A customer satisfaction survey is one of the most basic types of market research studies a business can implement. As a result, it is also one of the most common types of surveys. The concept is simple, you as a business want to understand how you are performing by scaling your customers' satisfaction.
However, it is easy to overlook some critical questions that could prove useful to your business. So before you field your study, here are 5 key questions to ask in a customer satisfaction survey.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Instead of asking a simple 1 to 5 scale or 1 to 10 scale of satisfaction, one of the commonly benchmarked metrics in the industry is NPS. What is NPS and how does it work? Very simply NPS is asking your customer on a 0 to 10 scale how likely they are to recommend your product or service to a friend or family member. You add up the percentage of 9s and 10s (promoters) and subtract the number of 0s through 6s (detractors) to arrive at an NPS rating. A quick search online will you give you some NPS benchmarks to see how you compare.
Source(s) of Awareness
While you have your customers engaged, inquire about how they have seen or heard messaging from your company in the past 3 months or 6 months. You can list advertising sources or ask this open-ended. This will give you an idea of ROI for some of your most common types of marketing (online, TV, radio, billboard, etc.)
Areas of Improvement
In addition to collecting quantitative scores and scaling satisfaction, it is always important to give the customer an opportunity to write his or her suggested areas of improvement for your business. This question is a valuable channel to drive change internally.
Categorize Satisfaction
Beyond collecting overall satisfaction, ask your customers to rate their satisfaction with different levels of the customer experience (CX.) Ask them how satisfied they are with your ordering process, customer service, shipping times, etc. Diving a level deeper with satisfaction will allow your analyst to run correlation and regression to determine which factors truly drive overall NPS. This will help you prioritize action items.
Demographics
Make sure you are able to track customer profiling data or demographics to the survey data. This will help with segmentation analysis and cross-tabs to understand differences between customer audiences. Think about ways you can tie internal databases of information to the survey (customer IDs, Salesforce.com data, Oracle sales data, or other systems.) You may need to ask some demographic questions or you may not have to. Just make sure this type of data is tied to your CSAT survey.
Drive Research is a customer satisfaction survey company in Syracuse, NY. Questions about an upcoming survey project? Contact us at 315-303-2040 or email our company at [email protected].