Of all of the different types of market research projects an organization can pursue, conducting customer satisfaction surveys is the most common.
Why? At its core, customer satisfaction is the essence of market research. It involves formally reaching out to customers, asking for feedback, and taking action with the results.
The process is simple, informative, and offers a high return on investment.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything from the benefits of measuring customer satisfaction to a step-by-step process for getting started and maximizing your ROI.
Article Contents 📝
- What is a customer satisfaction survey?
- The importance of a customer survey
- Options for collecting customer feedback
- How to conduct a customer survey
- Most common types of customer survey questions
- Example customer satisfaction survey questions
- Things to consider for your CSAT survey design
- How often to run a customer survey
- Actionable ways to use data from customer research
- Choosing in-house vs. outsourced
What is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?
A customer satisfaction survey is one of the most basic types of market research studies a business can implement.
The concept is simple, you as a business want to understand how you are performing by scaling your customers' satisfaction.
To achieve this goal, a survey is created - whether it be online, by paper, or by mail - and sent to a list of customers. The results from a customer survey are used to drive improvements and measure performance.
The Importance of a CSAT Survey
Customer satisfaction is an important key performance indicator every business should measure. That's because 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.
Therefore by not conducting a customer satisfaction survey, organizations run the risk of continuing actions that impact retention. Gathering feedback from buyers and/or clients is the greatest way to drive decision-making.
Sales, marketing, and operational strategies must be backed by data, not assumptions. This can help differentiate your company from competitors, especially ones that are not running any customer surveys.
Options for Collecting Customer Feedback
Let’s review what stage we’re on for conducting a customer survey.
We know what a customer survey is ✔️
We’ve decided whether to survey with a third-party or in-house✔️
Now, it’s time to figure out your approach to sending the survey to your customers.
These options include:
- Website
- Phone
- Forms or comment cards
It is important to settle on your approach before drafting the questions to include in a customer survey.
For example, you can include a lot more questions in an online survey than in a comment card.
Let’s talk through each option to collect customer feedback in greater detail.
Option 1: Email 📧
No other methodology offers more advantages than an online or email survey.
- First, they are cost-effective for all types of businesses.
- Second, feedback is collected quickly. Sometimes this is as little as 24 to 48 hours.
- Third, the data quality is high and the data is representative.
About 20 years ago, not everyone had an email address, so conducting a customer satisfaction survey with email-only customers incurred a lot of bias. Now, this is less of an issue.
Today, there are 4 billion daily email users. This number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025.
Response rates vary from industry to industry and by client-to-client but you can expect to receive between a 2% and 15% (or more) response rate on average.
Option 2: Website Links 🌐
This is similar to an email survey but a little different. Here, the customer satisfaction survey is placed on your website.
The most common option for website customer surveys is using a modal pop-up window. The survey can be programmed to pop up to a random selection of site visitors - such as 1 in 5, or 1 in 10.
It is important to note, you’ll likely capture both customer and non-customer traffic on your site, therefore you must make the form or survey relevant for both audiences.
Option 3: Mail 📪
A dated but still effective methodology. Many organizations choose this because they want to reach all of their customers.
If you choose to go the email route, you may not be able to get feedback from older audiences who do not use email.
Or you may not be getting feedback from an audience who is not online often enough to see the invite or reminder.
The process for mail surveys involves several steps. This includes printing envelopes, cover letters, paper surveys, return envelopes, outgoing and incoming postage, and any permits associated with bulk mailings.
Once a customer receives the questionnaire in the mail, they are asked to fill out the paper survey and return it to your business.
Commonly, market research companies include a prepaid postage return envelope to make the reply as easy as possible.
These costs add up and when coupled with the lengthy amount of time to assemble, wait for a return, and then data enter hundreds if not thousands of cases, many organizations choose to go in a different direction.
If you go this route, keep the survey short. Our customer survey company strives to keep our paper surveys on one page (either front-only or front-and-back if necessary).
Option 4: Phone ☎️
Much like mail, phone surveys are very expensive.
Think about it this way. It would likely take 5 seconds to click send on an email survey to 10,000 customers.
The same cannot be said for paying callers to dial through 10,000 records - or paying for printing, assembly, and postage for 10,000 pieces of mail.
The true benefit of phone surveys is it is the most active and personal methodology. Having a conversation with a customer over the phone generates plenty of depth.
