Why Your Customer Satisfaction Surveys Aren’t Performing Well + Fixes

Customer satisfaction surveys provide you with important data that can help you increase customer experience and retention. Therefore, this one tool has the power to give you a significant boost in revenue. But sadly, only about 9% of consumers bother answering surveys at all (Customer Thermometer). And the majority of those have a ‘negative bias’, which means they complete the survey only because they had a bad experience and want to complain about it. The data you’ll get through such survey results definitely won’t help you much. Therefore, you need to take a good look at your customer satisfaction survey, determine if it contains some of the main mistakes that make people drop them, and fix those right away.

3 Customer Satisfaction Survey Mistakes to Avoid

1. You have many open-ended questions

Open-ended questions can be good as they give your customers a chance to share their personal opinion in detail. However, the average person today gets distracted within 8 seconds or less. Therefore, if your survey has many open-ended questions that require typing in responses, you will be losing customers at the first one.

The solution is to create a survey that will have answer options already available, so the consumer only has to click on the one they agree with. The point is to create a survey that one can complete within a minute or two maximum. However, as open-ended questions can be a valuable tool, you should tag one or two in the end and make them skippable. This way, people who want to write more about their experience will be able to do that.

2. Your questions are vague

Answers to vague questions will be vague also, if your customers will even bother answering them at all. Therefore, they won’t provide any valuable information. What you need is to learn from a customer satisfaction survey done right. KFC is a great example to follow because this brand is renowned for its focus on customer service, and the great survey they have is one of the reasons why the company can deliver such a good experience throughout all its branches.

All questions and answer options in the survey must precise and focused on the exact areas of customer experience that one comes into direct contact with. Simply put, you have to ‘guide’ your customer through analyzing their experience step by step, not hope they will get there themselves by asking broad questions like ‘do you feel like the service was good?’ Instead ask ‘was the server polite?’, ‘was your request answered within 5 minutes or less?’ or ‘did the agent offer additional information on bonuses and available discounts?’

Answers to such questions will be more valuable to you because you can process them quickly and immediately enact changes that will boost customer experience.

3. You only give your customers one way to complete a survey

Customer satisfaction survey response rates vary greatly based on the method of survey delivery, from 57% for in-person surveys to 13% for in-app ones (Survey Anyplace). This means that you can get the best response by giving your customers some options.

However, do not make any of these surveys a mandatory step and avoid making them pop up too often. You don’t want your customers to get annoyed with these reminders.