You don’t have to beg, borrow and plead to get more customer feedback. You just need to create a survey they want to be part of.
If there’s one word you want to keep in mind when designing a customer survey, it’s this: short.
Attention spans and patience for surveys are short. Therefore, questions, the length of surveys, customers’ time commitment and your response time to the feedback must be short, too.
Hear what you need to hear
From there, follow these keys to getting more valuable feedback than you’ve ever had:
- Give it a catchy title. You can pique more interest in an email survey with the subject line “Give It To Us Straight” than with “The ABC Co. Annual Survey.”
- Introduce it. Send an invitation to participate a day or so before you actually send the survey. Briefly explain what you plan on doing with the feedback.
- Guarantee privacy. Allow customers to stay anonymous if they’d like. Let them know what you do to keep their feedback confidential.
- Ask easy questions first. Give customers a few questions to warm up to the survey. Questions with a rating scale often work here.
- Ask for demographic information at the end in case they quit before it’s done. Then you’ll more likely get the most important information — feedback on the experience.
- Maintain lots of white space. This helps to ensure customers aren’t visually overwhelmed by lots of questions.
- Ask more sensitive or difficult questions later in the survey. Let customers get invested in it first.
- Let them leave comments. Give customers space to leave comments or requests for a follow-up from you.
