In today's business world, you cannot afford to give customer satisfaction just lip service. The competition is getting tighter, and word of mouth spreads faster than wild fire, thanks to the internet. You need to listen to your customers at every step of their journey and improve their experiences proactively. But how is this possible?

That's where the customer experience survey steps in. This read will help you click right in all boxes when designing a CX survey. 

What is a Customer Experience Survey, and Why Does It Matter?

A customer experience survey is a process of capturing your customers' feelings and thoughts when experiencing your company, products, or services at various touchpoints. It employs both open-ended questions and structured data.

Your customer's needs and feelings matter more than yours. So understanding their experience is crucial if you're looking to take your customer service to the next level. The ultimate result is improved customer satisfaction and a loyal customer base.  

How to Conduct a Customer Experience Survey

Your CX survey needs to gather quality data that you can turn into strategic insights. These insights will then form the basis of your actions towards improving closely-knit customer relationships. So, how do you conduct a robust survey?

1. Have a purpose

Start with the end goal in mind: what will your survey results help you achieve? Knowing the decisions in advance allows you to have a clear focus. Throughout the whole survey, your actions will be more intelligent and targeted. 

2. Identify the correct type of survey

Be sure to you're using the right survey. Depending on your purpose, we have relationship versus transactional surveys. Most companies start with the former before combining both to continue getting customer satisfaction insights.

A relationship survey involves getting to know your customers' overall feelings about your brand. You have to conduct it quarterly, yearly, or periodically to help you:

• Get insights into your customers' overall satisfaction and loyalty
• Understand the general perception of the organization and offerings
• Benchmark against external and internal KPIs
• Identify areas that need improvement

A transactional survey, on the contrary, aims at getting more inputs to maximize different touchpoints across the buyer's journey. Essentially, you dive deeper into buyers' satisfaction concerning particular touchpoints. It helps you:

• Pinpoint your strengths and weakness in various interaction points
• Create and monitor specific KPIs for different teams
• Get helpful insights and data at the transactional level

3. Identify target group

Avoid blasting your survey questionnaires to anyone and everyone. Instead, tailor and focus your survey carefully on a specific audience. When defining the target audience, be sure you:

• Can obtain the feedback that will help you achieve your survey's purpose
• Know the best ways of reaching them and increasing their response rate
• Have their contact details
• Avoid asking them the information that you already know

4. Know the right timing

Remember to adjust your relationship survey's timing to fit well with the target respondents. When can they most likely give their feedback? Also, be sure the surveys fit well with the business's internal processes. That way, you'll get the results in time to influence crucial decisions.

On the other hand, if possible, send transactional surveys immediately after the relevant transaction. You don't want to get stale and unreliable answers due to the transient nature of human memory. Sending the surveys as soon as possible also boosts your response rate.

5. Put insights into actions

It's time to follow up on the collected information and act upon it. Did you get negative feedback? Use open-ended questions to dig deeper to the core of their dissatisfaction. Allow them to give more detailed information anonymously. Internally, be sure to address every issue raised proactively.

For positive feedback, optimize them to meet and exceed their expectations. This action helps cement your loyal customers' trust and bring more opportunities. 

Why are Surveys Essential for Business Success?

With a robust CX survey, you'll no longer be in the dark concerning what your customers are thinking about your brand. Also, you get deeper insights into the entire customer support and journey within your company. More reasons you need to conduct a CX survey include:

1. Improves your customer retention

Make your customer happy, and they will return for more. When you track how your customer interacts with your business, you can unearth any frustrations along the journey. You get to anticipate any service or product that's heading in the wrong direction. 

Also, it becomes easier to forecast future sales based on customer loyalty. The surveys allow you to incorporate effective changes to keep your customers happy and around.

2. You can Identify your promoters

Satisfied and happy customers will want to spread the good news to their friends and family. With a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, you'll not only identify your brand advocates and promoters but also know the detractors. 

Furthermore, the insights and data allow you to send targeted emails or SMS to customers, giving you a chance to persuade detractors to become your loyal advocates. 

