With the emergence of DIY survey platforms like QuestionPro, many businesses who had otherwise spend significant resources in outsourcing their customer feedback surveys are now brining the process back home.
While creating, sending, receiving and analysing the surveys is an effortless experience using platforms like Customer Experience, what can leave some executives rather puzzled is what comes much before this – planning.
So here are 5 simple and effective tips to plan your 360 degree customer feedback survey :
1.) Micro or macro: The first step is to decide what type of surveys you want to run. If your customer base is young and busy, you will find it much easier to get responses from them if you break down your survey into micro surveys. However, if your survey is logic dependent, that is, some questions are dependent on the answer of the previous questions, then it will be easier to get the entire survey answer at once, even if your customers might require some reminders to complete the feedback.
2.) General questions or logic and branching: Often surveys require complex logic and branching to be effective. In other word, instead of using general questions for all your customers, you might want to customize their later questions based on what they answer in previous ones. If your feedback is just to get some basic ideas on customer experience, you may not require much complex surveys. However, if you expect deep insights, you will have to spend some time using advanced logic and branching options.
3.) Close or open ended questions: In most cases you would find yourself using a mix of both. It is true that when it comes to analytics, it is easier to get concrete insights from close questions where customers can only choose from a set of given options while responding. The only risk in pursuing that is that the list of options may stretch too long. In which case 4-5 options with an option to type in their other response may be the best way to go. You may even chose to keep the entire answer open-ended in cases of “qualitative responses”.
4.) Mode of distribution: Your entire approach to surveys might change depending upon how you want to collect the responses. If you are a B2C company and have a significant customer base across social media platforms, then quick poll type questions might get you much more responses than embedded links would. If you use SMS or email survey integration, then you have the liberty or going for longer and complex surveys.
5.) Multiple or single surveys: Some organizations, especially ones in the business of consumer goods and services, might have customers belonging to distinctive demographics and questions will have to be customized based on certain aspects such as age, gender, geographic location and so on. While survey logic and branching mechanisms can greatly help, another option is that of creating different consumer surveys for different groups. While this is feasible when you have all the required customer data with you to identify them properly, a particular advantage of doing so is that the language and tone can be set to best attract responses without make the survey logic too complex.
