepted idea that excellent customer service equals exceeding customer expectations. Through their analysis, the authors found that customers are much more likely to punish bad service than to reward good service.

They showed that the costs of exceeded customer expectations are high, while the payoffs are minimal.

Userlike: Instant chats, long-term customer relationships

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Instead of putting all that effort into delighting the customer, the authors argue it should be invested in making the customer experience and problem resolution as easy as possible .

The authors found that the the ease of having your problems resolved was a much better predictor for satisfaction than having expectations exceeded. Improve the customer experience by easifying your customer’s journey.

This new service philosophy requires different measurements, which is why the CES was developed. They showed that CES is superior to CSAT and NPS in predicting consumer behavior .

Don’t ask, “How satisfied are you with this service?” ; ask, “How easy was it to get in contact/make a purchase/have your issue resolved?”

Relevance is crucial here. The time to pop the question is right after your customer had her experience. Otherwise, the ease of the experience might have been forgotten. It can be asked in-app (ease of the website/app experience), via live chat , or via email (ease of the service).

CheckMarket offers a free template to create your own CES survey. With some tweaking, many customer service tools are suited for this purpose. Read more in our post on how to get to the right customer effort score question .

5 Social Media Monitoring

Social media has had an immense impact on the relationship between business and customer. Where before, a great or poor service experience would maybe be shared with the closest family and friends, social media offered an outlet and reach to potentially millions of people.

Because of that, it’s the perfect place to hear what your customers are really thinking about you. If you have the right tools to track this, that is.

Facebook and Twitter are of course relevant platforms to track, but also platforms like Quora, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.

Some helpful tools:

• Google Alerts . This Google service notifies you when your brand appears in a prominent position.
• Mention . A powerful freemium tool that gives you a heads up whenever your brand is mentioned on the web. It’s especially handy for social media tracking, for which Google Alerts is not suitable.
• Socialmention . A free tool that analyzes social mentions of your brand on the web. Among others, it shows the likeliness of your brand being discussed on the web, the ratio of positive to negative mentions, the likelihood of people mentioning your brand repeatedly and the range of influence.

6 Things Gone Wrong

This metric originates from the Lean Six Sigma approach , and measures the number of complaints, or "Things Gone Wrong," per 100, 1000, or up to a 1,000,000 units of survey responses, units sold, or other.

The standard approach to measure TGW is through complaint sections in customer surveys, but you could also maintain internal metrics. In the worst case scenario your score is 1 or higher, meaning that you get at least 1 complaint per chosen unit.

Once you start measuring, you can start optimizing. And optimizing your customer satisfaction is the best investment you can make.

For related topics on measurement methods, check out our posts on measuring customer loyalty , how to measure service quality , and customer service KPIs .

Pascal is CEO at Userlike, bringing mobile messaging and automation to customer communication.

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Customer Research 101: Definition, Types, and Methods

12 February 2024

Table Of Contents

What is Customer Research?

Why is customer research important, types of customer research.

• 6 Customer Research Methods
• How SurveySparrow Can Help

Do you want to improve your marketing or product? Then, customer research can help.

Your customer is at the heart of all your business decisions. In fact, everything revolves around a customer. A business is about having a paying customer, and it wouldn’t exist without one.

The effectiveness of your product or marketing depends on how well you know your customers. When you know your customers better, you can make better product or marketing decisions.

In this article, we break down:

• What customer research is
• Why it’s valuable for your business
• Different types of customer research
• Six customer research methods you can use to refine and grow your business

Customer research (or consumer research ) is a set of techniques used to identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your current or potential customers.

Simply put, the consumer research process is a way for businesses to collect information and learn from their customers so they can serve them better.

Businesses typically conduct customer research to uncover new insights on their customers. They then use these newly uncovered insights to improve their product, craft an effective marketing strategy, and more.

Here are 2 key questions customer research helps you answer:

• Who are my ideal customers? Who is the best fit (or worst fit) for our product?
• What channels can I use to find and communicate with my ideal customers?

Online survey tools like SurveySparrow can help you answer these questions. With omnichannel survey distribution, snazzy data visualization, and 1,500+ integrations with your favorite tools, SurveySparrow simplifies customer research for your GTM and product teams.

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A. How well do you know your customers? Not knowing enough about your customers can cost you time and money.

For example, a recent survey revealed that 46% of customers broke up with a brand because they received irrelevant content pushes.

Successful marketers realize that research is necessary to understand and cater to the ever-changing needs of today’s customers. According to a study by Coschedule:

• Successful marketers are 242% more likely to conduct audience research at least once every quarter.
• 56% of the study’s most elite marketers research at least once a month.

B. You shouldn’t make assumptions about your customers’ preferences or needs. You have to go out there and get opinions from real customers.

C. You need to go beyond your general idea about your customers. The more you understand your customers, the better you’ll be able to serve them with your product or service.

D. If you want to make your product the best in the market, you need to identify any unmet needs and learn how well your product serves the needs of your current customers.

E. Customer research helps you learn more about your customers, both the potential and existing ones. Serving your customers better than the alternatives starts with understanding them better and more deeply.

F. Here are other key reasons why you should research customers:

• Know the Why : Your analytics dashboard merely tells you what your customers do. Only research can help you understand why they do that.
• Validate Assumptions and Best Practices : In most cases, guesswork leads to terrible decisions. Your customers might not need what you think they need. And what works for most businesses might not work for you. The only real way to know is to talk to your customers.

Customer research can be done in two distinct ways: primary and secondary.

Primary research

Primary research is research you conduct yourself. In other words, in primary research, you collect the data yourself. Some examples of primary research are face-to-face interviews, surveys, and social media interactions.

Secondary research

Secondary research (or desk research ) is done by someone else. In secondary research, you make use of data that’s been collected by other people. A few examples of secondary research are forums or communities, industry reports, and online databases.

Primary and secondary research can be further broken down into two kinds of data: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative data

Qualitative data is descriptive and conceptual. And the nature of the data makes it subjective and interpretive. Examples of qualitative data include descriptions of certain attributes, such as blue eyes or chocolate-flavored ice cream .

Quantitative data

Quantitative data can be expressed using numbers, which means it can be counted or measured. As opposed to qualitative data, it’s objective and conclusive. Examples of quantitative data include numerical values such as measurements , length , cost , or weight .

Customer Research Methods that Work in 2024 (and Beyond)

Now that you know what customer research is and why it’s important, read on to learn the different consumer research methods you can use to make the most of it.

In a survey, you ask a series of questions to your customers regarding a subject or concept.

You can conduct a survey in person, over the phone, through emails, or online forms.

Here are some advantages of conducting customer research through surveys:

• Quickly collect a ton of insightful data without the high costs.
• The data you collect using surveys is simple to analyze.
• You can ask various questions since you get a wide range of question formats.

When it comes to surveys, it’s all about how you ask. Clear and concise questions can help you get reliable information.

An online survey tool is your best bet for quickly gathering customer information. All you need to do is create a survey with a ready-to-use template and send your customers a link to take it.

If you’re in need of a cost-free and easy-to-use solution for conducting customer research surveys and beyond, consider exploring SurveySparrow . This tool aids in gathering essential data by enabling you to conduct thorough data analysis via its user-friendly and conversational survey format.

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In an interview, you speak directly to your customers and ask them open-ended questions.

• Interviews allow you to have deep, one-on-one conversations with your customers and explore a topic in-depth.
• You can go into the details, obtain data beyond surface-level information, and gather deeper insights.

While interviews allow you to probe deeper into a subject, success depends on the expertise and skills of the researcher (or interviewer) conducting the interviews.

Conducting interviews isn’t easy. It’s time-consuming and costly. However, the information you collect can be invaluable for your company’s growth.

You can meet your customers in person to conduct your interviews. Or you can use video conferencing tools such as Google Meet or Zoom to converse with your customers online.

Your analytics dashboard lets you in on your customers’ actions within your product.

