How to Make Your Customer Surveys More Engaging

Knowing what customers want and what they prefer is essential for the growth and progress of any business. Surveys play a vital role in delivering this insight in quantifiable form. This sort of feedback enables you to assess what customers think about a certain product, service and your brand in general. If designed well and used in the right manner, a survey has the potential of providing valuable data. This in turn will highlight problem areas of your service as well as things that your customers like. There is always the possibility of responses being intentional or given in a hurry but designing a survey that is interesting, short and has an incentive with it, is likely to bring you honest responses from clients. Here are a few tips that can help you make your customer surveys more engaging:

Use a Personalized and Friendly Tone

A survey is the direct interaction between a business and the clients on a personal level. It is important that questions should be devised in a personal tone. The questions should be precise and need to have positive words and phrases. The diction is of utmost importance to get the message through loud and clear. Always avoid technical jargon, difficult to comprehend vocabulary and words with dual meanings. Priority should be given to how the survey is to be pitched to customers. Present the surveys in a way that your clients don’t feel the pressure to fill them.

Focus On Quality, Not Quantity

Customer service reports clearly indicate that surveys that took longer to fill were usually avoided or abandoned by people. So it becomes crucial that businesses focus more on quality rather than the quantity of questions asked. A survey should not have more than 10-12 questions. The eventual goal should be kept in mind so that the clients are asked accurate questions to get what you intend to achieve. If the questions are tweaked so as to ask the clients’ opinion, they will feel more inclined to answer them as they would know that their suggestions are valuable. Surveys that aim towards the betterment of your products or services must be specific in nature. A proper textbox should be dedicated to suggestions with unlimited characters so that customers can write them in their own way. Choose either a close-ended or open-ended survey, whichever seems more probable to the need but be creative with your words so that participants feel inclined to answer the questions.

The Survey should have a Courteous Closure

Once participants have completed the survey, there should be an element of closure for them. End it in a unique way thanking them for their valuable time. Their time should be rewarded in due manner to let them know it was worth it. Often surveys conclude with a long thank you message. There are numerous creative ways of making the end message noteworthy.  A personalized one liner message can be used to end your survey on a memorable note.

Follow Up with Incentives

Businesses should always follow up with clients after they have filled a survey. This is a good practice and encourages them to participate again. An incentive may be provided to participants of the survey upon completion, for instance, give them a discount on any of your products or a free trial of your services. You can also treat them to a gift card or dinner coupons. Offering an incentive to participants will help you get more results. Customers will not have to think twice about voicing their opinion again whenever required.