An interviewer can ask customers to expand on their answers or ask unique follow-up questions to collect greater feedback.
The process is more conversational and exploratory than most options on this list.
With online surveys, you are at the mercy of how much or how little someone is willing to type in an open-ended text box.
Option 5: Form or Comment Card 📇
The final option for customer satisfaction surveys is handing out forms or comment cards at locations.
If you have plenty of foot traffic, this might be a great option. This option works well for restaurants and retail stores.
The comment card can either be filled out at the table, dropped in a comment box on the way out, or mailed back to the place of business.
Need a break from learning? Here are some customer feedback survey examples that made us laugh.
How to Conduct a Customer Survey
The first step for any market research is to define your objectives.
Ask your team these 3 simple questions:
- What do you want to learn from the customer satisfaction survey?
- What are your expectations of the customer satisfaction survey?
- How do you plan to use the customer satisfaction survey results?
Once you have answers to these, you'll have a more clearly defined vision and end goal.
By taking the time to determine your overall goals and objectives, you can work backward to set up a process and work plan to get you there.
Make sure you define your objectives here fully.
If you do not, your customer satisfaction might be set up to fail. Garbage in. Garbage out.
One more thing before taking the next steps...
Aside from your objectives, it can also be helpful to determine how frequently you’d like to survey your customers before jumping in.
It’s important to understand measuring customer satisfaction is not a one-and-done study. To truly evolve our business practices, we must continuously engage with our target audiences and seek their feedback.
Measure 📏
Take action 🏃♂️
Re-measure 📐
Take action 🏃♂️🏃♂️
And so on...
Your first CSAT survey typically acts as a baseline or benchmark study with subsequent follow-up waves. Depending on your type of business and the industry you serve, this may be every day, every week, every month, every quarter, or every year.
Additionally, as we’ve discussed, customer surveys come in many forms: paper surveys, mail surveys, online surveys, email surveys, and phone surveys.
The process for executing each approach will vary. For the sake of this article, I will discuss the process our customer satisfaction firm uses for online or email surveys.
Step 1: Market Research Proposal 💍
After contacting our market research company, a member of our team will reach out to discuss the overall needs of your project. We may ask questions such as:
- Do you have access to a customer database?
- How many survey responses do you need?
- Do you have a preferred methodology in mind?
- What is your budget for market research?
If you're interested in learning more about writing an RFP for market research, click here.
After understanding these key considerations, Drive Research will craft a customized proposal for your team to review. If you are satisfied with the document, all you have to do is sign on the dotted line and we are off and running!
Step 2: Kickoff Meeting to Address Objectives 🏈
The kickoff is a 30 to 60-minute meeting. It’s where all the Drive Research magic begins.
A kickoff meeting is important for market research because here you will work with the market research team to identify what topics should be asked in the survey.
This could include several different customer satisfaction metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs), like net promoter score (NPS) or customer effort score (CES).
Benchmarking metrics like these are crucial to evaluate over time to see how organizations improve month-to-month.
Following the introductory meeting, our team sends a project workplan.
The workplan is the document sent out post-kickoff which highlights tasks, deliverable dates, and responsible parties. This document will be updated throughout the project to assure all of your expectations are being met.
Step 3: Survey Drafting ✏️✏️
During this step, our expert team of market researchers crafts your unique customer survey.
It’s important to note the market research team not only looks for the best ways to pose questions to your audience but also the ideal length and methodology.
Each of these factors is critical to the customer satisfaction survey process.
Drive Research will send the survey draft as a Word document that comes to our clients to allow for edits, changes, and additions.
It is important that both parties are satisfied with what questions we are asking.
If you choose to conduct the survey in-house, here are a few tips we recommend to keep in mind when drafting your questionnaire.
💡 Tip # 1: Keep Questions Concise
Engagement is crucial to customer surveys. Try not to use any additional words or language that is unnecessary.
When you ask your customer survey questions get right to the point. Being concise is critical because it keeps the momentum going in the survey.
Answering one question leads to another and another. Being concise limits drop-off.
💡 Tip # 2: Focus on Closed-Ended Questions
If you ask too many open-ended questions, it will force your customers to type a lot. Lots of typing also increases rates of dropout. Open-ended questions are free-text responses without any categories to choose from.
Whereas closed-ended questions offer radio buttons to select one answer or multiple responses. Try to make 80% or 90% of your survey questions closed-ended.
