5 Best Ways to Improve your Customer Satisfaction Survey Rate

5 Best Ways to Improve your Customer Satisfaction Survey Rate

If you build it, they will come……, right? Well, not necessarily, when it comes to customer feedback surveys.

Here is a short story to explain this.

Sales Development expert, Mark, works for a medical devices company. He is been assigned with a task to strategize a plan to:

  • Improve Customer service
  • Increase customer retention rate.

To measure customer satisfaction he needs to survey the customers. After all, what would be a better way than asking the customers themselves about their experience – right?

He sends out survey links to all the customers via email. But only 20% of the customers respond. That doesn’t give him enough data to make an informed business decision.

Then, he tries the old-school way of collecting feedback using “paper and pen”. So, whenever a service engineer goes to the customer to provide service, he would have the customer fill-up the feedback form. This method has gotten him some response rate but then it was very difficult to manage the feedback forms. Some of the forms would get lost. And, it was extremely difficult and time-consuming to analyze all the feedback responses.

Finally, what worked for Mark is a digital survey template. A digital survey template is a digital feedback form that can be filled and submitted from a phone or tablet with just a few clicks. Now the service engineers would have the customer fill out this digital survey in a mobile or tablet and submit it.

With this approach, Mark has seen an 83% rise in the response rate. Also, he was able to automate the process of analyzing feedback responses and generate an intuitive survey report which helps him to make informed business decisions.

5 Ways you can Improve your Customer Satisfaction Feedback Rate

1. Go Digital with your survey

Since we are living in the digital era, it goes without saying that most people prefer taking the surveys on a digital device.
According to a survey, over a third of all the surveys are completed on mobile devices.

It only makes sense to leverage a digital platform to get a good customer feedback rate. These platforms also:

  • Automatically analyze the feedback responses
  • Generate intuitive survey reports
  • And, give actionable insights
SmartWinnr, for example, allows you to create a digital survey template. This survey template can be used by the field sales reps or service engineers to collect feedback from the customers when they go on field visits. SmartWinnr platform also automatically analyzes the survey responses and generates an intuitive report. You can use the insights to make informed business decisions.

2. Keep your Surveys Short and relevant - Micro Surveys

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: Will you spend time filling out a survey that is too long or doesn’t give you a way to say “Does not apply”– or skip the questions that aren’t relevant to you? Probably not.

Keep your surveys short and relevant. We call those micro surveys. Micro surveys are short, targeted, and timely sets of questions. With these surveys, we target quality over quantity. And, they are known to receive a higher response rate than the typical surveys.

Here is how to create short and relevant surveys:

  • Not more than 5-10 questions in a survey.
  • Have options like “Not applicable” or “Skip the question” for each question. This ensures that even if the customer encounters an irrelevant question, he can skip it and continue with the rest of the survey.

This way, you will respect your customers’ time. And, have them give a focused and accurate answer to each question.

3. Offer Incentives

Sometimes you can’t rely on good-will alone. If you’re having a tough time getting people to complete your surveys, try offering incentives to boost completion rates. You could offer product discounts, gift cards, coupons, raffles, etc to your respondents. Without a doubt, cash incentives (like cash back if it’s applicable) bring in the highest response rate. Cashback is more applicable to B2C businesses like eCommerce

Now before adopting this approach, you must know that there are pros and cons to offering survey incentives. Let’s see what they are:

Con: People might rush through the survey just to receive the incentive.
Pro: But, research reveals that out of all the people who said they take surveys because they want a prize, 94% report they still give honest answers extremely or very often.
Con: It might seem like you are giving away money in exchange for the positive feedback.
Pro: You just need to be careful with how you word your offering and most of the people will provide their honest feedback.
Take these points into account and create an incentivized survey that appeals to your customers.

4. Reply to the respondents

Remember, time is money for everyone. When your customers take precious minutes from their busy schedule to give feedback – you don’t want to make them feel as though their feedback has fallen on deaf ears. Make sure that you express your genuine appreciation to the respondents.

A simple and genuine “Thanks for your time” message or email will do. This will not only encourage them to fill out your surveys in the future. You might also get more of your questions answered and even turn respondents into promoters.

5. Adopt multiple channels to send out the surveys

Although you ensure that your survey is short, relevant and offer some reward to your customers – sometimes they don’t have the time to immediately fill it out. In order to avoid the risk of losing out on a few customers, ensure that you have multiple options to receive feedback. For example, if a customer says that she doesn’t have time to fill out the survey at the moment, then offer to send the survey in the email. And, say that she can take it whenever she gets time. What if she ignores that email in her inbox as well? Then send the survey request in SMS. By the second time, she sees your survey, she’ll undoubtedly remember it. The third time it comes to her attention, she may be extremely curious and complete the survey just to see what you’re up to.
Pro-tip: It is safe to send the survey up to 3 times to a customer. If you send more than that, then the customer might treat it as spam.

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