Customer satisfaction surveys are a great way to gather feedback from customers, which can significantly help business growth. Hiring a customer satisfaction survey service allows you to collect detailed data to guide important business decisions like new products and services.
Have You Ever Done a ‘CSAT’ for Your Biz?
A happy, satisfied customer is the backdrop for a thriving business. But how do you know if your customer is happy? How do you know if you’re serving them well?
Sometimes, the product or service speaks for itself.
But on most other occasions, you must find out from your customers.
Performing customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys - either on your own or through a customer satisfaction survey service – is one of the best ways to get the data necessary to grow your business.
CSATs are among the best ways to gather feedback and improve customer satisfaction. In this blog post, we’ll cover the basics of CSATs and why hiring a company like Call Serv to perform your surveys can help grow your business.
What are Customer Satisfaction Surveys Anyway?
Customer satisfaction surveys, commonly known as CSAT surveys, are tools used by businesses to collect feedback from their customers. These surveys are designed to measure the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction customers have with a particular product, service, or overall experience.
It’s possible you’ve seen or experienced a CSAT survey before. For instance, after you make an Amazon purchase, they may send you an email with questions to rate your service. Or perhaps you’ve called your internet provider, and you’re prompted on the phone to dial a number to leave feedback on the customer service agent. These are all forms of CSAT surveys.
The primary purpose of CSAT surveys is to gain insights into customer perceptions, identify areas for improvement, and gauge overall customer satisfaction levels.
What are the Types of Survey Methods?
The fact that you’re collecting information is a win for your company. That said, there are a few ways you can perform CSATs.
Rating Scales:
Rating scale surveys involve customers rating their satisfaction on a numerical scale, typically from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, with options such as “very dissatisfied” to “very satisfied.”
These surveys provide a quantitative measure of customer satisfaction, allowing businesses to analyze and compare results easily.
These are common after an email correspondence or after a ticket is logged with customer service. Today, there are services and apps that allow you to automate a rating scale CSAT.
Sometimes, this method is referred to simply as CSATs, but you can place multiple questions through Rating Scales.
Open-Ended Questions:
Sometimes, CSAT surveys aren’t enough. You need more data.
Open-ended surveys involve providing customers with an opportunity to provide written or spoken feedback and share their thoughts and opinions in their own words.
These surveys offer valuable qualitative insights and allow customers to express themselves more freely, providing detailed feedback that may not be captured by rating scales alone.
Open-ended CSAT surveys are done via email but are also more popular via calls. Call Serv, for instance, contact customers to perform deep surveys using open-ended questions. The information gathered can help a company move forward with a change, product, or service.
Open-ended surveys can also be used for Marketing, Brand Awareness, or Market Research surveys.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys:
NPS surveys measure customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking a single question: “How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”
Customers respond on a scale of 0 to 10, categorizing them into Promoters, Passives, or Detractors.
Removing the Passives, the company can get a more accurate representation of customer sentiment by finding the difference between Promoters and Detractors.
NPS surveys help identify brand advocates and areas for improvement.
Similarly, the Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the difficulty a customer has interacting with a company. This data helps a company look at its customer journey or customer experience.
What are Some Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions?
So what do you ask?
Your customer’s time is valuable, so it’s essential you perform surveys that take little effort but get you all the data you need to make valuable, actionable change.
In some cases, this data is used to measure your Customer Support or Customer Experience team’s performance, so you must ask the right questions. Some examples include:
On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your overall satisfaction with our product/service?
Was [person X] able to resolve your issue?
What aspects of our product/service do you find most valuable?
How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to others? (NPS)
Did our product/service meet your expectations? Why or why not?
How would you rate the responsiveness and effectiveness of our customer support team?
If you could change something about [product/service], what would you change?
You can always add, remove, or tweak your questions. The goal is to gather accurate information so you can report on your progress or make improvements.
5 Fantastic Benefits Of CSAT Surveys
Are surveys a waste of time? Aren’t customers deleting these emails or ignoring your calls? Yes, it’s understood that many customers will decline CSATs. Statistics show about 24% for email and 8-12% for calls.
However, the data from these engaged customers are more than enough to be valuable for businesses. A well-executed survey with the right script and questions also increase response rates significantly.
Here are five benefits you can’t ignore:
Insight into Customer Needs: CSAT surveys provide valuable insights into customer preferences, expectations, and pain points. This information helps businesses understand their target audience better and make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and customer service improvements.