💡 Tip # 3: Keep The Length Short
Sensing a theme here? Similar to short questions and making the majority of your questions closed-ended, make sure your survey is short as well.
We recommend about 15 to 20 questions maximum. This keeps the length of the survey to about 3 to 5 minutes which is a good length to limit drop-off.
The longer the survey, the more respondents will bail.
Looking for more? Here are a few of our favorite customer satisfaction survey questions to include.
Step 4: Survey Programming, Testing, and Soft-Launch 🧪
Once the survey is final, it is then programmed into an online survey software. From there the link and survey are tested to ensure it is error-free and ready to go for fieldwork. Use our survey programming checklist to assure the best results.
Our internal survey testing team checks for:
- All questions from the survey draft have been included
- All question formats are correct
- All disqualification/screener questions are routed correctly
- All routing is working as intended
- Spelling and grammatical errors
Survey programming can be complicated, so it's essential to take your time and not rush this stage.
Lastly, Drive Research soft-launches the customer survey. In the rare instance, we’ve missed a programming error, it will be caught here.
Soft-launching the study to a small percentage of respondents assures the survey is working as intended. If not, we can quickly readjust before the survey reaches your entire customer base.
Recommended Reading: 7 Reasons to Soft Launch Email Surveys Before Jumping In
Step 5: Full Launch of Fieldwork 🚀
Now the fun part begins. The survey is fully launched to all remaining customers.
During this time, you may want to see if the researchers you are working with can give you access to review data as it is received.
We like to call this our “live data link”. It's about as real-time as real-time gets. Literally seconds after surveys are submitted they show up in your portal.
Before closing fieldwork, we recommend sending a few email reminders to those who have not yet completed the survey. Doing so helps boost response rates and leads to a more accurate representation of data.
You may get the extremes early in fieldwork. Those who are happy or unhappy with your brand. Reminders help obtain all of those customers who were not as anxious to respond.
Step 6: Begin Final Data Quality Checks 🔐
Before beginning the analysis or reporting stages, it is important to clean your survey data. This can be done after fieldwork is closed, or as survey responses start to come in.
Here are a few things our customer satisfaction research company recommends reviewing:
- Double-check for duplicate entries. This could be duplicate email addresses or duplicate IP addresses.
- Check for straightlining. Did a respondent select “A” for every answer in your 10-question grid? Then they weren’t taking the survey seriously.
- Check time to complete. If the average time to complete your survey is 10 minutes, remove respondents who took the survey in 2. They are most likely racing to the end to earn a quick reward.
- Review the open ends for erroneous responses. We often wonder what language "uwskxhuqmdmd" is in open-ends. These types of responses are not taken seriously, therefore why should the other questions they’ve answered be?
Step 7: Report Creation 📊
This stage is where researchers compile the results and turn them into something actionable and specific for your organization.
The goal here is to arm your teams with powerful insights to create data-driven strategies to propel your success.
There are typically 2 different types of reporting packages to purchase. We cover those options in-depth in our blog post, Topline vs. Comprehensive Market Research Reports.
1️⃣ One level is a basic reporting package.
This often includes a raw data file or responses and charts and graphs. Little is done with analysis and the client buying into this package does much of the interpretation on their own.
2️⃣ The second option is a full reporting package.
This is a comprehensive, all-encompassing customer survey report. This includes...
- An executive summary of key themes. This component reflects your objectives and the purpose of your customer survey (i.e. what did you want to learn?).
- Recommendations and action items. Based on our experience with customer surveys, here is what our team thinks you should do with the results.
- Customer personas. A customer persona walks you through a typical customer experience (who your customer is, why he or she buys, and what he or she dislikes).
- Infographic. This is a graphical representation of the data collected. It helps highlight key findings from the survey. Our clients often use this to send to employees to share the results or in their marketing campaigns to reflect positive customer experiences.
- Detailed crosstabulations of charts and graphs. Lastly, the comprehensive report includes all of the charts and graphs broken down by key segments and demographics. A data file is also sent.
Step 8: Debrief and Next Steps 🗣️
Whether you are carrying out this process with a third party or conducting the survey in-house, you must talk through the findings in detail.
Drive Research sets up a debrief meeting with our clients to walk through the report page by page, supplying key stakeholders with our interpretations, action items, and takeaways.
It’s one thing to conduct a customer feedback survey, but it’s another to then make changes to the results.
