How to Ask Customers to Fill Out a Survey?

Customer experience is the major catalyst for growth. What your customers say, think and feel about your products or services can make a big difference to your business. 81% of companies who can deliver customer experience outperform their competition.

No one is a better critic than the ones who use your product; they can tell you what’s missing and where do you need to put in extra efforts. Therefore, surveying your customers is crucial for finding out your areas of improvement and optimizing your performance.

However, the question is – How to survey customers?

Yes, it is not an easy job to get your customer’s thoughts in your survey forms. However, there is always a way to get things done. Before getting to that, we need first to understand the reason for creating a survey and the ways to develop it.

Reasons why you should do a customer survey

Here are four reasons why you need to bother about creating customer survey forms for your customers:

Reason 1- Improve customer satisfaction

For rendering utmost customer satisfaction, you need to understand your customer’s preferences. A customer survey will help you in finding out what they like or dislike about your product. By collecting such feedback, you will know what you need to do to keep your customers happy.

Reason 2- Stimulate discussion

Discuss important topics of the survey with your customers. Give them a chance to elaborate on their views. You will not only get a broader perspective of your survey but also gain the client’s trust and loyalty.

They will feel good that you are genuinely interested in knowing how they feel about your products or services.

Reason 3- Determine product or service performance

Use the customer survey to improve the performance of your service or product. A little tweak and improvement can help in capturing the attention of more customers.

For that, you need to know what’s not working. So, ask product-specific questions to improve and offer an impactful product to your customers.

Reason 4- Figure out what matters the most

There are disconnects between what customers want and what companies think customers want. A survey can give you more clarity and help you in staying on the right track.

So, based on the survey answers you can plan your strategy to provide what the customer really wants.

After understanding the reasons for surveying your clients, your next step should be to define your goals.

Like, write down-

• What is the purpose of creating a customer survey?
• What are you exactly trying to figure out?
• Who do you want to send the survey to? (you can bifurcate the customer by demographics, business size and annual revenue)
• Which medium will you use to conduct the survey? (Like through social media or survey platforms like Zonka Feedback SurveyMonkey, SurveyAnyplace, and SurveyGizmo)
• What are you going to do with the data collected from the survey?

Once your goals are defined, it is time to write the survey.

Ways to create a customer survey that works

A survey form can help in measuring the success of your product. Below are a few ways to create an impactful survey that will help you in gathering the necessary information you need to improve your product.

1. Keep it short

Ensure your surveys are short and precise. No one has time to answer lengthy surveys. So, eliminate unnecessary questions and avoid using superfluous phrases in your questions. Every question should have a strong reason for being in your survey.

2. Create open-ended questions

Multiple choice questions or polar questions might seem appealing, but they aren’t able to collect enough information. Open-ended questions give customers more freedom and space to share their opinion about your product or services.

3. Use customer survey templates

The survey can be time-consuming, so it is better to use the premade templates offered by various survey platforms and edit it to suit your needs. You can even reuse your work, by saving the survey you created as a template and customizing it as per the current requirements.

4. Format it correctly

Avoid confusion and keep your survey focused by grouping similar kind of questions. Create sections and title it to bifurcate these groups. Provide guidelines and instructions to the customers, so they don’t face any trouble while answering the questions.

5. Be clear and specific

Ensure your question aren’t vague or general. The customer will leave the survey if they aren’t able to understand your question. Be straightforward and specific while creating questions. Explain everything that could be interpreted in more than one way.

6. Review your survey

Give your survey one last look before sending it to the customer to avoid any mistakes as it might affect your company’s reputation. To be on a safer side, even ask someone else to review the survey to ensure you haven’t missed any critical point.

7. Use tools

There are many tools available to build your survey forms like Survey Monkey and Formstack. With the aid of these high-end tools, you can easily create your online survey without any hassle.

Moreover, these tools can be integrated with a sales CRM making your work easier post the survey and help you in retaining your customers.

Wait, we are not done yet, there is more to this. Remember the main question?

Yes!!

How to ask customers to fill out a survey?

It is tough convincing the customers to take a survey. However, we cannot let out efforts go in vain. Customers’ feedback matters and we need to use all the possible tactics to get them to answer your survey questions. Here is what you can convince your customer to take a survey:

Warn them in advance

Do inform your prospect during the early stage of your sales process that you would be asking them to fill the survey form later. Let the customers know that you value their opinion and are looking forward to delivering the best-in-class customer experience.

Plant the seed early so that you won’t have to struggle later. Besides, this will also help in fostering relationship when they realize that you care about what your customers think and experience.

Nail the timing

Make sure your timing for asking the feedback is right. The best time to survey the customers is soon after their experience with your company. As the adage goes, strike the iron when it is hot.

So, when things are still fresh in their heads, it is the best opportunity to know the problems and determine areas for improvement. Moreover, you can quickly address their problems so that they have a good buying experience.

An estimated 67% of this customer churn is preventable if a customer issue is resolved at the time it occurs.

Offer incentives

Incentives are the best way to increase the response rate. Customers are willing to take a survey when they are incentivized. As per a research pre-paid incentive provides an almost 3 x (59% Vs. 22%) increase in response rate.

Either you can offer a free product or service for a specific time or offer gift cards and prizes. Gift cards and prizes are the most enticing rewards that easily attracts the attention of the customers.

Focus on users’ Interest

Customers are more likely to respond when they find something interesting. Something that is directly related to them like their experience. So instead of generalizing, pique their interest by making the survey customer-centric.

When you give their experience more attention, they tend to respond more quickly to the survey. “Going above and beyond involves making customers ”feel special”  and helping them out even when it may not make sense” – Neil Patel

Customer survey through multiple channels

Appearing in the inbox is the easiest way to reach your customers, isn’t it? However, are you sure you will be given importance amongst those esteemed client’s emails?

It is time that you change your approach and try different channels to reach your customers like you can post your surveys or various social media site or send it via SMS. There are high chances of getting noticed when you are on a device they use 24×7 like their cell phone.

Moreover, most of the customers are socially active so that it increases the chances of getting a response to your survey.

Publicize your surveys

Promote your survey. Distribute it everywhere; on your website, in your email signature, at the end of an article and on your social networking sites. The more you promote, the better response you will get. So, don’t forget to publicize your surveys.

Wrapping up

A customer survey can help in reducing your churns and growing your business. So, make the most of it. Moreover, a CRM can be helpful in storing and analyzing the data you collected through your surveys.

CRM like Salesmate can help you in retaining customer base and fostering long-term relations with your valuable customers. We all know the journey of a client doesn’t end once they sign the contract.

The real journey begins from there, and Salesmate can help you in strengthening this relationship with your customers. To learn more about Salesmate, take our 15 days free trial and check every single feature out!