Just a glance at it and you’ll know what your customers do and how they engage with your product.

The irony is that customers don’t know what they want or why. They might think they need something but that might not be the case.

What they say they need doesn’t equate to what they do.

The point is that customer-reported behavior is different from actual behavior. That’s why it pays to track and observe your customers’ behavior.

You can use heatmaps, click tracking, scroll mapping, and user-recorded sessions to gain insights into your users’ actions and behavior.

Focus Groups

In this method, you combine a small group based on certain criteria such as demographic, firmographic, or behavioral attributes.

And you ask this group about whatever topic or concept. It could be about your product, marketing message, or something else that’s related to your customers or business.

The idea is to get them to talk to each other and have meaningful conversations.

A moderator helps facilitate the conversations between the individuals in this group. The moderator will try to draw meaningful insights from these conversations and discussions.

You mainly use this technique to understand a certain topic or subject better.

Competitive Analysis

Studying your competitors’ strategies and tactics is a great way to learn more about the target market and the existing solutions.

You can analyze both your direct and indirect competitors depending on the needs you address and the customers you cater to.

You can conduct a competitive analysis from a marketing or product perspective.

If you conduct your analysis from a marketing perspective, you study your competition’s SEO strategy , landing page copy, blog content, PR coverage, social media presence, etc.

You can also conduct your competitive analysis from a product perspective and analyze your competitors’ user experience, features, pricing structure, etc.

Review Mining

The reviews of you and your competitors are another great way to get inside your customer’s head. This method can be especially valuable if you are a SAAS company.

It helps you better understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses as well as your own. This understanding helps you improve your own products and better address the needs of your ideal customers.

This kind of data is easy to acquire as it’s publicly available, and you can get them on:

• Review sites such as G2Crowd and Capterra.
• Forums and niche communities such as ProductHunt, Reddit, Quora, etc.

Why SurveySparrow is the Best Customer Research Tool

SurveySparrow facilitates comprehensive customer research by enabling businesses to efficiently collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback, leading to better informed and customer-centric decisions.

• Collect Feedback Easily : Create simple surveys to find out what customers think about your products or services.
• Understand Satisfaction : Use surveys to figure out how happy customers are with what you offer.
• Learn Buying Habits : Find out why customers buy certain products, which helps in planning what to sell.
• Get Product Opinions : Ask customers what they like or don’t like about your products to make improvements.
• See How People View Your Brand : Understand how customers see your brand, which is important for your marketing.
• Keep Up with Trends : Regular surveys help you stay updated on what your customers want or need.
• Group Customers : Identify different types of customers to target them more effectively with your marketing.
• Improve Customer Experience : Learn where you can make the buying process better for your customers.
• Test New Ideas : Before launching new products, check if your customers would be interested.
• Check Customer Loyalty : Find out if customers would keep using your products or recommend them to others.

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Businesses that deeply understand their customers have a huge advantage over the ones that don’t. Period.

Whatever you’re looking to learn or achieve, it becomes a lot clearer with a little research.

When done right, customer research can be your competitive advantage.

Be sure to pick a method that’s right for your situation. What are you looking to learn and achieve? Think through each research method carefully and pick the one that works best for you.

Have you conducted customer research? What did you learn? And how did it go? Tell us about that in the comment section below.

And if you’re looking to conduct customer research through surveys, feel free to check out SurveySparrow .

I'm a developer turned marketer, working as a Product Marketer at SurveySparrow — A survey tool that lets anyone create beautiful, conversational surveys people love to answer.

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12 Voice of the Customer Methodologies To Generate a Gold Mine of Customer Feedback

Published: March 08, 2022

If you want to improve your bottom line and get more repeat business, then you have to listen to your customers. You need to empathize with their concerns and hear the Voice of the Customer (VoC).

By creating a strong Voice of the Customer (also called Voice of Customer) program, you can find out:

• Why your customers need you
• What you can do to help your customers
• What your customers are looking for
• What their interests and behavioral patterns are

First, let’s go over the basics. What is Voice of the Customer?

What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a research method that's used to collect customer feedback. A VoC program can help you capture how your customers feel about your business, product, or service, giving you insights that can help you create a stronger customer experience.

Do you know the difference between successful and unsuccessful businesses? Successful companies pay close attention to what their customers are saying. They know that business metrics like revenue and churn tell only a part of the story.

In order to understand why customers make certain decisions, they know it's critical to understand the customer's perspective.

That’s where Voice of the Customer comes in. Businesses study VoC to visualize the gap between customer expectations and their actual experiences. Customer-perceived value is correlated to higher retention and more sales because customer-perceived value looks at how businesses are advertising their products or services.

Implementing Voice of Customer within your business functions will strengthen your customer success , operations, and product development teams. These groups use this research to identify and improve all stages of the customer's journey by working together to enhance their products and services.

61 Templates to Help You Put the Customer First

Email, survey, and buyer persona templates to help you engage and delight your customers

• 6 buyer persona templates
• 5 customer satisfaction survey templates
• 50 customer email templates

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Applying a Voice of the Customer program will help companies develop a closer bond with their customers, and improve their internal collaboration as well.

Most importantly, VoC helps businesses increase customer retention and create an army of customer advocates .

To create a VoC strategy, you’ll need:

• An objective and overarching question, e.g., Why did customer retention rates drop for a particular product in the last quarter? Or How do customers feel about the recent changes to a specific offering?
• A tool to collect VoC data, such as a dedicated customer feedback software or a survey provider
• VoC feedback and data
• A team to analyze the feedback and identify patterns

How Voice of the Customer Impacts Your Business

According to research by Qualtrics, offering a strong customer experience is all but guaranteed to improve your sales. 94% of consumers

report that they are likely to purchase more from a company with “very good” remarks or feedback from the customers.

However, without knowing how your customers actually feel, you can’t offer a strong customer service experience.

By capturing VoC, you can connect and engage with customers at every touchpoint in the customer journey and programmatically improve their experience with your company. This technique helps you:

• Spot early warning and potential brand crisis
• Evaluate new concepts, ideas, and solutions
• Customize your products, services, add-ons, and features to meet the needs and wants of your customers
• Increase customer retention
• Serve your customers the solutions they need

Voice of the Customer Methodology

The Voice of the Customer methodology is the way businesses collect customer feedback about their products, brand, and service. Interviewing customers, sending feedback surveys, hosting focus groups, and reaching out via social media are all part of a Voice of Customer methodology.

Reaching out to your customer is the bulk of an effective VoC strategy. A successful methodology will provide you with all the insights you need to understand customer preferences, problems, and complaints.

Before choosing a method or technique, you should first outline a question and an objective for your program. If you start gathering data without an objective in mind, you won’t know how to use the insight to improve your business.

The question can be related to previous metrics, trends, and new customer behaviors. Here are a few examples of what that can look like:

• Only X% of customers made a repeat purchase in Q2 of last year, a drop from a previous year. What changed? How can we improve?
• How many of our customers feel loyal to our brand? What can we do better?

Note: These are only meant for you and your stakeholders. Here are examples of a few questions you can use in a VoC survey or study.

Now, it’s time to establish an objective: Either gauging current customer service performance or improving a specific business function or product.

• Gauging current performance: For many businesses, it’s worth launching a Voice of Customer program to set a baseline to compare future results to. When you make this your objective, you usually ask the same questions during each iteration.
• Improving a business function or product: Companies use VoC strategies to understand their customers’ needs and to improve their products or services.

After identifying a question and objective, you might naturally choose a VoC technique to capture the data.

For example, if you’d like to know how customers feel about your service team, you’d choose to survey previous contacts in your CRM who’ve contacted your service department.

Don’t know how exactly you’d reach out? Here are some techniques and methodologies you can use for your Voice of the Customer analytics program.