Setting aside time to review the data and the report and assigning action items to how you can implement these changes is huge - even more so with a customer survey.
This audience has taken the time to provide their feedback, therefore they are expecting your business to take action with it.
Most Common Types of Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions
The questions you ask will rely on the goals you’ve set for your survey and also what things you want to know about your customers/respondents. Typically though different question types will be able to help provide different answers.
Here are some of the most common CSAT questions we ask for high quality answers:
- Transaction: This type of customer survey focuses on a specific interaction between the business and the client.
- Periodic: These surveys are conducted on a schedule to measure customer trends over time.
- Net Promoter Score: NPS surveys gather data on how likely customers are to recommend a business.
- Customer Effort Score: Surveys measuring CES focus on how easy it is for customers to complete a task/goal when interacting with a brand.
Example Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions
Being that a customer survey is a popular market research methodology, there are many generalized templated questions you can find on the internet.
- How often do you use the product or service?
- How well does our product meet your needs?
- How responsive have we been to your questions or concerns about our products?
- In your own words, describe how you feel about (insert company name or product here).
While these are great to ask, don’t overlook some unique, yet critical questions that could prove useful to your business.
So before you field your study, consider including these 5 key questions in your customer satisfaction survey.
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Example question: How likely they are to recommend your product or service to a friend or family member?
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 Net Promoter Score (NPS).
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.
NPS is a powerful customer satisfaction metric to track as it succinctly measures customer loyalty and gauges the potential for organic growth through positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
💡 Pro tip! A quick search online will give you some NPS benchmarks to see how you compare.
2. Source(s) of Awareness
Example question: “Where have you seen or heard information about [INSERT COMPANY OR BRAND] in the past 6 months?”
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.)
3. Areas of Improvement
Example question: “What do you want to be improved about [INSERT COMPANY, BRAND, PRODUCT, OR SERVICE]?”
In addition to collecting quantitative scores and scaling satisfaction, it is always important to allow the customer to write his or her suggested areas of improvement for your business.
This question is a valuable channel to drive change internally.
4. Categorize Satisfaction
Example question: “How satisfied are you with [INSERT COMPANY NAME]'s shipping times?”
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.
5. Demographics
Example question: “What gender do you identify as?”
Make sure you can track customer profiling data or demographics in the survey data.
There are several demographic survey questions to better segment respondents. This will help with segmentation analysis and cross-tabs to understand the 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.
Recommended Reading: How to Conduct Customer Segmentation
How Often to Conduct Customer Satisfaction Surveys
No one will argue conducting a CSAT survey gives organizations an edge over their competitors. Right?
However, I think you’ll agree that this edge is sharpened even more by obtaining customer feedback regularly.
Don’t get me wrong, conducting this type of market research in the first place is a critical step for all organizations that helps orient and drive the customer-centric mentality forward.
But! In our competitive and ever-evolving world, truly understanding what drives customer happiness and pain points allows organizations to consistently adapt and mold themselves into a better company day by day.
This is a lot tougher to do when customer satisfaction surveys are conducted once every 12 months or 24 months. It's much easier to manage the customer experience (CX) by obtaining regular feedback.
In this section, we’ll discuss the benefits of continuous customer feedback surveys. Or watch the video below for a quick recap.
1. Better Monitor Performance 📈
So maybe you’ve conducted your first customer satisfaction research study and received in-depth data about what your customers think and feel about your brand. What's next?
Let’s say, for example, respondents were asked to rate their satisfaction with Example Company ABC on several different factors.
'Ease of working with the company' scored neutral among customers, meaning most think the ease of working with the company is neither easy nor hard.
Here you were thinking working with your organization was easy, right? 🤦🤦🤦
By conducting customer satisfaction research on a regular basis, internal teams can create strategies and initiatives that address the ease of doing business on the fly.
Customer satisfaction survey data eliminates the guesswork. With the data, you know exactly why customers stated your organization was difficult to work with.
Knowing what needs to be improved is powerful and gives organizations an ongoing competitive edge.
Having consistent customer data rolling in allows your team to measure and benchmark performance regularly to see what tactics improved the score and which did not.
2. Evolving Customer Personas 😃😥🤩😨
One of the unique differentiators of a Drive Research customer satisfaction report is our ability to create customer personas that add a face and personal touch to data.
