Guide: 3 Key Elements of a Successful Customer Survey

Customer surveys are key to understanding your customers and creating an experience that meets or even exceeds their expectations. But to gain the maximum output of your customer survey, you need to focus on all the stages involved in conducting the survey – not only during the survey, but also before and after. All three elements are equally important to the value of your results. 

Before the Survey: Prepare both Your Organization and Your Customers

It is very important to the outcome of your customer survey that you prioritize preparing both your organization and your customers for the upcoming survey.

With the right preparation, you will set the stage and take ownership of your survey before it is conducted, which will have a positive impact on the perception of the survey when it is released.

Professional preparation of both customers and your organization itself increases the number of participants by a factor of 1.5-2.0x.

See the 7 most important customer survey questions to ask

During the Survey: Maximize Participation and Customer Feedback

At this point, your data collection has just started – or is about to start. Here, it is very important that you get as many customers as possible to share their feedback as possible. The more feedback you receive, the better your starting point for improving your customer experiences.

Targeted initiatives to activate and increase customer participation are key here. This can be done both internally and externally through different approaches and types of communication, as the survey is being conducted.

Approaches to increase customer participation include regularly updating stakeholders on the response rate during the survey or using motivational tools such as competition among responding customers.

After the Survey: Follow Up and Act on Your New Customer Insights

Now your data collection is complete. The results are in, and it is time to understand the customer feedback in depth and draw the conclusions you need to.

With the conclusions defined, you can begin launching actions that will help you improve your customer experience based on your new and fresh customer insights. Some of the actions that can be taken based on the survey results include:

• How can you recover potential customers-at-risk?

• How do you prioritize your initiatives and follow up?

Actual Templates and Tools to Maximize the Impact of Your Survey

This article has provided you with a brief introduction to how you maximize the impact of your customer survey.

You can find an expanded and detailed version of each stage in our guide 3 key elements of a successful customer survey – including unique easy-to-follow templates and tools to help you master each element.