Customer satisfaction surveys are powerful tools for getting to know your audience better and connecting with them on a personal level.
In addition to understanding your audience’s exact pain points, a well-crafted customer satisfaction survey will give you the feedback for improving your product, services, or user experience (UX).
But, as valuable as customer satisfaction surveys are, there are common mistakes you must avoid at all costs to get the best return from your efforts.
To ensure you connect with insights that are accurate, informative, and help you meet the needs of your prospects head on, we’re going to explore five common customer satisfaction mistakes to avoid.
We’re also going to tell you how you can use ScoreApp to produce customer satisfaction surveys that deliver high-quality insights that will accelerate your commercial growth.
1. Asking unclear or confusing questions
To connect with customer insights that are accurate, honest, and empower you to improve your consumer-facing business strategies, you need to ask the right questions.
If your questions are irrelevant, confusing, or clunky, they’ll offer next to no value to your business. You’ll also frustrate your customers – and harm your brand reputation in the process.
To gather data that will lead you to commercial success, your questions should be:
- Concise, easy to understand, and jargon-free
- Neutral and not loaded with personal bias or opinions
- Directly relevant to the aims or goals you’re looking to achieve or the data you want to gather
ScoreApp’s customisable templates are responsive, well-designed, and come complete with pre-set questions you can tailor to the needs of your audience.
2. Using loaded or biased questions
Expanding on the last point: To connect with customer satisfaction data that’s honest, accurate, and provides actionable information, you need to avoid bias at all costs.
Too many businesses taint their customer satisfaction survey questions with opinions or personal bias. When that happens, the answers they receive are misleading.
Then, these businesses use their misleading customer satisfaction data to create campaigns, communications, and strategic ‘improvements’ that yield poor results.
To avoid this ‘customer satisfaction circle of despair’, you should use neutral and objective language. You should also ensure your questions are clear and written in plain, simple language.
Remember, your goal here is to gather insights that will improve your products, services, and experiences. Keep that in mind and you’ll connect with the data you need to succeed.
3. Making your survey (way) too long
Studies show that the ideal customer satisfaction survey length falls at around the seven to 10 (or around five-minute) mark.
Why? Well, lengthy surveys can become repetitive, as well as labour-intensive, and this can cause your respondents to drop off halfway through.
To avoid making your survey clunky or long-winded, you should stick to questions that are 100% relevant and essential to the information you’re looking to gather.
Read through your survey as a customer, and if there’s any content you feel is unnecessary, remove it. Keep it to around seven to 10 questions if you can.
ScoreApp’s online survey templates are optimised to keep everything clear, concise, and earn the best possible response rates.
4. Neglecting survey structure and flow
A disjointed or disorganised survey structure will dissatisfy your respondents and have a negative impact on your response rates. It will also reduce the quality of the answers you receive.
Overlooking survey flow or structure is a common customer satisfaction survey mistake – but not one you need to make.
To keep your survey logical and fluent, you should:
- Start with slightly more general questions and move onto ones that require detailed answers later on in the survey
- Make sure each question is relevant or connected in some way, to keep your respondents focused and engaged throughout
- Aim for a conversational and consistent tone to maintain a strong brand voice that resonates with your respondents
Taking note of these tips will get you the best-quality customer feedback for your business while providing your prospects with an engaging experience that will boost your brand reputation.
5. Overlooking branding and personalisation
For the best possible return on your customer satisfaction survey efforts, you need to steer away from generic branding, visuals, and messaging.
Droves of businesses fail to add a dash of personalisation to their customer satisfaction surveys, earning low response rates in the process.
Adding your brand’s logo, imagery, colour scheme, and even font will give your survey a more personal feel that’s not only consistent with the rest of your marketing communications, but will also increase your engagement levels in a big way.
You can work with ScoreApp’s customisable survey templates to add your brand logo and personalise their appearance to improve trust, credibility, and response rates.
Tip: Get inspiration for your survey creation efforts by browsing through our ever-expanding Made With ScoreApp library.
Tips for creating effective customer satisfaction surveys
Now you know which mistakes to avoid, let’s look at some tips for creating successful customer satisfaction surveys.
Set clear objectives
First of all, you need to know the exact aim of your customer satisfaction survey. Why? Because defining the purpose of your survey will keep it relevant and focused.
Do you want to gather customer feedback on a recent experience they’ve had with your brand? Do you want to get opinions on a certain service or product? Are you looking for insights into how your customers perceive your brand image?
Set your objectives and you’ll create questions – as well as a survey structure – that returns top-quality data.
Offer incentives
Whether it’s a personalised deal, a discount code, or the promise of a free trial, offering potential respondents an incentive will see your response rates soar.
As long as the incentive you offer potential respondents is decent and is likely to offer real value, your customer satisfaction survey will be a success.
Test your survey
We touched on this earlier, but it’s important, so we’ll say it again.
Before you launch your customer satisfaction survey to the public, test it thoroughly. You should also get other people within your business to give it a whirl.
Running survey tests will help you catch any questions that are clunky or confusing while ensuring the flow of your survey will maximise engagement. You should only hit the ‘publish’ button once you’re 110% happy with your efforts.
Avoid survey pitfalls and capture quality insights with ScoreApp
By avoiding these common customer satisfaction survey mistakes, you’ll earn consistently solid response rates and gather actionable insights that will give you an edge on the competition.
The main aim here is to be as clear, concise, and objective as possible while migrating from designs that are generic or impersonal.
ScoreApp’s extensive library of customisable templates will optimise your efforts so you can create slick, professional, and engaging online surveys. With in-built data analytics features, you can also use the platform to view, arrange, and use your survey insights with ease.
Are you ready to win with customer satisfaction surveys? Try ScoreApp for FREE.
