Brands must listen to and understand their customers on the path to delivering flawless customer experiences. Experience surveys stand at the forefront of methods used to measure customer experience.
Experience surveys serve as the entry point to gauge and work towards providing an impeccable experience for users of a product or service.
Businesses utilizing the possibilities of the digital world now offer experience surveys to their customers through various channels. Where do businesses go wrong when they fail to attain desired outcomes from experience surveys? The answers to our questions lie within the continuation of our article, under five headings.
1- Avoid Ambiguous Statements, Keep Your Questions Clear and Concise
Strive to frame your questions in a simple and understandable manner. Opt for easily comprehensible expressions over elaborate and high-sounding sentences favored by marketing departments. Ensure your questions are clear and comprehensible for all.
Vague questions can hinder the accuracy and meaningfulness of responses. Here are some examples of vague questions:
“How did you find the product?”
This question is ambiguous as it doesn’t specify which aspect of the product is being referred to.
“What are your thoughts on the quality of service?”
This question is vague as it doesn’t specify which service’s quality is being evaluated or which aspects it encompasses.
“What are your thoughts on your overall experience?”
This question is vague as it doesn’t clarify which experience is being evaluated or which aspects of the experience are being considered.
Such ambiguous questions can lead to responses that are unclear and generalized, rather than obtaining responses that are precise and meaningful. Therefore, when designing experience surveys, it’s important to ensure that the questions are clear, concise, and understandable.
2- Avoid Biased Statements
Biased questions create a tendency for customers to respond in one direction or another, thus affecting the results. Here are some examples of biased questions:
“Do you think this product is as successful as our other products?”
This question contains bias and can predispose users to provide a negative response without having an opinion about other products.
“If you liked this product, would you recommend it to your friends?”
This question contains a proposition and leads users toward a positive response.
Such biased questions can influence customer responses and make the results misleading. Therefore, when designing experience surveys, it’s crucial to ensure that the questions are objective, unbiased, and do not guide users towards specific responses.
3- Avoid Lengthy Surveys
By attempting to achieve multiple goals with one survey, you risk diverting the customers’ attention and decreasing completion rates. Thanks to the availability of customer relationship management (CRM) data, matching experience data with customer data is feasible in the digital world. Therefore, it’s advisable to refrain from asking questions such as “How often do you shop?” or “Which of our stores have you shopped at?”
Using logical flows, you can provide different experience surveys to each customer based on their responses. Designing a scenario where metrics and closed-ended questions are included and where the flow varies based on assigned scores is relatively straightforward.
Instead of asking questions about each component of the experience individually, you can expedite the survey by querying the experienced components in a single question, thus shortening the length of the survey without posing unnecessary questions.
4- Choose Metrics and Calculations Correctly
In experience surveys, scoring questions are used in conjunction with open-ended and closed-ended questions to measure the experience. It’s crucial to have a metric like NPS, CSAT, or CES behind these questions, and to select the appropriate metric for each question. The calculations derived from these metrics should be performed using the standard calculation methods for each metric. Utilizing non-standard applications and calculations for comparisons can lead to inaccurate results.
5- Define the Target Audience
Brands value the opinions of all their customers and might want to obtain them through mass distribution. Sending an experience survey to customers who haven’t made purchases in a long time might not be an appropriate approach. Besides transactional communications, consider creating a sample for mass distributions or conducting preliminary research to identify the customer group that can provide the desired information.
Examples of customer groups you could create include: customers who have made purchases above a certain amount in the last 3 months, customers who have purchased specific products in the last 3 months, customers who have requested returns or exchanges, customers within a specific segment, customers under the age of 30.
Meet Wiseback
Wiseback has been offering experience measurement, management, consultancy, and training solutions to businesses from various industries since 2017. To learn more about our solutions that advance the experience measurement and management processes for businesses striving for customer-focused growth, get in touch with us.