Your customers or members form a range of opinions and perceptions about your products, services, pricing and more. It used to be they told a friend or a couple of associates when they were unhappy. Now, they can instantly tell thousands (even millions), thanks to the Internet.
Customer surveys can help you uncover valuable information about perceptions and attitudes. Surveys can help you to:
- Preserve recurring revenue
- Identify process breakdowns
- Respond to dissatisfied customers
- Detect competitive strengths and weaknesses
- Pinpoint opportunities for product/service expansion
- Set customer-focused goals based on firsthand feedback
- Document customer testimonials
TYPES OF SURVEYS
Asking the right questions and in the right format will yield the type of information you need to mend a challenged relationship or identify new sales opportunities.
There are two primary types of surveys:
open- and closed-ended. Open-ended surveys are typically used when the respondent’s own words are wanted or when the surveyor doesn’t know all of the possible answers in advance. A closed-ended survey is used when you want to rank responses or when a statistical analysis is needed.
Here are a few of the most common question formats:
- Likert-scale (Attitudes) – Respondents are asked to indicate how closely their attitudes match the question or statement on a rating scale (“Strongly disagree” at one end of the scale; “strongly agree” at the other end)
- Multiple choice – Used when you want respondents to pick the best answer or answers from among a finite number of answers
- Ordinal – Helps to rate features in relation to others (“Rank from 1 to 5 your favorite XYZ…”)
- Categorical – Best when the answers are categories and each respondent must fall into exactly one of them (gender of a respondent)
- Numerical – Useful when you want to collect real numbers (age, time frame, etc.)