What is a customer persona? You’ve come to the right place.
To put it simply, instead of looking at results in a traditional executive summary format or using (sometimes boring) charts and graphs, a customer persona brings your data to life.
Let's face it, not all of us are research nerds who enjoy looking at spreadsheets and mounds of data.
Here’s a quick example of a customer persona from our customer satisfaction surveys.
“When Alexis first sees the Example Company ABC logo, she immediately thinks of the good service and the customer service representative she works with, Garrett. Alexis has been working with Example Company ABC for nearly 5 years and likes to do business with the firm because it’s local and has a quick turnaround.
Her business relationship with Garrett is a critical factor in her satisfaction. In the past 5 years, Alexis has reached out to competitors for services she didn’t know were offered by Example Company ABC. Alexis prefers to communicate via email, but is also an avid user of LinkedIn.”
Once a customer persona is crafted based on key results, organizations can focus on making the customer experience better for "Alexis". While Alexis is not an actual customer, teams can tie strategies to something more tangible rather than a simple chart or an executive summary.
Some places like Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos go as far as saving a seat at all meetings for their "Alexis".
Now, take this a step further to think about how you can tie these customer satisfaction survey results to recent marketing and advertising efforts.
The ability to have up-to-date and regular data helps organizations identify how well a campaign is working, if customers are aware of it, whether or not they are talking to colleagues, friends, or family about it, etc.
This data becomes much more real-time and actionable than one major study completed every few years, right?
As your customer personas evolve and change, your customer satisfaction surveys need to keep up the pace. Surveying every year or 2 years is not frequent enough to keep up with changing behavior.
3. Change and Adapt, Change and Adapt, Repeat 🔁
The sooner you collect data, the better. Also, the faster you react to the data, the better.
Customer satisfaction reports may include an executive summary, which could include several different pieces of information like a persona, infographic, and question-by-question results.
In a fast-paced world, access to this consistent customer satisfaction data arms your team with an evidence-based and fact-based strategy regularly.
For example, results could come back and say that instead of focusing on XYZ, customers would love it if you could do ABC.
Creating strategies based on feedback from your customers makes complete sense. It's not rocket science. If you know what customers want, it's easier to keep customers happy which keeps customer retention high.
4. Stay Tuned In With Your Customers 👂👂
Let’s face it, things change. When they do, you need to know about it.
If you conduct an annual customer satisfaction study, and the results come back mainly positive with a few areas of improvement, and your teams are geared up for some enhancements, who’s to say the customer needs may change in 3 months or 6 months?
Or what if several customers begin to have new problems? Wouldn’t you prefer to know about these issues sooner than 12 months from now?
My gut is telling me you’re nodding your head yes 😉😉
Regular customer satisfaction surveys open up a whole new channel to stay tuned in to the customer journey.
In a digital age, the customer experience happens 24-7-365.
And with 86% of people willing to pay up to 25% more for a better customer experience, you need a customer satisfaction program that produces frequent feedback.
Things To Consider For Your CSAT Survey Design
Consider your survey design when thinking about your respondents. You want to make it as easy for them to both answer your questions but also complete the entire survey to get as high quality data as possible.
Although it will depend on your goals, there is some survey design you can include which gives a better experience for your respondents.
Here are some things you should do and some things you shouldn’t do for your CSAT survey design:
Good Survey Design Components:
- Optimize your survey for mobile (and all devices)
- Use multiple questions/answer types
- Make the survey short
- Ask for your company rating
- Testing your survey before launch
Bad Survey Design Components:
- Make the survey too long
- Use leading or biased language
- Using industry-specific language (hard to understand)
- Not testing the survey at all
Actionable Ways to Use Data from Customer Research
Far too many organizations ask for and collect feedback but do nothing with it. 🤦♀️🤦♀️
One of the worst outcomes of customer satisfaction surveys is to collect feedback from customers and do nothing with it. Without any change or action, customers feel misled.
When someone offers constructive feedback on a product or service, they expect the organization to listen and make changes to improve.
No action leads to dissatisfied customers, stagnant growth, and even declining revenues.
Over time this will take its toll on your business because your competitors will eventually cater and make changes that catapult them ahead of you.
Not doing any customer satisfaction surveying is bad, but not taking action with customer satisfaction data is equally unhealthy for the business.
Value is judged by the actions, results, and outcomes you pursue from the market research, not by the number of pages and tables in a final report.