VoC Techniques

• Customer Interviews
• Online Customer Surveys
• Social Media
• Website Behavior
• Recorded Call Data
• Online Customer Reviews
• In-Person Surveys
• Net Promoter Score®
• Focus Groups
• Dedicated Feedback Form

It’s a well-known fact that it costs organizations five times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. The value of retaining existing customers over acquiring a new one can’t be overstated.

Understanding your customers and building a solid customer relationship is a methodical, insightful process. There are certain techniques that you can follow to get reliable answers. Companies often use a mixture of different techniques to ensure they're getting the most from their research.

Let’s take a look at some of the Voice of the Customer methods that you can use to collect data.

1. Customer Interviews

Customer interviews are one of the traditional techniques to collect VoC data. It is commonly used to understand a particular customer’s point-of-view regarding product or service issues, attributes, and performance measures.

You can choose to perform this for either a particular customer or for a group of customers with some common attributes. This is usually executed in person, on the phone, or through email.

While the cost of in-person interviews is the highest among all forms of interviews, it is still considered to be the most useful form for building trusting customer relationships. This is because customers perceive this type of interaction as more personal.

2. Online Customer Surveys

Another great way to capture VoC is by conducting online customer surveys. These surveys help you in understanding your customers and addressing the issues they face.

However, if you don't ask the right questions with the help of the right platform, you may never get reliable answers. That's why you need to put in a lot of thought while designing your surveys. With platforms like VWO or SurveyMonkey , you can choose from the different types of surveys available, such as multiple-choice surveys, drop-down surveys, and open-ended surveys.

HubSpot’s customer feedback software is an excellent tool for setting up online surveys. With this tool, your respondents are automatically connected to a specific contact in your CRM, which requires less manual work from your service or VoC team.

3. Live Chat

According to a study by ServiceBell , more than 60% of consumers are more likely to return to companies that utilize live chat.

Having a live chat option on your website is an incredible method for collecting real-time customer feedback. It also reduces the possibility of your customers feeling unsatisfied with your customer service efforts.

The use of live chat is not limited to listening to customer complaints and resolving them. It's also a good tool to capture Voice of the Customer data. For this, you can schedule a follow-up survey of all the customers connecting with you through a chat.

Not sure how to start? You can use HubSpot Live Chat to get live chat up and running on your website.

4. Social Media

Social media is a potent ingredient of the feedback cocktail, as it provides you the opportunity to have two-way communication with your customers.

On any of the most commonly-used social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, you can tap into relevant ongoing conversations, connect with those customers by actively participating, or quietly listen (while taking notes).

The core strength of social media is that it allows you to have a more direct and real-time conversation with the people using your products or services.

While this is a good way to gather feedback, look for trends, and create stories, it may be more challenging to turn this into hard data. But the upside to this is that you're hearing unfiltered feedback directly from customers.

5. Website Behavior

Your website is a great place for you to capture Voice of Customer data. Besides chat and online surveys, another way to collect this data is by analyzing your customer behavior on the website. You can do it by leveraging tools like heat maps.

You can opt for a platform like CrazyEgg , which will allow you to track behavior patterns on your website and A/B test potential changes.

6. Recorded Call Data

If you're planning to leverage historical data, recorded calls might come in handy. Recorded calls with your customers can give you a broad overview of how they perceive your brand, what sort of objections they have, and what else they expect from the company.

Though this technique requires an upfront time investment, it is always advisable to do this regularly. It will also help you train your customer support team with better objection handling, thereby enhancing your customer service.

7. Online Customer Reviews

Your online reputation isn't just the result of what you generate at your end — it includes all instances in which your business appears online, including online reviews. 90% of consumers read a review before making a retail purchase, and 72% read multiple reviews.

While online reviews may feel intimidating, they’re a goldmine of Voice of the Customer data. On online review sites like G2 Crowd , Finances Online , TrustRadius, TrustPilot, and Capterra, you can begin collecting VoC data without needing to reach out to individual customers first.

It's also essential to understand the impact these sites have on your business and how you can use reviews to enhance your online reputation. 86% of visitors hesitate to purchase from a business that has online negative reviews. With such statistics, it becomes crucial to not just ensure positive reviews, but also handle negative reviews.

8. In-Person Surveys

Opting for an in-person survey is yet another method to capture the Voice of the Customer. Although this may not be a popular method for large business setups, it's leveraged by lots of medium-sized businesses when conducting customer research — and it can be done using a tool as simple as Google Docs.

9. Net Promoter Score®

Net Promoter Score (NPS®) is a management tool that is used to measure the loyalty of a company's customers. Fred Reichfield, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems created and developed this customer loyalty metric.

NPS gives you quick and reliable feedback from customers. The way the system works is easy. Customers need to answer this simple question on a scale of 0–10:

"How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or a colleague?"

HubSpot’s customer feedback software is an easy way to get NPS scores, allowing you to keep a pulse on customer sentiment and loyalty.

Image Source

10. Focus Groups

In a focus group, eight to twelve customers meet in a room and are asked to share their perceptions, beliefs, and opinions about your product or service. The group participants are free to openly talk with one another.

This data collection method is used to gain insights into customers' prioritization of needs, or to test concepts and get feedback. Focus groups are sometimes used in addition to interviews and surveys as the last step to further investigate and understand the Voice of the Customer for each of the company's touchpoints.

This method can be as informal or as formal as you want it to be. You can send highly personalized emails to particular customers or create a template that can be used for the entire target. You also have the option to either ask for feedback as a response to your email (which might be unstructured and time-consuming) or add a link in the email body to one of your surveys.

12. Dedicated Feedback Form

The last option is to have a dedicated feedback form on your website — and this is more of a mandate than an option. No matter which other methods you plan to choose to capture VoC, you cannot skip having an online feedback form.

Allow your existing customers and website visitors to share their feedback at any point in time. Don't make them wait until the moment you feel that there is a need to capture their voice.

The majority of these techniques will help your team derive qualitative information from your customers. That means you'll need to ask thought-provoking questions that motivate participants to provide insightful answers.

However, keep in mind that it's not the customer's responsibility to provide you with any feedback, let alone productive feedback.

If you're not getting the results you're hoping for from your VoC techniques, then you may need to reassess the questions that you're asking your customers.

Here are some of the best VoC questions to ask that get effective survey results:

Voice of the Customer Questions

• What characteristics do you look for in a company/product?
• What matters most to you when selecting a company for [product or service]?
• What comes to mind when you think about [company/product]?
• How can [company name] improve your customer experience?
• Name a competitor you would prefer over our product or service and explain why you would choose them.
• Would you recommend [company/product] and why?
• Which company have you purchased the most [product] from in the past 12 months?

Let’s go over each of these.

1. What characteristics do you look for in a company/product?

This question is a great starting point for a survey or questionnaire.

It removes your company from the conversation and directs the attention to the customer's interests. By asking this type of question first, you give the impression that your interests are more customer-driven.

Pay attention to the vocabulary that your customers use when responding to this question. Even if the responses are similar, the vocabulary that's used can indicate different audience characteristics.

For example, if you receive responses that use slang or shorthand, then you can deduce that this feedback is coming from a younger, more casual audience. This will help your team when making big operational decisions like changing a product or restructuring your pricing.

Should you ask this question as multiple choice or open-ended?

Open-ended. That way, you can get to know your audience with much more detail and depth.

2. What matters most to you when selecting a company for [product or service]?

This question is an excellent way to find out what your customers care about the most. Whereas the previous question asks about general characteristics, this question helps your team learn what influences the final purchasing decision.

Is it quality? Price? Availability? Sustainable production? Customer service? Free shipping? Or express shipping regardless of the price?

This question can help you launch an audit of your services and products to ensure you’re meeting customer expectations. Even more importantly, it can help you deduce whether your current business practices are getting in the way of the customer experience.

Most customers won’t reach out and tell you what they prefer when choosing a brand, and some questions skirt around the topic. This question will get straight to the point and give you a clear, actionable directive.

