Discover What Your Small Business is Doing Wrong (and Right) By Conducting Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Part 3: Delivering the Survey

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So you’ve decided to run a customer satisfaction survey. You have narrowed down the areas you would like to poll your customers about, and written out the questions you would like to ask. But even the best planned, most targeted survey won’t do you any good unless it gets into the hands of your customers. Further, your customers are busy people, and even if they happen upon your survey, they may need a little extra incentive to actually answer those questions that are so vital to your business. Read on for ways to deliver your survey and persuade your customers to put in their two cents.

First, it’s always a good idea to investigate how the competition delivers their customer satisfaction surveys. Chances are you run into a survey in one form or another when you go out to eat (in the form of comment cards on the table), when you call an 800 number (in the form of a push button survey at the end of the call), on a website (in the form of a pop up ad or link) and even in government offices (in the form of a suggestion box.) All of these methods are viable ways of delivering surveys to your customers, and all depend on the type of business you run and the rate of return you expect. Before you get started, be prepared for a low response rate – 25% to 30% is about average, though you can increase your odds by offering incentives.

Your first order of business is to decide how to format your survey. If you own a brick and mortar store, your format could be as simple as a printed page on a clipboard or a self-addressed and stamped insert into your customer’s shopping bag. Though the format is simple, tabulating the results of a paper survey can become a logistical nightmare as you find yourself surrounded by piles of papers or little cards. Remember the hanging chad debacle in Florida? Combine that with actually have to decipher a customer’s rushed handwriting. You’ll be in for a long night.

A much simpler way to format your survey is to create it with online with a tool such as SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, or SurveyGizmo. These survey tools allow you create a survey online, and then provide you with a link which you can embed in a website or email, or even print out and hand out to customers in a brick and mortar store. The biggest upside to online surveys is tabulation. SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, and SurveyGizmo will allow you to get a quick overview of your respondents’ answers, or analyze them question by question. You can even compare two questions (i.e. gauging what the 18-25 year old demographic thought about your troubleshooting helpline) and print out your results in an easy-to-read chart, graph, or table.

Further, some people will prefer the anonymity of taking a survey on the internet. Also, an internet survey doesn’t waste paper, a move the planet will appreciate, considering that odds dictate your survey will likely get discarded by 75% to 85% of potential respondents.

Whether you decide to survey your customers on paper, on the internet or by some other method (such as a phone survey), you’ll notice that many customer service survey delivery methods rely on catching the customer while you have them as a captive audience. For example, restaurants offer comment cards in that short window between finishing your meal and waiting for the check to come back. If you own a brick and mortar store, you can take advantage of this method by printing out your survey and offering it to customers while they wait in line. Another method of survey delivery, if you own a brick and mortar store, is to ask customers if they would like to be on your emailing list. As you collect names, you can send the survey via email.

If you own an ecommerce store, you have a bit more of a challenge. Many people shop on the web precisely because there are no lines and no downtime! Sure, you can create your survey online and then put up a link to it on your survey on your site, or as a popup after customers have made their purchase, but because the customer hasn’t received their item yet, this isn’t the best way to deliver your survey (unless, I suppose, you are simply surveying your customers about their experience on the site.) A better way, though, is to send the customer satisfaction survey as a follow up after the product has been received.

And that brings us to the all important idea of incentives. In part 2 of this series, we mentioned that the response rate on customer surveys is generally about 25% to 35%. You can increase those odds, though, but offering incentives to customers to fill out your survey. For example, if you own a brick and mortar store, offer your customer a 5% discount for taking your survey today. (Hey, why not make that discount contingent on taking your survey AND joining your mailing list?) Or, if you choose to conduct your survey online, offer a coupon upon completion. Other incentives include entering survey takers into a drawing for a prize or offering a small free gift.

As with leading questions, try not to unduly influence your survey takers by offering them swag. After all, wouldn’t you be more likely to giving someone a glowing recommendation if they had just offered you a gift? The same goes for customer satisfaction surveys. If you want real answers – and real feedback on how you can make your business even better – encourage respondents to tell you how they really feel. The truth might hurt sometimes, but it won’t hurt as much as when you go a out of business because of a customer satisfaction problem you never knew you had.

We hope this series on customer satisfaction surveys for high volume small businesses has been helpful to you. If you implement any of these strategies, or have implemented them in the past, we would love to hear your story!