In this section, Drive Research will provide a few actionable recommendations for customer satisfaction data.
Immediate Action and Follow-up 🚩
It is important to translate the data immediately. If your market research company receives a red flag response or feedback from a customer requiring immediate follow-up, they should be making you aware.
Don’t wait until the end of fieldwork or report time to take action on these. It could be too late.
For context, 95% of customers share bad experiences with others.
As part of the customer experience (CX) and customer satisfaction work, your partner should regularly update you on cases that require attention.
Filters can be sent up in the survey programming to alert the administrator when a case meets certain conditions.
For example, if customers provide a rating lower than 5, answering “yes” to an unresolved issue, your team would be notified.
Better Understand the Customer Profile 🧔
Use the survey data to understand the demographics of your customer base. Understand genders, ages, household incomes, family status, marital status, etc.
Your results should be broken down by these core demographics so you can begin thinking about segmenting your marketing and sales strategies.
Integrate Decision-Making Criteria Into Marketing 📱
Don’t uncover only overall customer satisfaction, understand customer satisfaction on all levels, and all customer profiles. It will help segment and prioritize buckets that need improvement.
You may find males prefer television while females are more apt to be online.
Or you may see younger age groups notice your marketing on social media, while older age groups still gravitate to newspapers.
Some of the data may confirm what you already know, while some of it will be eye-opening.
All of the data should support your upcoming marketing strategies through evidence-based and fact-based insights.
Recommended Reading: 9 Examples of Data-Driven Marketing Strategies
Conducting a Customer Survey In-House vs. Outsourced
One of the first decisions you'll have to make when conducting a customer survey is whether it should be administered in-house or with a customer satisfaction survey company.
We’ll cover the key advantages of both options in this section. For a more in-depth comparison, I recommend bookmarking this blog post to read later, Is In-House or Outsourced Market Research Better?
Benefits of DIY (Do It Yourself)
The most commonly mentioned benefit of in-house client satisfaction surveying is the perceived cost savings.
I say perceived because if you have little experience with customer satisfaction surveys you'll likely take a lot more time than an expert.
If you make any mistakes, it will also take a lot more time to fix and straighten out.
As we continue through this guide, our customer survey research firm will share a few insider tips to try and alleviate these concerns.
In short, the fact that you are not paying to outsource your customer survey may lower your allotted budget for research up-front - but what other priorities won't you be able to accomplish if you are spending all of your time on the market research project?
Something to think about. 🤔🤔
Benefits of Outsourcing
Customer satisfaction is market research in its purest form. For this reason, it is in an organization's best interest to avoid collecting customer feedback in-house or through an online survey platform.
The value of using a third party for customer surveys goes beyond percentages and statistics.
They can provide context, comparisons, and interpretations of the data for your organization to easily take action with the results.
We outline five of these benefits below.
George Kuhn, President of Drive Research
1. Utilize the expertise of a third party 🧠
A customer feedback survey comes in many forms.
Perhaps it is a formal email inviting customers to complete a survey. Or, collecting customer feedback can be as simple as a comment card for consumers to fill out after they have finished their meal at a restaurant.
Every customer survey is different because every organization is different.
With online survey platforms, you are left to create and field a survey on your own. There is no trusted partner to help you each step of the way.
Unfortunately, DIY market research often results in organizations making common mistakes that ruin the survey experience for respondents, resulting in poor quality data and feedback.
A customer feedback survey company can help your team build and field a survey that is specific to your objectives, goals, and budget.
Based on these factors, a third party can recommend:
- What channel to use (online, phone, mail)
- What customer survey questions to include
- How long the survey should take customers to complete
2. Asking customers the right questions❓❓
Regardless of the method for collecting customer feedback, a key component of any survey is what questions are included.
If you’re not asking the right questions, or even not phrasing the questions in the right way, the results will likely not align with the objectives and goals you’ve set forth, to begin with.
A customer satisfaction survey company will consider your goals, industry, audience, and methodology when writing your customized survey.
They know exactly what does and does not work because they have great experience in this realm.
Survey writing is truly a science.
By outsourcing your survey rather than executing the research in-house, you can rely on a partner who has a background in survey writing, design, and programming.
3. Honest feedback = high-quality data 💎
Satisfaction plays an important role in your business. It is a leading indicator of measuring and improving customer retention.
