10. Tips for Great Surveys

Last week we talked about one of the most important elements of a satisfaction survey: knowing what you’re monitoring.

As you can see, the Survey Rule helps us understand where each survey is present along the Customer’s Journey thus enlightening us as to which interaction influences each response.

Surveys are one of the main information sources for the study of current customer experience and development of hypotheses for the evolution of said experience’s perception by the customer. This makes it paramount that we exercise daily concern over the quality of the data gathered by us.

Our customer is the main data source. Since customers are humans, it does not suffice for you to simply ask and believe you are getting a 100% honest and unbiased answer. It is necessary to know the correct manner of asking in order to get the answers you need.

To that end, you’ll need to concern yourself with 3 elements of your surveys:

• Timing
• Communication
• Metrics

Timing

You are well aware that the human brain does not perfectly store information and previous events. Performing a survey at the right time ensures the customer still has fresh memory of what we are asking them about.

That is not all there is to it however, as every interaction affects the customer’s perception of the brand, even if you ask clear questions, the customer’s latest interactions with the brand will always affect the answers they give.

For instance, if a customer has just had a terrible experience with a salesperson who mistreated them and you ask what they thought about their recent website shopping experience you can be sure their score will be affected by the terrible experience he has also had offline, regardless of you specifically mentioning the website.

In this scenario, you are at the danger of ‘reading’ decreased website satisfaction when in fact the problem is within the service provided by the sales staff.

The above takes place and you must be aware of it because the greater majority of customers only answer quantitative questions so you’ll be getting lower or higher grades without knowing what the customer thought when delivering that score.

Timing a survey correctly diminishes the uncertainties of motive for a 0 grade. Even without open comment you know the customer is evaluating their last experience with your brand.

Normally the best moment to send a survey is as quick as possible, right after a customer is through an interaction you wish to evaluate.

Communication

The customer must know who is talking to them and what is being asked. This may seem trivial but to not fool yourself, this is commonly the most complex element.

We must always work with the presupposition that our customer is not interested in receiving our surveys, that they are dispossessed of spare time and will not laboriously strive to answer our survey questions. Our work is to make it as easy as possible for them.

Timing it right is already a big step in that direction.

With timing you must also strive towards picking the correct channel.

Being conservative, the proper channel is that which your customer has chosen to relate with your brand. If you’re already firing surveys as quickly as possible, try to utilize that same channel for surveying. For example, make questions about the online purchasing experience on the webstore itself, ask about service as soon as it is over and while the customer is still in the chat or with their phone unlocked or email open.

For interactions which happen asynchronously, such as delivery or product use, emails are often a great choice.

And remember, no one is comfortable answering questions face-to-face with a person from the company so look for digital channels or be extra careful with in-person research.

Once the right channel is chosen, move on to the ‘what to communicate’.

There are two concerns:

1. Clarifying who we are and what we want.
2. Sparing cognitive effort

The first step is placing elements which speak your company’s language. Never give up your visual identity nor brand voice. Your customer is already accustomed to them and if the survey differs you’ll be adding another effort on top of answering it.

The second step is being extremely succinct and using highlight elements smartly so as to signal to the customer where to focus their attention. Elements such as bolding, coloring and word marking are very welcome here.

As a third step we have good customs. Using known systems and daily elements reduces the cognitive load of having to learn something new. For instance, surveys usually position the worst grade on the left and the best one on the right. The highest number on a scale is usually the best grade.

Don’t forget the fourth step: every survey is a moment for your brand to reach out to your customer. If you treat them as something boring or merely protocol, so will your customers. If your identity allows for it, be creative, understand new formats for communication and engagement.

Check out the examples below and see if the surveys follow each and everyone of these rules.

Video survey, sent the moment a customer finishes their online purchase:

Email Survey:

Whatsapp Survey right after product was delivered:

Metrics

Choosing which question to ask and how customers should answer it is the last element to ensure the data will be reliable.

The first analysis you must do is ask if the question ought to be transactional or relationship based.

Transactional surveys evaluate merely that step in the customer’s journey, they are such as: “how do you grade the delivery?”

Relationship questions as the name explicitates, grade the entirety of the relationship between brand and customer up to that moment.

Without knowing your company, what I can suggest is that you ask transactional questions along the customer’s journey and only one relationship question at the very moment a customer has their pain solved (or not) through the use of your solution. There are cases however where the scenario may be different — SaaS companies, for instance, can ask annual relationship surveys in order to know if a customer remains faithful to their solution.

As always, it depends on the objective you have when you decide to craft a survey.

When choosing to perform transactional surveys it is imperative that you ask questions which are simple to answer, that is why I recommend CSAT and CES metrics of short scale (3 to 5 options).

When you ask the question, ensure it is abundantly clear which step of the journey the customer is grading.

A very big advantage of surveying in this format is the low cognitive cost it brings to the customer, enabling you to gather quality data without compromising customer experience.

Whenever you opt for a relationship survey, there isn’t a better metric currently available other than NPS.

NPS is a metric that, although highly demanding from the customer, is vital to understand the degree of loyalty that customer professes about our brand. Such a metric has a high energy cost because it brings a complex question (recommendation degree) and a long scale (0 to 10) making the customer think a lot in order to answer.

Be careful not to cause survey fatigue: whenever performing NPS, make sure to have given at least 6 months interval between repeat queries to a customer.

If you mind these three elements your surveys will be spotless and you’ll be gathering trustworthy data.

Perhaps at this point you might be wondering about response rates.

Should you follow the principles of this article, the response rate shouldn’t worry you. Every element described here will contribute to increasing respondent customers.

So that you can track and benchmark around, today we aim for the ballpark of 20% response rate, but 15% and beyond is already considered a successful survey.