How to design a perfect survey

Keep in touch with your customers and improve your business

Staying in touch with your customers after they've purchased your product/service is really important in order to make sure that they come back to you in the future. Turning your customers into loyal customers can be tricky and you need to prepare a proper strategy to achieve this. 

Send them a survey!
When you make an online purchase, you can be almost sure that you will get a "satisfaction survey" few days afterwards. For some brands, sending such survey is an obvious part of their sales management. Usually they will ask you a few simple questions, such as "How did you like the product?", "Was the delivery on time?" or something similar. Sometimes you answer these surveys, sometimes you don't. I, for example, usually only answer when I'm really happy with the product and I'll add some positive comments; or the opposite, when I'm really dissatisfied and I write a review with a complaint. But sometimes, when the survey looks short and simple and I get it by email, I spend 2 minutes and answer it. When the survey is too long, with complicated questions and open answers, I usually just close the window/delete the email.

So, if you're thinking about setting up a satisfaction survey for your own company, you need to make sure of two things:
1)  that people will actually take the time to fill it in, so make it short, simple and interesting
2) that the survey results will be actually useful, giving you usable data for growth and improvements

Keep the process in mind
When you're making your own survey, you should integrate it with your software, so all the results will be directly analyzed and added into your system. (don't end up with hundreds lines of data in a messy excel sheet!)

There are few steps for creating a good survey:
1. Design your survey 
2. Test your survey
3. Share your survey
4. Collect data and statistics from your survey

1. Design your survey 
There are several things to keep in mind when designing your survey. You should make sure it has the look & feel of your company (use your logo, company colours, etc). By doing that, your survey really gives the impression that it's coming to your customer directly from you and it's not just a general online form.

It's really important to keep your survey short and simple. And of course, to ask relevant questions. No one will want to spend 30 minutes answering lengthy and useless questions. If you make it short and to the point, you have a higher chance that people will actually finish the survey and you'll get the desired results.
If you sold a product, you can ask about your customers' satisfaction, about the delivery, the packaging, whether they found it easy to buy online using your website and a few other basic things. If you organized an event, you can ask people how they liked the venue, the food, the program, etc. This way, you will end up with useful data from answers.
For example, if you find that many people are complaining about the lack of food at the event, you can consider ordering more for the next event. Or, if a lot of customers complain about late deliveries, you should have a talk with the delivery company you use.
Create a survey while thinking about how to improve customer satisfaction, hence how to make them come back and stay loyal.

2. Test your survey
Once you finish drafting your survey, always, always test it yourself first. Send it to your own email address, check whether all the links are working, whether all the images are appearing correctly, whether it works on all internet browsers, etc.
You can also try to fill it in yourself - to see how much time it'll take and whether the questions are clear and understandable - and useful.

3. Share your survey
So, your survey is ready, everything has been tested and it works fine. Now it's time to share it and put it to good use.
There are several options for sharing your survey. If you make a general one about your products/services and you want to see your customers' satisfaction (and/or their ideas for improvement), you can simply share the survey using your database. And then just wait and collect the results.
Another option is to set up "post-experience" survey. You can send it to all participants that attended your event.  This can help you to understand the good parts of your event and the parts that need improvement.
If you're selling products online, you can also use automatic survey. For example, every time someone buys your product, they will automatically get a survey by email (let's say 5 days after the purchase). With such system, you can collect data on an ongoing basis.

4. Collect data and statistics of your survey
You managed to create and share your survey. Now what? Well, now comes the most important part - you need to analyze the data you have collected. If you created a one-time survey to find out about general customer satisfaction, you can easily understand your strong and the weak points. This can help you to keep up the good work and make improvements. If you also leave an empty text field for "other comments", some people might even write interesting and helpful points providing new ideas on how to improve your company.
If you set up automatic survey that will be sent to everyone after purchasing your product/service online, you can keep collecting your data and evaluate them on ongoing basis. Yet again, this will help you to understand what your customers (dis)like and will enable you to look for improvements.

Make it count!
If you really want to collect a lot of answers and make sure that many people will participate in your survey, offer them something!
The possibilities are endless. If someone fills in the survey, you can offer free delivery on their next purchase. Or you can offer an extra month of service with 50% discount. Or, if you want to make it bigger, you can enter people who complete the survey into a prize draw with a cool prize (laptop, phone, plane ticket, etc). You can be sure that with such special offer, more surveys will be completed.

Design your own survey today

Here at Odoo, we are developing our own survey module. Totally customizable and adaptable to your own needs. Do you want to try it on your own? Check our demo where you can play in the back-end, create your own questions, select various options for answer fields, analyze the results and discover more about the whole Survey module.

Follow the link to the demo and try it on your own!

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