In fact, 69% of US customers believe that customer service influences their loyalty. And better yet, happy customers are 87% more likely to purchase upgrades and new services.
The feedback collected from customer satisfaction surveys allows organizations to make data-driven decisions regarding many business, operations, and marketing strategies.
However, relying on data to drive business decisions is only effective if the market research data is vetted and trusted.
In regards to customer feedback surveys, respondents must be completely and brutally honest when sharing their experiences of working with your organization.
By using a third-party, customers will be more up-front about their feedback. If you survey your own, customers may not be willing to share the whole truth if they know you'll be reviewing the specifics.
Let’s take a look at two different scenarios.
Scenario #1: Using a DIY Customer Satisfaction Tool ❌
When conducting a customer satisfaction survey in-house or through an online survey platform, the survey is likely sent from a company email and branded with a company logo.
In doing so, the feedback received from the survey is already tainted.
People have a hard time being honest or sharing negative commentary for many different reasons. For example, customers often try to be polite or not to over-criticize a representative they’ve worked closely with.
Customers fear their name or personal information will be tied to criticism and will impact their future relationships moving forward.
While everyone loves hearing positive feedback, there is a lot an organization can learn and take away from receiving negative feedback in a customer survey.
Scenario #2: Partnering with a Customer Survey Company ✅
When conducting a customer satisfaction survey with a market research company, all customer information remains confidential with the third-party firm. Typically there is messaging in both the email invitation and the actual customer survey that speaks to this benefit.
When Drive Research executes a customer satisfaction study (whether it be online, by phone, or by email) respondents never speak directly with the organization seeking feedback.
For example, if conducting an online customer survey, respondents will only first receive an email from the organization such as the below template.
“[Company Name] has partnered with Drive Research, an independent market research company in Upstate New York, to conduct an important survey. Within the next week, you may be randomly selected by the market research company to participate in a short 5-minute survey to request feedback on your relationship with our organization.”
The customer survey email invitation is then sent by our enterprise online survey software to be completed.
By sending a feedback survey through a third-party, customers are much more likely to provide their honest feedback because their information always remains confidential.
Their direct responses are never tied to their names or other identifiable information.
This also gives our clients peace of mind knowing the data collected from our customer research is accurate, high-quality, and reliable – especially when deciding how to improve their customer relationships.
4. Easily interpret customer feedback 🗣️🗣️
Building and fielding custom surveys are just the beginning. You see, the real value in collecting customer feedback is interpreting the data in a way that makes sense and can easily be taken into action.
Online survey platforms like SurveyMonkey provide high-level results and leave you to make sense of the numbers.
If you are looking for more of an in-depth analysis you are either asked to pay for a higher subscription monthly fee or download a third-party app. It doesn’t have to be this complicated.
Using a third party helps with perspective and context, meaning the customer satisfaction company can share how your results compare to other organizations they have worked with.
- They will tell you if a 52% satisfaction rating is good or bad. ✅
- They will offer recommendations and the next steps for using this data to improve customer loyalty, protect profitability, and grow revenue. ✅
- They will use industry-preferred metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and other key performance indicators. ✅
Customer satisfaction surveys do not only benefit an organization in understanding the views of their current customers but taking this feedback and strategically using it to grow their book of business.
This starts with understanding what the data means and how it compares to others in your industry.
5. Benchmarking customer survey results 🏁
Benchmarking your customer survey results is another key factor in using a third party. Our customer satisfaction survey firm often talks through 4 common benchmarks with our clients all the time.
These include comparing your CSAT scores to:
- Best-in-class companies (Amazon, Apple, JetBlue, etc.)
- Industry peers (other companies in your industry across the country)
- Key competitors (your local or regional competitors)
- Your own company (comparing CSAT scores wave-over-wave)
A good customer satisfaction survey firm can help you structure these into your analysis.
Contact Our Customer Satisfaction Survey Company
Drive Research is a customer survey company located in New York. We work with a variety of organizations and industries across the country to assist with customer surveys.
Plus, as a full-service market research company, we can manage your entire project from start to finish. This includes survey design, programming, fieldwork, analysis, and actionable recommendations.
Contact Drive Research by filling out the form below or emailing [email protected].
Emily Rodgers
A SUNY Cortland graduate, Emily has taken her passion for social and content marketing to Drive Research as the Senior Marketing Manager. She has earned certificates for both Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
Learn more about Emily, here.