Multiple choice. Because most of us make purchasing decisions on common factors such as convenience and price, there’s no need to leave it open-ended. Consider giving customers the ability to choose up to three answers (preferably in order of preference).

3. What comes to mind when you think about [company name/product]?

This question provides your team an immediate customer reaction about your company or product.

This essentially serves as an approval rating that lets you know how customers feel about your business at the moment. You can monitor responses to see how they change over time to determine whether your company is actually addressing the feedback.

One area where this is exceptionally helpful is during crisis management. If you're not sure whether a crisis is resolved or not, you can use this survey question to get a general feel for how your business continuity plan is affecting your customers.

If you're still seeing negative comments toward your company, then you know that you need to continue working to resolve the crisis.

Open-ended. This is a highly subjective question and every customer will answer differently.

4. How can [company name] improve your customer experience?

Admittedly, this question probably won't yield many groundbreaking ideas. No matter how loyal your customers are, they might not understand how your business operates, nor might they fathom how hard it is to implement even small changes to the customer experience.

Making changes takes time and costs money — two assets that most businesses will be hesitant to put at risk. So, why do we see this question included in nearly every survey we take?

The answer is customer loyalty . Successful companies recognize that their most valuable customers spend more on each purchase than first-time buyers.

So, when they're sorting through responses to this question, they use their CRM to pinpoint feedback that's left by their most valuable customers. This way, companies are assured that these customers are included in every business decision.

Either/or. A multiple-choice question can have common answers such as “Offer free shipping,” “Offer chat on the website,” or more, depending on what you feel your brand needs to improve. This can help you get clear answers on what you should prioritize without having to sift through paragraphs of writing.

On the other hand, the customer experience varies from customer to customer, and an individual’s bad experience may be a catalyst for a major and important change in your organization.

To strike a balance between the two, you can add a text box where customers can elaborate.

5. Name a competitor you would prefer over our product or service and explain why you would choose them.

This question gives you two pieces of information. First, it tells you who your direct competitors are, or at least who your customers believe your competitors are.

This difference is important because your customers may be using a competitor that you're currently unaware of. For example, customers may be supplementing your product or service by using a competitor who's in a completely different marketplace.

The next piece of information that this question provides is why customers would switch to a competitor. It could be because of price, functionality, style, etc. Whatever the reason is, knowing why customers may prefer a competitor can help you address any weaknesses that exist in your products or services.

Open-ended. That way, you can find out who your customers think you’re competing with, thereby offering greater insight into where your product lacks.

6. Would you recommend [company/product] and why?

One way to determine customer satisfaction is to see if customers would recommend your company to others.

Customers trust other customers and won't advocate for your product or service if they don't like it. That's because if they recommend a bad product or company, they risk ruining a personal or professional relationship in their own lives. If customers are hesitant to recommend your company, you may need to assess how your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts are affecting the customer's experience.

A good addition to this question is to ask to whom they would recommend your product or service. This not only gives you an idea for potential lead opportunities, but also helps you gauge how invested customers are in your company.

For example, if a customer said they would recommend a product to their boss or potential lead of their own, you know that your product is significantly meaningful to that customer. If they would only recommend it to a peer or acquaintance, then there may be an opportunity to enhance the customer experience for these users.

Both. For the recommendation part, you can create a multiple-choice section with simple answers like “Yes” or “No.” Afterward, include the option to elaborate with a text box.

7. Which company have you purchased the most [product you offer] from in the past 12 months?

This is a great question to find out who your strongest competitors are.

It’s similar to number five in that it also mentions your competitors, but this question tells you who your customers have done business with, not who they would do business with. Both are important pieces of data but offer slightly different insights.

After gathering answers for this question, you’ll know who is stealing your business, which can help you bolster your competitive analysis efforts. If you get repeat answers, you can take a closer and much more thorough look at that particular competitor to see what they’re doing that you’re not.

Multiple-choice. This makes it easy for customers to choose from your competitors. Don’t forget to include giants such as Amazon or Walmart if you offer a product that can be purchased from those retailers. Last, include a write-in option.

These questions will help you gauge how customers feel about your brand, product, or service, and tell you in what instances they would do business with your competitors.

Now that you have robust data to work with, it’s time to analyze it all and create an action plan.

Voice of the Customer Analytics

A Voice of the Customer analytics program is a systematic method by which companies examine the data from VoC surveys. The purpose of a VoC analytics program is to identify and track trends in customer sentiment, resulting in an action plan to improve the customer experience.

The most important step in a Voice of Customer program is analyzing the data that you’ve gathered.

With the techniques and questions we listed above, you’ll be sure to have some valuable insights. Now, it’s time to analyze all of that data.

Here‘s how to get started.

1. Measure the success of your program on the number or percentage of responses.

If you sent out 200 surveys and only received 30 responses, it would be worth taking a second look at the methodology that you used. If you target a young audience, for example, they might prefer social media outreach instead of surveys.

2. Identify trends and common themes.

Do most of your customers wish you offered a chat service? Are most customers happy with the responsiveness of your service team? It’s important to know what percentage of people agreed because that way you can prioritize initiatives.

3. Consider adding your findings into a simple reference document (such as a Google Doc).

After analyzing the feedback for trends in consumer behavior and preferences, add these new insights into your buyer personas . This helps you gather a more complete picture of your target audience.

4. Visualize these trends and compile them into reports.

You can visualize trends using simple tools such as Google Sheets or a more dedicated reporting software such as Lexalytics . Don’t present these reports just yet.

5. Create an action plan.

The look of your action plan will differ, depending on the themes and trends you may find. If you received responses requesting a live chat widget on your website, your next step would be to look into investing in live chat software .

6. Present your report and action plan to your team.

It’s important to leave the presentation last. That way, you have an improvement plan, rather than discouraging your team with negative insights.

By pairing these results with an action plan, you can ensure your team will understand the actions they should take.

Now, let’s take a look at the tools you can leverage as you create a VoC program.

Voice of the Customer Tools

Creating and implementing VOC strategies can be both time- and resource-intensive. Thankfully, there are tools available to help in streamlining the process.

Best for: Mid-sized to large enterprises

HubSpot’s customer feedback software empowers companies to take the customers' pulse and ensure they’re capturing critical KPIs. From pre-built NPS, CES, and CSAT surveys to customizable VoC templates, HubSpot has everything you need to truly hear your customers. HubSpot’s VoC system is connected to its CRM and service software, helping you create a seamless customer service experience.

2. Medallia

Best for: Large companies and enterprises

Medallia makes it easy for companies to capture customer signals, route them where they’re most useful, and make sense of large data volumes with robust analysis and prediction.

Medallia’s VoC software has multiple layers for employees and customers. For instance, employees can receive an in-depth review of a customer’s sales experience and their journey into purchasing said product or service. Medallia also lets you group customers depending on behaviors and contributing factors (i.e. coupon, discount, social media click, etc.) to analyze how the customer’s experience is.

3. InMoment

InMoment provides in-depth VoC data for the customer experience as a whole. It also lets your team drill down into users’ in-app experience to provide a more holistic view of how they’re interacting with your brand — and where there’s room to improve. Their VoC system is all about unifying what the customer, employee, and business needs.

InMoment has a new program called ‘Experience Improvement’ which combines data, technology, and human behaviors to improve the “human” experience at your business. Indeed, their motto is to “bring back the human aspect in businesses”.

4. Clarabridge

Clarabridge is all about conversational analytics that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to capture multi-touchpoint consumer data, in turn providing both depth and nuance to customer sentiment and experience analysis.

Clarabridge uses AI to enhance customer experiences through what can be heard via calls, surveys, email channels, chat rooms, and more. Their AI creates data- and solution-based results tailored to customers’ specific experiences. By actively listening to what customers are saying, you can track customer loyalty and emotions while they are in the process of purchasing. You can therefore reduce churn rate and increase revenue from repeat purchases.

