The best way to find out what your customers think about your company is to ask them via a satisfaction survey. It remains private, simple to fill in and easy to analyse. Unfortunately, its response rate varies between 10 and 30%. Why is this? Very often, the cause is a bad structuring of the questions.
In order for your surveys to generate useful and usable data, here are 6 mistakes to avoid in your questionnaires!
1. Start with personal questions
Consumers are increasingly protective of their personal data. Beginning your survey by asking for their name, email address or gender, greatly reduces the response rate. Respondents have the impression that you are seeking, above all, to collect personal information rather than constructive opinions.
Nevertheless, this information is still useful to assess the satisfaction of each customer segment.
Our advice
Therefore, place these questions at the end of the survey. The respondent, having taken time to complete the questionnaire, will be less likely to abandon it.
2. Asking several questions at once
“What do you think of our products and services?
». Although this type of question saves you time, it requires two different answers. A buyer may be satisfied with the quality of your products, without being seduced by your customer service, for example. Moreover, the data collected with this type of questionnaire remains imprecise and difficult to use.
Our advice
You must avoid ambiguity in your investigations.
Define one question per product or service. You will be able to evaluate your overall performance and make improvement decisions more easily.
3. Lack of precision in the questions and answers
The questions should not be subject to interpretation. All respondents should have the same understanding of them. The same applies to the proposed answers.
Avoid subjective adverbs such as: “often”, “regularly”, “rarely”. Instead, use specific ranges of values such as “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly” or a rating scale (e.g., 1 to 5). The customer can express his thoughts in concrete terms.
Another good practice is to avoid negatives. They can mislead the respondent. A question such as “Don’t you think version 2 of the product is better than the previous one? “is confusing. It is better to use a clear and positive phrasing: “Do you think version 2 is better than version 1? ».
Think about it
Remember that concise and precise answers help you analyze your data.
4. Make questions mandatory
There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling compelled to answer all the questions. Especially since customers may not necessarily experience all your products or services.
Forcing the hand is the best way to lower your response rate and distort the results.
The solution? Make the main questions, which determine the path of the questionnaire, mandatory, but for the others, let the respondent choose.
Attention
Open-ended questions must be optional. If you force the customer to write a text, he or she may abandon the form along the way.
5. Influencing the response
What is the point of conducting a customer satisfaction survey if you only want to collect similar opinions?
Imagine a person’s state of mind when faced with a question like: “90% of our customers are satisfied with our customer service, and what do you think? ». It’s hard to argue with such a statistic. Therefore, a customer who has had a bad experience is likely to minimize it.
In addition to encouraging truncated responses, this practice greatly reduces the relevance and usefulness of the results drawn from your surveys.
Our advice
Always remain neutral and impartial in writing to encourage objective answers.
6. Asking too many questions
No one wants to spend 30 minutes answering a satisfaction survey. Keep your questionnaires short and to the point. Ideally, the form should be completed in no more than 5 minutes.
Our advice
To do this, avoid questions with no real added value for your survey and get straight to the point.
The customer satisfaction survey reveals how consumers feel about your brand. To ensure that it reflects reality, be precise, concise and objective. This is the key to deriving data that is essential to the continuous improvement of your products and services.
Market research experts are available to assist you in writing your customer satisfaction questionnaires. To do so, publish your project on Codeur.com and receive quotes from freelance professionals, quickly.
