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Satisfaction survey : The checklist
Today, almost 9/10 customers do not respond to satisfaction surveys. The reason: Customers do not open surveys because they find them too long and not easily digestible. This checklist will enable you to maximise the opening of your questionnaires and increase the conversion rate.
Let the customer express himself freely. Ask as few closed questions as possible.
Use an appropriate tone. Too formal a tone creates distance and reduces response rates.
Personalise the questionnaire request. Sending the questionnaire on behalf of an employee is more attractive than sending it on behalf of a company.
Lay the groundwork: Send a survey based on a specific need, not just for fun. Ask yourself the questions: "Why do I want to send this survey?" and "What are my expectations?"
Choose the right indicators: Avoid using the Net Promoter Score for all your questionnaires. For OKR measurement other tools (CSAT, classic evaluations or Likert scales, etc.) are often better choices.
Target: Avoid mass surveys. Focus on a random subset to avoid sampling bias. Aim for circles of distribution where you start with 10% of your sample, look at the first results and gradually increase your reach. This allows you to test, spot problems, change questions and avoid spamming.
Initiate: Pre-dispose your customers to take your surveys. Example: At the end of a call or ticket, ask your advisors to tell customers that they will receive a survey. They will be much more likely to respond and give their time.
Singularity effect: If you have the opportunity, choose a human sender (jean@alloreview.com) rather than a corporate sender (marketing@alloreview.com). Your customers care much more about a representative of your brand than your brand itself.
Keep it simple: Avoid putting too much emphasis on your brand in emails when asking for customer feedback. Your brand name and logo in the email signature is sufficient.
Accept responses: Avoid addresses such as do_not_reply@alloreview.com. They indicate that you don't care about hearing from your customers (a paradox for a survey). In addition, direct responses allow you to gather valuable information.
Careful with the subject line: Be careful with the subject line. Try to stand out a little to avoid filtering the information. Just be sure to avoid unethical clickbait. Highlight a benefit or ask a question to interest your customers.
Contextualise: In the email, formulate your question according to the moment of the customer journey. Use personalisation if possible (e.g. "[Name] following your visit to our shop on rue Saint Honoré, we would like to have your feedback").
Be concise: CUSTOMERS DO NOT READ. Get to the point with a quick introduction. Avoid walls of text and long paragraphs before your survey question. A brief two-line introduction is often sufficient.
Guide: Give your customers a guide as to how long the survey will take them. Announce a time frame in the email beforehand. Once on the questionnaire, a timeline or a page counter before the end reduces the abandonment rate (e.g. 3/5 before the end).
Provide a benefit: When designing the survey, ask yourself the questions "Why should participants be interested?" and "What's in it for them? Highlight the benefit and how it will help you create a better experience for them.
Incentives: To increase the response rate to your surveys you can use incentives such as post-send coupons. But don't overuse them. These incentives tend to distort the results and are a sign that you have not sufficiently nurtured the customer experience beforehand. This is something that can be worked on over time by creating a strong relationship with your customers.
Spark effect: Starting the survey should require as little effort as possible from the respondent (spark effect). The first trigger should be low friction. For example, if possible, integrate the first question directly as an interactive widget in your e-mail. Experiments have shown that this method achieves better results than a static link saying "Start survey here".
Keep it short: Ask only the questions you absolutely need to keep respondents' time. Survey completion rates drop by 10-20% for each additional question. If your survey software allows it, try to capture partial survey data to maximise your usable data set.
Get to the point: Don't waste your customers' time with questions about their profile (e.g. asking for their email address in an e-mail survey). This information can be obtained very easily. Get to the point by asking important questions.
Disclose questions gradually: If your survey has more than one question, order them by difficulty. In other words, post the simplest and shortest questions first to increase the response rate.
Be clear: Don't leave your customer in doubt. If you ask a question about experience, make it clear whether you are talking about the overall experience with the brand / last interaction with an advisor / last use of the product...
Nudges: With open-ended questions you can nudge the customer to talk about a topic you want them to with simple text like "Our customers have spoken about X, Y and Z". You can also encourage respondents to be as comprehensive as possible with a message like "Please be as detailed as possible to help us understand".
Qualitative: Quantitative data will give you an indication of what your customers think on average. But qualitative gives you insights into the "why" and helps you make decisions more easily.
Nurturing: Don't abandon customers who have taken the time to complete your survey. Send them a post-feedback message or email, as personalised as possible. Show your customer that their time is not wasted.
Adaptive survey: If a customer talks about a topic in an open-ended question in your survey, do not ask them about that topic in the rest of the questionnaire. You need to show the respondent that you are listening to them and that you value what they say.
Relationship: Listen to your customers. Once the survey is completed, don't leave them with nothing. Post a message and a personalised call-to-action based on their satisfaction or the issue they raised. For example, if your customer mentions a dissatisfaction related to a technical problem in their feedback, you can display "We're sorry you've experienced a technical problem, you can click on the button below to be put in touch with our service".
Adapt: The customer is giving their time to give you feedback, adapt to them and offer to give their feedback verbally as if they were sending a voicemail to a friend. AlloReview understands your customers' voice in 82 languages!
Save time: Open questions can take longer to process than quantitative feedback. With AlloReview, AI does the work for you! All opinions are transcribed on a dashboard in real time with the topics raised and the reasons for satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Make it visible: Don't let your survey responses sit in Excel spreadsheets. Make customer feedback visible on a dashboard.
Did this article make you want to know more about AlloReview? Request a demo here.