Verin’s software focuses on going beyond surveys to collect unstructured data across all customer touchpoints. Verint’s solution also offers automated analysis to help connect data silos and reduce the risk of missing key consumer data.

Verint sees how customers are shopping online, which is crucial because their experience is a factor in their purchase decision. So, with their VoC tools, you’ll be able to create tactical but humanized solutions that will help you increase customer loyalty and boost KPIs. Verint has real time triggers and alerts that will help you understand the customer experience and predict future behaviors.

6. SentiSum

Best for: Mid-sized to large businesses

SentiSum looks to minimize consumer friction across channels by providing categorization and analysis for customer support conversations. Equipped with accurate, granular, and real-time data, companies are better positioned to identify and resolve key customer concerns.

SentiSum uses NLP (National Language Processing) to help organize and understand the specific emotions and problems that customers are having. They also use AI that tailors to your specific business. By looking at specific and broad tags, SentiSum comes up with solutions that make it easier to handle errors and alleviate customer concerns.

7. AskNicely

Best for: Small to medium-sized businesses

AskNicely is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) based software that allows businesses to collect customer feedback via SMS, email, or web responses. Create customized surveys and get feedback in real-time with the ability to publish to your team’s preferred channels like Slack. It can be integrated into an existing CRM or used with another support program.

Best for: Medium to large enterprises

Feedier not only allows users to collect information from customers, but also will help you organize it with a variety of built-in reporting tools. Once collected, you can automatically assign ownership to a particular feedback-triggered task, create workflows and generate “close the loop” reports. Integration with Trello and Jira makes it easy to direct actionable items from feedback received.

9. CustomerGauge

Best for: B2B customer experience

CustomerGauge’s Account Experience solution helps B2B companies capture and distribute feedback from your accounts in real-time and are aimed at helping prevent churn. Their “close the loop” tools make sure client concerns don’t fall through the cracks and the built-in reporting tools are customizable to suit your needs.

10; MonkeyLearn

Best for: Enterprise businesses

MonkeyLearn helps you capture the Voice of the Customer by analyzing what the customer wants and visualizing the data. The tool allows you to organize customer feedback and then segment the positive and negative feedback into subcategories. That way, you know what to focus your attention on. MonkeyLearn also shows you how your customers are making purchase decisions across all of your products or services.

MonkeyLearn analyzes CSAT (customer satisfaction) by looking and finding weak links in business processes or strategies and gives data-driven results to strengthen them. It analyzes surveys, chats, and email experiences to come up with better solutions for the ultimate customer experience. The tool also tracks trends and behavioral habits so that recurring issues can be solved in an efficient manner.

Voice of the Customer Template

To make the most of your VoC efforts, you need a reliable template that generates predictable results. A good VoC template helps you outline how to set goals for your customers. In this template, you’ll be able to outline:

• What did the customer say;
• What does the customer need; and
• How can your company provide the solution for the customer’s needs?

Tools like HubSpot’s customer feedback software can help with these efforts, but there are also some basic template guidelines worth following, no matter how you choose to create your VoC.

First, make sure your template is clear, concise, and to the point. VOC efforts are all about understanding your customers — they’re not exercises in marketing or customer conversion muscle. Make sure your questions are clear and get to the needs of the customer.

Speaking of questions, some of the most common include:

1. Where have you heard about [product or service] in the last six months?

This question helps companies understand if their marketing strategies are working or if they can be improved. When a customer explains how they learned about you, it reveals the channels and platforms that will give you the highest ROI.

2. Which social media platforms do you use every week?

Customers are always sharing opinions; you just need to know where to look to find them. Knowing where your customers are posting can help you collect VoC data in the channels your customers use most.

3. How does [brand or company] compare to the competition?

This question tells you where you rank alongside other businesses in your industry in your customers’ eyes. This is a great question to ask when trying to understand what you can improve to outshine your competitors.

4. How appealing are [specific services or products] to you? (offer a rating scale)

Ask prospects what matters most when selecting a company or service and offer choices such as price, experience, and branding. Offer a rating scale for each of these options, or allow customers to fill in a free-form text field. This question gives you insight into what your customers value most when they’re buying products.

5. How satisfied are you with [current product or service]?

The goal of this question is to understand the customer’s experience at an overarching level. Was it good, bad, terrible, or just “meh”? This gives you an idea of how much they enjoy your product and how likely they are to recommend it to others.

6. What do you like best about [current product or service]?

The goal of this question is to understand what your product does well. This may sound like the previous question, but it gives customers the opportunity to dig into the specifics of the product. Be sure to ask about unique features so you can get actionable answers.

7. What could be improved about [current product or service]?

Use this question to figure out how you can generally improve your product. You can only learn so much from your internal knowledge, and your customers’ perspective can round out your understanding. The feedback you receive can help you make your product better for its intended audience.

8. Would you like a follow-up from [company]? What form of communication do you prefer?

If you’d like to follow up with your customers, give them the option to choose the communication medium they prefer. This question is great because it gives the customers the opportunity to opt out of additional surveys if they’d like.

The goal here is to keep your VoC surveys focused: If you’re targeting customer service, ask questions that provide data relevant to this metric. If consumer experience with products or services is the priority, design your survey to reflect this aim.

Here are a few more free templates to help you get started.

VoC Templates

2. InVision

Visual collaboration platform InVision makes it easy to create your own VoC survey and organize the feedback you receive. Centralize all of the insights you get in one place and easily share them with your team.

Similarly to InVision, Miro’s template takes a more design-friendly approach to VoC feedback and surveys. Their template utilizes a sticky-note table layout and allows others from your team to collaborate.

4. QI Macros

For a more bare-bones approach, QI Macros has a template that can be used in Excel. In this template, you’d place customer statements in the far left column and rank them by importance using the top right section.

Still not sure what VoC can look like for your company? Let’s take a look at some of the best examples of VoC analytics strategies in the industry.

Voice of the Customer Examples

If you're still not sure how your business can benefit from the VoC methodology, then it may help to look at some real companies that benefited from following this method.

Below, we highlight several businesses that profited from applying VoC to their organization.

Subbly is a SaaS e-commerce platform that entrepreneurs and marketers use. To capture the Voice of the Customer, it added a feedback page to its website and set up a feedback monitoring system for its Facebook page. Now users can comment on others' feedback that's posted to the company's website and vote on ideas that they like best.

Subbly's CEO, Stefan Pretty, believes that "between all these methods of collecting the voice of the customer, [they] harness their [opinions] on the best way to run Subbly, to shape [their] product roadmap and the features [they] roll out." Pretty notes that this approach has paid off too, as the company has become much more customer-centric and has even rolled out two new features based on the voice of the customer.

2. Plainview

Plainview is a B2B SaaS company that offers software for strategic planning and resource management. It regularly hosts meetings called "Inner Circles" where customers participate in interviews and attend focus groups. Since 2006, Plainview has hosted about 40 sessions and has met with over 1,000 customers from 300 companies.

This VoC approach helped the company make a major design change to its product. Plainview's CMO, Brian Urioste, discussed how the "Inner Circles" pointed out flaws in the software's navigational design, which was preventing customers from achieving their goals. Urioste noted that "even though the feedback and changes extended [their] product development cycle, [they] ended up with a product that better served the needs of all of [their] customers."

3. Convertize

Convertize is a content management software that lets customers A/B test their content when publishing it to their website. They benefited from the VoC methodology by gathering feedback during product releases and using that criticism to improve their new products.

For example, when they released their persuasive notifications feature, they also sent out surveys and sought out reviews to see how users felt about this product. Some users reported issues with the feature blocking important content on their site and had to remove it because they could not adjust it.

After seeing these reviews, Convertize moved quickly and resolved the problem two weeks after it was first reported. Convertize's CRO Project Manager, Benjamin Ligier, highlighted that not only did this feedback "solve the customer's immediate problem, but also gave [them] a much-improved feature."