3. Help you collect data for informed decisions

The backbone of robust decisions is high-quality data, not mere flukes. A CX survey gives you this data to help your company make wise decisions and please your customers. 

The Importance of Finding Out What Customers Want

A serious company knows that investing in customer satisfaction is the key to thriving. And surveys help you identify your customers' pain points, desires, and needs. Why?

1. Loyalty is valuable

Gone are days when your only competitors used to be the brick-and-mortar stores across the street. Nowadays, your business also has to contend with online stores worldwide selling similar products. That's why price wars are now common.

The secret to avoiding these wars is to cement your customer loyalty. So listen to them and improve your customer service. That way, they will not find any reason to look for other brands. And as you know, convincing a recurrent customer is cheaper than trying to find new ones. 

2. Solve issues

Customers will stay where their grievances are handled professionally. So bring humanity into your customer experience by offering your clients a listening ear and improving your products accordingly.

Problems are inevitable in any company. The good news is that you can proactively anticipate them and act accordingly using CX surveys. Doing that as soon as possible helps to reduce the chances and effects of negative reviews and lawsuits.

Identify and solve dissatisfaction, and you'll prevent inevitable errors from snowballing into a much more significant threat. Who wants to see their brand that took many years to build come tumbling down within a few days?

3. Boost brand recognition

As the internet continues to reign, a single customer review online can create far-reaching ripples that can either break or cement your brand. If customers perceive that your customer service is professional, they'll consider your company and come back with more people. 

You see, loyalty and familiarity outperform lower prices by far. Commitment to satisfy current customers helps you open opportunities for free marketing. You'll gradually notice people leaving positive comments about your brand in conversations. And potential customers consider word of mouth to be more trustworthy than what a company's CEO says.  

4. Slice through the competition

Consumers don't always consider price in their buying decisions. Improving your customer service is a sure-fire trick if you're looking to make your business stand out from the pack. 

Satisfy your customer's needs, and you'll not have to reduce your prices to stay in business. In fact, with better customer service and higher-priced goods, potential customers will perceive your brand more positively.

5. Keep improving

Keeping up with the dynamic and fast-moving world of business can prove to be challenging. Failure to change with the ever-changing innovations and customer needs poses a risk of becoming obsolete. 

Capturing your customer emotions is crucial if you're looking to pinpoint areas for improvement as early as possible. Changes in even seemingly small things like your store's layout and interfaces can hugely impact your customer satisfaction. 

You see, it's your customers that keep your business alive. So commitment to their satisfaction is the secret to remaining dynamic and flexible enough to continue thriving.

Common Mistakes That Can Be Avoided When Conducting a Customer Experience Survey

Some of the mistakes that haunt companies in designing surveys include: 

1. Asking too many questions: Bombard your respondents with pages of questions, and your response rate will plummet. Keep it short and sweet- just 5 to 10 questions are enough to collect the most critical information.
2. Asking mandatory questions: Don't expect to get an answer to every question. You don't want them to lose interest and flee away halfway.
3. Going too deep in the demographics: Only use demographic questions where it's needed to keep the survey short. 
4. Using technical terms and jargon: Your respondents may not understand most of the terminologies in your industry. So keep everything simple to avoid confusion and get accurate answers.

Tips on how to make surveys more effective

Here are sure-fire tips and tricks you need for a survey that will help you achieve better customer experiences:

1. Set clear goals: Pen down what you need the survey to achieve. Is it the entire customer experience or feedback on a single interaction? 
2. Use open-ended questions: With these questions, you get better answers than close-ended ones. The more the respondents open up, the richer the insights get.
3. Use the right survey tool: You can employ a tool that allows you to analyze real-time responses. Some of the software will enable you to resolve dissatisfactions before negative reviews start rolling.
4. Review survey: Don't send the questionnaires before reviewing their design. A pretest via a focus group will reveal any loose ends and help you understand insights better. 

Wrap Up

You now understand how to create CX surveys that work wonders. For further help monitoring your customer across your platform and company, Sendlio will come to your aid. Get in touch today.