Why are your customer survey initiatives failing? — Part 4

ask more [appropriate] questions instead

Most companies regularly undertake customer surveys; however, often find it difficult to realise value from them. Here’s our take on some of the big reasons why these initiatives can fail and some practical tips on what you could do about them:

1. Culture — discussed in our first part.

2. Lack of executive buy-in — discussed in our second part.

3. Organisational misalignment — discussed in our third part.

4. Not asking the right questions (the focus of this story)

5. Analysis paralysis

6. Undertaking surveys manually

Surveys are one of the simplest and most cost-effective means of collecting data…and also one of the riskiest. Ask the wrong questions, you’ll collect the wrong data, form incorrect hypotheses and make sub-optimal or even incorrect decisions.

Start with the end in mind

How do you start off? Do you think about all the questions you’d like to ask your customers or do you take a step back and think about the big picture — Why are you conducting the survey in the first place?

It’s far more effective to think about what answers you need to solve your problems and work backwards to what are the right questions to ask your customers. In the context of customer experience, for example, you may be interested in understanding themes such as why are/aren’t your customers loyal, what am I doing well that’s building satisfaction, where and why are my customers struggling, etc..

Keep it simple

With people’s attention spans getting shorter and shorter (or are they?), there is a need to keep surveys short and simple. Mobile phones are now the go-to tool for pretty much any task — if your surveys are too long and not optimised for mobile, the only data you may get is a poor response rate.

As you build your survey, ask yourself and your team: “How are we going to use the results from this specific question?” If you can’t answer this then remove the question from the survey. Another way to view this is to ask yourselves “Is this a need-to-know or a nice-to-know?” and eliminate the latter.

Avoid using complicated words and words that could have multiple interpretations. Can you ask your questions in a shorter, simpler, and clearer way? Similarly, are you trying to ask too many questions within a question or can you break them up into smaller questions?

In terms of customer experience, there are tried and tested ways in which you can ask your customers just a few questions to develop good insights.

Asking the right type of questions

Here’s a short checklist to see if you can improve the types of questions you ask in your surveys:

1. Are you asking leading questions? We all want to be told that we’re doing things well, but surveys should be about honesty rather than just gathering positive feel-good responses.
2. Are your answer options appropriate? Things to watch out for include ensuring your options are mutually exclusive (i.e. there is no overlap), ensuring you have full coverage of options (do you need an ‘Other’ option with a free text box as an example?), ensuring your options are balanced (same availability and weighting for the negative responses as the positive ones) and reducing the use of polar (Y/N) questions.
3. Are you understanding the ‘why’? Include some open-ended questions for customers to explain the ‘why’ so that you can qualify responses and understand root causes.

Asking the questions at the right time

Gone are the days when you could get away with surveying your customers over a long time period (quarterly, bi-annually, etc.).

Nowadays, it makes more sense to survey your customers regularly but with an end result still in mind. Many companies ask customers for their feedback post a key touch point in the customer journey. The trick is not to survey the customer too long after this interaction and technology makes it easy to do this.

Let’s look at some examples…

Say you’re a bank and you wanted to get feedback on an account opening experience. It wouldn’t make much sense to send a customer a survey, more than a few days of opening their account. Ideally, you want to survey them while the interaction is still fresh in their mind and they are more inclined to give you honest and relevant feedback.

Say you’ve just delivered your customer’s online order — send out a survey request within the same day.

Say you’ve just closed a support ticket for an issue raised by a customer — that’s ideally when you want to get feedback on the customer’s issue resolution experience.

Next time you’re about to hit that send button, run through this checklist and see how you can optimise your survey!

Talk to us! We’re keen to hear your thoughts — what’s worked for you and what hasn’t? Do you have any other good practices to share?