4. Cox Communications

In the span of 18 months, telecoms company Cox Communications was able to reduce customer churn, identify key customer experience (CX) trends and improve their Net Promoter Score across multiple channels . By collecting data from customer touchpoints including sales, retail, call centers, and field service, Cox has made VoC a central function of business operations, in turn driving increased ROI.

5. Sky Spain

By implementing a robust VoC program, Sky Spain created end-to-end customer journey maps that helped identify key issues and pain points , analyze customer preferences to create targeted content, and additionally provide locally-relevant insights to help facilitate the transition of this UK-based company into the Spanish market.

6. SharkNinja

Struggling to connect reliable housewares products with robust customer service, SharkNinja implemented a comprehensive VoC plan to bridge the gap. Now equipped to collect and analyze consumer insights, the company has reduced call handle time by 15%, decreased the total operational costs of customer service, and improved communication across the organization.

7. Associated Bank

With gaps and inconsistencies in VoC data collection and analysis, Associated Bank needed a new approach. By creating and deploying a holistic VoC program, the company was able to reduce the time required to generate actionable customer feedback from six weeks to real-time and saw a 6-point jump in overall customer experience scores.

8. Ohio Mutual Insurance Group

Looking to differentiate their business, Ohio Mutual Insurance Group created an end-to-end VoC program to both capture customer preferences and gain a competitive edge. The approach worked: the company saw a 25% increase in customer email survey response , decreased survey response time from weeks to days, and developed a unified approach to CX across all customer channels.

To better understand its buyers and improve overall customer service, Volvo dove into the VoC process and discovered that customers preferred shorter surveys with open-ended questions. This allowed the company to generate more in-depth responses to survey questions, in turn helping the carmaker identify top-performing staff, drill down to specific customer concerns, touchpoints, and prioritize issues at dealerships that require immediate resolution.

For all these companies, a Voice of Customer program was critical in their improvement and growth. The bottom line is to be highly customer-centric to engage and retain your existing customers.

A Voice of Customer Program Will Lead To Business Growth

Implement a Voice of the Customer program to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can be a pathfinder and hero in the industry by investing in products, enhancements, and services that will make your company stand out and grow better.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Voice of the Customer Methodology: All You Need to Know

October 6, 2020

by Savan Kharod

In the hyper-competitive world of business, your ability to retain customers can be the difference between success and failure.

So it’s vital that you keep your customers front of mind in everything you do. After all, if you’ve got happy customers, then more than likely, you’re going to have a happy business, too. But the secret to keeping your customers coming back isn’t a product or price – it’s about the customer experience you provide for them.

As many as 86% of consumers are even ready to pay more if it means a better customer experience. The question is, how do you ensure they get it? Well, all the information you need is right there in your customer feedback.

Think of customer feedback as your golden ticket, not only to an improved product or service, but to an enhanced customer experience, too. And that in turn means increased sales and revenue. Research reveals that collecting and using customer feedback can increase cross-selling and upselling success rates by 15-20% .

According to the same report, feedback can also help brands decrease the cost of customer retention. Businesses that actively use feedback data as part of their Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs ultimately spend 25% less on retaining customers in comparison to those that don’t.

Another survey by The Aberdeen Group discovered that brands who implemented a VoC program as part of their retention efforts generated a 10x greater yield in annual company revenue. However, if you want to achieve similar results for your business, you first need to know exactly what Voice of the Customer is, and the role customer feedback plays in it.

Understanding Voice of the Customer methodology

Voice of the Customer is an analytical method used to identify customers' desires and expectations. It collects everything customers say about a business, product, or service to provide an overall picture. Businesses invest in VoC to understand the difference between customer perceptions and their actual experience, using the information to help shape and refine their products and services.

The term, coined by John R. Hauser and Abbie Griffin, is described as follows : “VoC provides a detailed understanding of the customer’s requirements, a common language for the team going forward in the product development process, key input for the setting of appropriate design specifications for the new product or service, and a highly useful springboard for product innovation.”

As the definition above shows, VoC is based on two things:

• Comprehensive insight into customer requirements. VoC offers an in-depth window into what customers want from your service, product, business, etc.
• The use of data to propel product development. VoC data acts as a guide for making informed decisions about business development.

Before examining how to gather feedback in more detail, let’s take a look at the actual process a VoC program entails.

Typically, it involves three stages:

• Collection. Conducting surveys, polls, website behavior analysis, etc. to accrue valuable customer information.
• Evaluation. Evaluating the responses collected to unlock key customer expectations.
• Implementation. Acting on the insight gained to enhance the business offering.

While you can use a range of methods to try and improve customer experience, they usually fall under the scope of one of these three overarching themes – all of which contribute towards enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, and therefore referrals and sales, too. Gathering and scrupulously evaluating data in this way gives you a more objective view of your customers’ expectations, thus shedding light on the measures you need to take to improve their overall experience.

How VoC is transforming the business landscape

Forward-thinking brands making best use of VoC data have revolutionized not only their own market standing, but the overall business landscape as well. When brands truly know their customers' needs, they can make better choices and shape their processes accordingly – including anything from marketing and distribution to product creation and consumer success.

VoC data benefits both you and your customers – your customers through an improved experience, and your company through better performance. According to an Aberdeen Group survey, the top-ranking VoC providers recorded 55% higher customer retention rates, along with a 23% decline in customer service costs.

VoC methodologies to capture customer feedback

Capturing feedback from your customers doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are 11 easy ways

One effective way of acquiring VoC data is through on-site customer surveys. These surveys help you understand your customers and bring to light the types of problems they face. Always remember though – if you don’t ask the right questions, you won’t get the right answers. That's why pre-planning your surveys is so important.

To achieve the best results, make sure you:

• Keep the questionnaire (and questions) concise.
• Ask questions that are easy to understand and provide the option for straightforward responses (yes/no and multiple-choice work fine).
• Categorize your persona-based surveys for tailored outcomes.

2. Customer interviews

Customer interviews are a traditional stalwart of VoC data collection. They are widely used to understand consumer perspectives on service issues, product attributes, and the general impression of a brand. Businesses can conduct such interviews for a single customer, or for entire groups of customers who share similar attributes. Although typically executed in person, they can be conducted over the phone if needed.

3. Website behavior analysis

The behavior your customers exhibit on your website is a rich source of VoC data You can extract valuable information such as customer heat maps, scroll maps, and even eye-tracking, all in a matter of minutes – especially if you use a single platform that brings all of that functionality under one roof.

4. Social listening

Social media is one of the best mediums for gathering VoC customer feedback. A potent tool in its own right, it provides the opportunity to connect and interact with your customers, creating a two-way communication channel.

According to a study by Microsoft, one third of Americans have used social media to complain about a brand or its customer service. Having a social media presence across platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, among others, therefore gives you a valuable insight into customer issues.

Going one step further, you can use social listening to conduct sentiment analysis and see exactly what users are saying about your brand, be that positive or negative, beyond the direct conversations they have with you. You can then use this data to improve your customer experience strategy.

5. Focus groups

Focus groups involve gathering your customers in a room and inviting them to express their opinions, thoughts, and feelings regarding your goods or services. The participants of the group are guided through a discussion by a moderator.

Focus groups are often used in addition to interviews and surveys to add more depth to Voice of the Customer data. Having multiple participants can often lead to lively discussion and allow ideas to spark off each other. The qualitative data produced helps with both product improvements and the development of marketing material.

6. Live chat

Live chat is your customers’ new best friend. In fact, 44% of respondents prefer using live chat for online shopping questions. In addition to using live chat for customer support a live chat feature on your website lets you gather real-time feedback and follow-up surveys from customers right after an event, giving you the chance to rectify any issues immediately, thereby increasing customer satisfaction. This makes it a tremendously useful tool for capturing Voice of the Customer data.

Your approach to email can be as casual or formal as you like. You could send highly personalized emails to specific customer segments, or even build a template which can be used for the entire customer pool. There is always the option to seek further details for a particular answer as well, or to include a link to another one of your polls/surveys.