Continuous improvement of products and services: By regularly collecting customer feedback through CSAT surveys, businesses can identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to enhance customer satisfaction. This iterative process fosters a culture of continuous improvement and keeps the business aligned with customer needs.
Enhanced Customer Loyalty: When customers feel their opinions are valued and see that their feedback leads to positive changes, they develop a sense of loyalty towards the business. Conducting CSAT surveys and acting on the feedback received can help strengthen customer relationships, increase customer retention, and foster brand advocacy.
A Competitive Advantage: By addressing customer concerns and improving overall satisfaction levels, companies differentiate themselves from competitors, attract new customers, and retain existing ones.
Proactive Products and Problem-Solving: Hearing the issues your customers face straight from the horse’s mouth can save you time and money. You can quickly and proactively resolve a long-standing issue. Or you can put the wheels in motion for an overwhelming response to a new product or service.
All businesses, especially those looking to grow, should have some form of customer feedback survey. There are two ways this can be done. You can perform your surveys in-house or hire a customer satisfaction survey service to perform calls or more detailed emails.
Conducting Customer Satisfaction Surveys In-House
You can perform customer surveys on your own. These can be emails or forms you send to your customer after an interaction.
There are a host of programs you can use to set up CSATs, such as Survey Monkey, JotForm, HubSpot, Typeform, and much more.
Some of these can be automated through an email service or used to collect data while your team calls customers on the phone.
Here are some things to consider when performing in-house surveys:
1. Define survey objectives and target audience
2. Select the appropriate survey method and distribution channels
3. Craft clear and concise survey questions
4. Determine survey frequency and timing
5. Ensure data privacy and protection
While the advantage is that you have some control over who does your surveys and how quickly you can gather the data, you still need to hire someone for this task or add it to your customer service team’s plate.
If it’s an in-house hire, the ROI for the hire is not ideal. Adding it onto someone else’s plate can lead to burnout. This burnout can also cause low survey numbers or missed deadlines.
That’s why we often recommend hiring a customer satisfaction survey service provider instead.
Hiring A Customer Satisfaction Survey Service Team
If you want to understand your customers, hiring a team to perform your surveys is the best bet. Your company can focus on implementing changes or responding to feedback.
A survey team will take a list of customers along with the questions and focus on calling and collecting data. They even send customers who need individual help for a long-standing problem to critical stakeholders.
With a provider like CallServ, for instance, you can scale or decrease your CSAT efforts at a fraction of the cost. You also save time in training, survey setup, and execution due to technology like outbound dialers.
Best Practices for CSATs
Here are some things to remember when doing surveys in-house or with a service provider.
Keep surveys short and focused. Avoid overwhelming participants with lengthy questionnaires. Instead, prioritize the most important questions that will yield the most valuable insights.
Use a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions. Quantitative questions like rating scales or multiple-choice questions provide numerical data for easy analysis and benchmarking. Qualitative questions, such as open-ended prompts, allow customers to provide detailed feedback, share their experiences, and offer suggestions or ideas.
Provide incentives for survey participation. Consider discounts, exclusive offers, or entries into a prize draw if your numbers are low. By showing appreciation for their time and feedback, you motivate customers to take the survey and increase the chances of gathering a representative sample.
Regularly review and update survey questions. Customer needs and market dynamics evolve, so it’s essential to review and adjust as necessary regularly.
Use the results in different ways. For instance, you can advertise that you have 95% customer satisfaction to attract new subscribers.
When conducting customer satisfaction surveys, prioritize data privacy and protection. Communicate how customer data will be used and ensure compliance with relevant data protection regulations, such as GDPR.
Actively seek feedback at different touchpoints. You can send surveys to varying parts of the customer journey to gather more targeted feedback.
Implementing these best practices allows you to optimize your customer satisfaction surveys to gather accurate and actionable feedback. Remember, the ultimate goal is to improve customer satisfaction and drive business growth by leveraging the insights gained from these surveys.
Call Serv as Your Customer Satisfaction Survey Service
CSAT surveys are invaluable in improving your customer service while learning from your customers. More importantly, it’s an opportunity to get the feedback necessary to shape your company’s future.
Despite the importance, CSAT surveys can be low effort. Hiring a customer satisfaction survey team can take on the burden while scaling your efforts to determine your customer satisfaction performance and making key changes to your business.
Let CallServ conduct outbound customer satisfaction surveys on your behalf. Speak with our team, and let's create a custom campaign for your needs.
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