If your business is currently struggling, your sales are dropping, and you’re receiving a lot of poor customer reviews, it’s time for a change. No matter if you are dealing with a technology issue or some kind of market disruption, your customers are the ones that will eventually punish you for your failure. It’s common knowledge that customers are the only value-generating element for any business. You could be manufacturing the best, most reliable/useful products in the world and you would still have zero business if no customer would ever set foot in your Stores

Luckily, there are things you can do. For example, one of the most effective ways of gaining a better perspective on the current state of your business is through a customer satisfaction survey. Such a survey will help you get deep into customers’ minds and understand the way they perceive you. Once these things become clear to you, you should be able to steer your boat in the right direction and considerably improve your relationship with old customers. You could also start attracting new customers, even though, cost-wise, it is more expensive to get new customers than retain existing ones. How much more expensive? Up to five times more.

However, in order for a survey to provide you with the desired answers and solutions, it should be well-structured. Without further ado, here are a few secret questions the best customer satisfaction surveys should always incorporate.

Offer Reference Points for Service Rating

Most surveys tend to ask customers to rate a service/product using a scale from 1 to 10. The following reference points are more effective in helping you understand exactly how you compare to your competitors:

  • poor
  • good
  • average
  • okay
  • exceptional

You should also be able to understand if you have any loyal customers that are fully satisfied with what you have to offer.

Focus On Neutral, Unbiased Questions

While your own marketing department might be responsible for creating your customer satisfaction survey, your customers should not know that. On the contrary, you should strive to create the impression that your survey has been created by a third party. Create unbiased, neutral questions that will encourage participants to give both positive and negative answers. Avoid formulating any leading questions and keep it short and clear. Remember the purpose of surveying your customers in the first place is to improve your work and offers. For that, you will need to be able to take criticism and use it in a constructive manner.

Write down the most relevant questions you would need answers to so you can collect as much feedback as you can. Asking customers whether they believe a certain casino website contains relevant and informative content in the blog section is a good example of a survey question. Participants could be asked to check out the gamblersbet.com blog and rate their answers based on their personal experience. An even better approach strategy would be to ask participants to describe their experience with using the blog to get a better insight into the industry.

Keep It Short And Sweet

The last thing you want is for the people taking part in your survey to get lost in a never-ending, confusing question. Try to steer clear from using specialized terms.  While they might help you gain a quicker understanding of how people perceive the quality of your products or services, they will most likely confuse survey participants.

Focus on simple and concise questions so there are no misunderstandings and you should reach people a lot easier. Avoid asking two or three different things throughout the same question. It will confuse people and force them to give unclear answers that are difficult to interpret. Mixing in at least two different questions will make it harder for you to measure the satisfaction level for each individual element.

Use Context

A brand new customer who has recorded a bad experience with your customer support service or a product they’ve recently bought is different from a loyal customer who has been giving you their business for the last 5 years. Context is essential when addressing certain questions, so make sure you create contextual questions. The answers will help you find out which customers are valuable enough to be surveying in the future.

Loyalty VS Satisfaction

Simply because someone is satisfied with your products does not also mean they will turn into a long-term, loyal customer. They could find similar levels of satisfaction somewhere else, for less money. You should focus on finding those customers who are more likely to stay with you for many years to come, provided they are well taken care of.

Survey Question Testing

A third-party should be used for testing your customer satisfaction survey questions prior to reaching the real audience you are interested in. Find out if there are any questions that should be rephrased, changed or eliminated. Do all the necessary changes, if any, then get ready to apply the survey. Once all the results are in, you can move on to collecting all the necessary data, compiling and interpreting it. This should help you formulate conclusions and figure out what to do next in order to make your business grow or bloom again.

Use the Results to Your Survey

Keep in mind a survey will remain a simple piece of paper thrown in a drawer at the end of the day unless someone will actually start using it for its real value. Surveys are not made to satisfy your simple curiosity about the way your customers are perceiving you and your business. They are meant to bring important changes in the life of a company and should be given the attention and importance they deserve.

For more important tips and tricks on how to create the best surveys, feel free to take a look at the rest of the articles on our website.  Learn how to get more quality responses that can be used as an input to a future decision. Lots of poorly written surveys produce data that cannot be interpreted. Make sure your next survey isn’t one of them.