8. Online reviews

Did you know that 86% of visitors are hesitant to purchase from companies that have negative reviews online? Your online credibility is not just a product of what you create yourself – it also includes any other references to your brand online, particularly online reviews . Exploring positive and negative reviews, and the sentiment behind them, can be especially helpful in revealing issues customers may not wish to share with you directly.

9. Recorded calls

If you're considering leveraging any historical data you might have, call recordings are a good option. Recorded calls with customers provide you with an overview of how your brand is seen, the kind of complaints your customers have about your products or services, and, perhaps most importantly of all, what they expect from your brand.

Although it can be a labor-intensive process, it does offer rich data rewards. You can also use these recordings to learn how your customer-facing and support staff are performing and discover areas where further training may be required.

As most of your customers will keep their smartphone on them at all times, SMS messages are a great way to reach out to them no matter where there might be. Incorporating SMS into your VoC program also makes it incredibly convenient for customers to complete your surveys, helping to increase the likelihood of a response.

11. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a strategic metric you can use to evaluate customer engagement. It measures customer loyalty by asking one simple question: "How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or a colleague?"

Answers are provided on a scale of 1-10 and segmented into three groups:

• Detractors (0-6): These are your unhappy customers that are unlikely to buy from you again and may even harm your brand reputation by discouraging others from buying from you, too.
• Passives (7-8): These customers are satisfied but not to the extent they can be expected to promote your business.
• Promoters (9-10): These are your most loyal customers and are most likely to refer you to prospective buyers. They typically have a high customer lifetime value.

5 best practices for running a successful VoC program

Review these best practices to ensure your VoC program is providing the most value for your company’s needs.

1. Connect insights across all data channels

The success of your VoC Program is heavily dependent on the use of high quality tools and services. To ensure you gather the insights you need, be prepared to invest in software that makes data collection and analysis more effective. Customer service, marketing, and analytics platforms help you visualize data, streamline processes, discover new insights, and collaborate across teams and departments.

Omni-channel feedback software helps you go one step further, aggregating feedback from all channels to highlight customer behavior, preferences, and satisfaction levels on an enterprise-wide scale. These insights in turn help you create a more seamless customer experience.

2. Collaborate and act on survey data

Feedback isn’t much use to you unless you act on it. And customers want to see evidence that their opinions are being listened to and taken seriously. Building an efficient VoC program requires not only the right data, but collaboration across multiple departments to make best use of it, too.

All relevant departments should have a say in collecting and analyzing data, as well as creating action plans based on the insights the data provides. Make sure you have the necessary communication tools and support for your employees to work together and connect across teams and divisions.

3. Incorporate the Voice of the Employee

No picture of what’s going on in your company is truly complete without a view of your employees’ opinions, too. Collecting employee feedback does two things in particular to improve the customer experience.

Namely, it:

• Offers another perspective on customer interactions
• Helps identify internal policy, process, and technology barriers that impede the delivery of satisfactory customer experiences

4. Share dashboards and reports with relevant people

A proper VoC tool should help everyone at your company understand what’s going on – and do that in the context that makes most sense to them. So, invest in a platform that lets you customize dashboard views for particular positions within your company and provides the right insights for the right personnel. Take care to loop in the appropriate people, all the way from the management team to the frontline staff.

5. Measure ROI

Any program aimed at improving customer experience has to prove it delivers value to your business. That’s why you need to orient your VoC programme towards ROI, and place ROI as the end goal of any changes you make. To successfully measure VoC ROI, you’re going to need to know the cost of your VoC program, as well as the financial implications of any improvement to associated metrics it generates, such as NPS. From there you can see if the costs exceed the benefits, and whether your VoC efforts are viable or not.

Voice of the Customer examples

Here are two company examples of brands utilizing the Voice of the Customer to the best of their ability.

Convertize used customer feedback to help refine newly-released product features. The feedback gathered from the VoC program offered an invaluable insight into usage of their platform. Leveraging these insights, Convertize revamped its notifications feature and launched two separate options for where notifications could appear on a website.

When a user expressed dissatisfaction over certain aspects of the feature after its launch, Convertize listened, determined to understand what the issue was. Based on that feedback, Convertize made the necessary changes and released the fix within two weeks.

According to Musa Hanhan, Head of Customer Experience Design at Genesys , their voice of the customer program was the lynchpin of their newfound success. Explaining how it helped revolutionize customer services, he said: “Our established VoC practice is transformative both internally for us and for our customers.”

As part of their VoC program, Genesys customers were asked to participate in surveys or feedback interviews. As soon as they saw their preferences reflected in the end product, they understood that their voice mattered to the company.

Continuing where he left off, Hanhan explained, “It’s transformative because it has changed the way we think as we are able to see through the lens of our customer thanks to their direct feedback. Plus, it has helped our employees to engage with our customers better. Finally, it has impacted the way we create services for our customers.”

Closing thoughts

Understanding your customers’ expectations and desires is key to the success of your business. Don't ever just assume you know what they are, though; make sure you go out and ask your customers directly. After all, who could know what your customers want better than the customers themselves?

But if you really want to deliver the best possible experience and stay competitive in the market, you have to go one step further than listening to what your customers have to say. You have to act on it, too. And the best mechanism for doing that? A well-designed VoC program.

Savan Kharod is a Digital Marketing professional at Acquire . He loves to share his knowledge and experience in digital marketing, social media marketing, customer service and growth marketing. In his free time, Savan likes to backpack and explore new places. 

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The rise of the inclusive consumer

The American consumer is undeniably becoming more inclusive. Responding to our survey 1 McKinsey Inclusive Consumer Survey, October 2021. in October 2021, two out of three Americans told us their social values now shape their shopping choices. And 45 percent—likely representing well over a hundred million shoppers 2 Extrapolated data: 45 percent of 270 million US residents over 18 years old would be about 120 million. —believe retailers should actively support Black-owned businesses and brands. This 45 percent represents the inclusive consumer.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Pamela Brown, Tiffany Burns , Tyler Harris, Charlotte Lucas, and Israe Zizaoui, representing views from McKinsey’s Retail Practice.

Large consumer and retail players from Nordstrom to Yelp are moving quickly to serve this group of influential customers. Indeed, while inclusive consumers tend to be younger, female, and more racially diverse, they include men and women across ethnic backgrounds, income levels, and age groups. Given this diverse and ubiquitous representation, the inclusive consumer holds the unique power to influence all demographic groups (Exhibit 1).

The inclusive consumer is more likely than other shoppers to buy Black-owned brands out of a desire to support diverse entrepreneurs on their growth journeys and small businesses in general (Exhibit 2). Like many other consumers today, they base their shopping choices less on traditional advertising and more on social media, friends’ recommendations, and the stories of those who founded the brands they admire. They are also more likely than other shoppers to care about sustainability and quality. 3 McKinsey Inclusive Consumer Survey, October 2021.

Where the inclusive consumer may be headed

Inclusive consumers are a large and influential population, and they want to spend more on Black-owned brands, which they know are underrepresented on store shelves. However, finding the brands and the products remains a barrier. Indeed, one in five inclusive consumers cited not finding the products they wanted as a reason for not buying from Black-owned brands. This plays out in the bigger picture of US retail spending as well. While about 14 percent of the US population identifies as Black, 4 “Quick facts,” United States Census Bureau, July 1, 2019. Black-owned brands rang up only about $83 billion in sales in 2020 5 Estimated with consumer-reported proportion of holiday shopping with Black-owned brands and National Retail Federation data on 2020 holiday spending of $790 billion. —less than 1.5 percent of $5.4 trillion 6 “Sales for U.S. retail trade sector over $5,411.0 billion,” United States Census Bureau, January 28, 2021. of retail spending. In our survey, about 21 percent of inclusive consumers said they had pledged to devote at least 15 percent of their retail spending to Black-owned brands in an effort to turn the tides. 7 McKinsey Inclusive Consumer Survey, October 2021.

