13 Best Practices For Designing Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT)
13 Best Practices For Designing Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT)
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6-8 minutes
There are many places you can go wrong in constructing and delivering
a customer satisfaction survey that can keep you from getting an
accurate picture of your customer experience. And most companies
do go wrong in their survey design and delivery–often in multiple ways.
(Alarming but true: If you send out a defective survey, it might be worse
than not surveying your customers in the first place, because of the
risk that the data you get back will be invalid but nonetheless used to
guide company strategy.)
1. Ask for the customer’s overall rating of their experience you’re your
company first. You don’t want to influence this answer by asking
smaller, more nitpicky questions before you get to the biggie; asking
your customer several individual questions and onlythen getting around
to asking for an overall rating reduces the validity of that all-important
rating.
7. Don’t use internal jargon. You need to speak the language of your
customers, rather than your internal lingo. (However: if all of your
customers are from the same industry, as is common in B2B, you can
certainly use jargon that is familiar to them.)
9. Don’t hassle recipients for not filling out your survey. Maybe remind
them once. I wouldn’t remind them twice. These are your customers;
they’re not obligated to do what they’re not interested in doing.
10. Include a free-form text field or fields to leave room for novel
responses that you may not have even considered and to offer your
customers an opportunity to express themselves.
13. If you send out similar surveys over time and expect to compare
results, it’s essential to understand that you cannot change anything in
your delivery approach, introductory materials, or survey content
without making your results impossible to compare as apples to
apples. One of the consistent findings of social psychology and
behavioral economics (aka “psychology with a name-change for
marketing purposes”) is the often-intense and disproportionate effect
of what would seem to be small, even trivial, changes in
circumstances. In the world of surveys, this means that, for example,
there can potentially be huge effects from changes as apparently
minor as:
[A note about this article's content: This is the most comprehensive peek
under the lid I’ve ever offered on great survey design. However, portions
of this have been recycled, with updates as appropriate, from a related
article of mine published here in 2014.]
[email protected] - www.micahsolomon.com -
(484)343-5881. Micah Solomon is an author, keynote speaker, trainer,
consultant and influencer. Customer service,…
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Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, keynote speaker,
influencer and trainer. Customer service, customer experience,
company culture, hospitality. (email, chat, web).