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Customer satisfaction surveys can provide an extremely valuable metric of how well you are doing at meeting the needs of your market.
Want to see what your satisfaction survey could look like?
As you design the questions you must keep in mind the purpose of the information you are trying to gather and try to be as direct as possible about getting that information. The typical customer satisfaction survey question goes something like this:
How satisfied are you with the product/service you received?
Completely satisfied
Very satisfied
Mostly satisfied
Neutral
Mostly unsatisfied
Very unsatisfied
Completely unsatisfied
This tells you how satisfied the customer feels, but that is not actually a very useful piece of information. Because who knows what satisfaction means to any single one of your customers? Each one will have been looking for different things, and will have different thresholds for feeling satisfied. So if you run a one-question survey with only that question, and at the end you find that 86% of your customers are at least mostly satisfied, then what?
You can ask this type of question, but if you do you'll need to qualify it with additional qualitative questions that will allow you some ability to interpret the data in a useful way. You should write each of your survey with the following question in mind: What will I be able to do with this information? By using this purposeful approach to your survey design, you will be much more likely to extract information that is directly relevant to your business goals.
This is the reason that many authors recommend crafting your surveys more as customer loyalty surveys. In many cases, this is a good strategy. Still, your questions should focus in more on actions than attitudes. For example, your customer loyalty question could read like this:
Will you buy from us again?
Definitely
Probably
Maybe
Not sure
I'd have to think about it
Probably not
Definitely not
This question is more likely to elicit real attitudes toward your product or service, and will provide a simple gauge of customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, this question also provides you with a fairly limited amount of fairly generic data. It is prone to careless answering and misinterpretation. Consider the following version of the above customer satisfaction survey question, rewritten to elicit more specific and personal responses:
How satisfied are you with our product/service?
I am going to recommend it to someone this week
I'm very satisfied and will continue to buy/use it
It's not perfect, but better than I would expect from other companies
I have no complaints, but it isn't anything special
There are some things I would change, but it'll do
I'm only going to use it until I can find something better
I wish I never would have ordered it
This question is much more engaging to the reader, and so will tend to elicit a more careful and specific response. It also opens up a good opportunity for an open-ended followup question, such as "Why is this the case?" or "Can you say more about that?" These types of qualitative questions are less efficient in that they must be gone through one at a time by actual humans. But the answers you'll get here are the real meat of the survey. They provide information you never expected to get, and are excellent fodder for brainstorming meetings.