Most retailers will need to make changes to meet the needs of inclusive consumers. Fewer than half of these shoppers say they know which products on retail shelves are from Black-owned brands, and a third don’t know where to go to purchase Black-owned brands. 8 McKinsey Inclusive Consumer Survey, October 2021. About 45 percent of the inclusive consumers we surveyed said they would value relevant labeling on store shelves and the ability to filter website results to find Black-owned brands. About a third would value additional sources of information, such as curated lists of products, a database of Black-owned brands, and recommendations from influencers.

Major retailers are now joining social influencers and other stakeholders to spread the word. Growing support for Black-owned brands is evident in social media and traditional media: a wide range of publications, from New York magazine and GQ to Harper’s Bazaar 9 “The 42 best gifts to shop from Black-owned businesses now and forever,” Harper’s Bazaar , November 17, 2021. and whowhatwear.com, published a curated holiday list of products from Black-owned brands in November 2021. In the same month, Oprah’s “favorite things” list 10 “Oprah’s favorite things 2021 list is here!,” Oprah Daily, November 23, 2021. focused on products from small businesses, many of which are owned by women and people of color.

How retailers could attract the inclusive consumer

In a marketplace being transformed by digitization, social change, and a global pandemic, leading retailers and brand managers know that they must keep meeting evolving consumer preferences to stay relevant. Major retailers are now reviewing how they work—from operations and merchandising to hiring and HR practices—and starting to move the needle. Retailers should consider actions in five main areas to bring the inclusive consumer through their doors and onto their websites.

Action 1: Reshape shelves. Retailers can first and foremost demonstrate a commitment to the inclusive consumer by evaluating and reimagining the brands on their shelves. Many are already taking strong action, reimagining their merchandising mix to make shelves and the brands that sit on them more representative. For example, more than 28 national retailers, including Gap, Macy’s, and Sephora, have signed the Fifteen Percent Pledge’s call for 15 percent of retail shelf space to be dedicated to Black-owned brands. Some of these retailers have doubled their assortments of Black-owned brands in just a year, opening their doors to almost 400 brands. 11 Elizabeth Segran, “In one year, the 15% Pledge got 385 Black-owned brands on the shelves of Macy’s, Gap, Sephora, and more,” Fast Company , July 7, 2021. In addition to introducing Black-owned brands, retailers could also review their planograms and product placement: for example, Ulta Beauty is intentional about placing Black-owned brands in prime locations in stores and creates dedicated efforts to increase Black-owned brands’ features in circular advertising and email marketing. 12 Liz Flora, “Camille Rose expands to Ulta Beauty as retailer makes Black-owned brand push,” Glossy, April 12, 2021.

Retailers can first and foremost demonstrate a commitment to the inclusive consumer by evaluating and reimagining the brands on their shelves.

Action 2: Switch up sourcing. Retailers, especially those who are vertically integrated, could also demonstrate commitment to the inclusive consumer by doubling down on diversity in their supply chain. For example, Best Buy has committed to spending at least $1.2 billion with businesses owned by members of the Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) community and other diverse businesses by 2025. 13 “Best Buy commits to spending $1.2 billion with BIPOC and diverse businesses by 2025,” Business Wire, June 24, 2021. The commitment includes plans to increase all forms of spending with businesses from nearly every corner of the company—from how it brings goods and services to stores to where and how it advertises. Supplier diversity is not limited to retailers and can also be considered broadly by most brands and companies. For example, in 2020, the Coca-Cola Company committed to spending an additional $500 million over five years with Black-owned suppliers, more than doubling the company’s previous commitment. 14 “Coca-Cola Company commits $500 million in additional spending with Black-owned suppliers,” Coca-Cola Company, October 10, 2020. These actions show an increasing commitment to diversity across the supply chain, and these types of commitments will likely grow in future years as consumers begin calling for similar levels of diversity in the supply chain as they are calling for on shelves.

Action 3: Map it out. Inclusive consumers consistently say that not knowing which brands are Black-owned or where to shop for them are barriers to spending as much as they would like on brands from diverse founders. And wayfinding is their resounding answer. Retailers could help consumers identify Black-owned brands with clear labeling on shelves and websites, the ability to filter website search results, and curated lists of products, for example.

Sephora responded to these needs by creating a dedicated tab on its website to share Black-owned brands’ stories and products and by enhancing its online site, which features Black-owned brands on its browsing pane, provides a filter for shoppers looking for Black- and BIPOC-owned brands, and provides curated lists of recommended products, including a “Sephora Favorites” bundle in Black-owned beauty. 15 Kori Hale, “Sephora’s planning to double down on Black-owned brands,” Forbes , January 25, 2021. Google is also actively working on multiple initiatives to support Black-owned brands, including a tool that allows Black-owned businesses to identify themselves in maps, listings, and Google business-profile searches. 16 Keyword , “Standing with the Black community,” blog entry by Sundar Pichai, Google, June 3, 2020; “Supporting Black-owned businesses,” Google for Small Business, 2021. Additionally, Google has launched the ByBlack platform, which consists of both a national Black business directory (powered by the US Black Chambers) and a national certification as a Black-owned business (in partnership with American Express). This tool provides Black entrepreneurs access to a community with valuable business resources (including Google trainings) and a way to help reach new customers.

Action 4: Share the stories. Inclusive consumers care about what is on shelves, but they want more. They want to learn about founders’ stories, for example, and support the missions of small businesses. Further, our research shows that inclusive consumers are more likely than other shoppers to buy Black-owned brands based on recommendations from friends, and retailers that incorporate founder stories into marketing and digital placements are more likely than those that don’t to attract the inclusive consumer’s eye. Nordstrom, for example, introduced “Concept 012: Black_Space,” which includes a dedicated shop developed, designed, and curated by Black voices to amplify Black representation through in-store buildouts and merchandising. The concept is further supported with an online site experience that includes video content created by Black curators to represent their perspectives. 17 “New Concepts @Nordstrom launches Concept 012: Black_Space,” Nordstrom, February 22, 2021.

Action 5: Ditch the big-brand playbook. Introducing and cultivating smaller brands takes different capabilities and mindsets  than retailers may be accustomed to when working with larger, more established brands. Unlike big brands, small brands come with more variability in experience and know-how, as well as growing pains as they enter the bigger retail stage. Retailers that are committed to fostering smaller brands will need to work differently, creating teams that understand how these brands operate. For example, those with experience working with small brands know that everyday requirements from retailers, such as buy sizes and inventory systems, can have large-scale repercussions on small brands with limited working capital or team capacity to meet these terms. A retailer that seeks to help smaller brands can boost the odds of success by adapting its playbook and its teams to suit their needs.

The time is now

In the years ahead, millions more consumers will likely join the ranks of inclusive consumers, rewarding businesses that pursue inclusion and avoiding those that don’t.

Businesses that meet the needs of inclusive consumers will likely do more than raise revenues and loyalty—they may also earn dividends in other areas of the business, including attracting and retaining talent. About 70 percent of the US-based employees we surveyed in August 2020 said their sense of purpose is largely defined by work, and nearly two-thirds said COVID-19 had caused them to reflect on their purpose in life, and nearly half were reconsidering the kind of work they do. (For more on this topic, please see Naina Dhingra, Andrew Samo, Bill Schaninger, and Matt Schrimper “ Help your employees find purpose—or watch them leave .”)

Whether employees or customers, the inclusive consumer is changing the imperative for retail. The evidence is overwhelming: the inclusive consumer is leading the pack, influencing consumers across demographics, and voting with their pocketbooks for retailers that support diverse entrepreneurs and their products. (For more on this topic, please see “ The Black unicorn: Changing the game for inclusivity in retail .”)

Pamela Brown is a partner in McKinsey’s New Jersey office, where Charlotte Lucas and Israe Zizaoui are consultants; Tiffany Burns is a partner in the Atlanta office; and Tyler Harris is an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office.

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