Satisfaction surveys: questions to ask and methodology

Satisfaction surveys have become indispensable, and you can no longer ignore them. In an increasingly customer-centric market, your customer relations must be perfect, or risk seeing them leave for the competition.

Understanding your customers’ needs and expectations has become a priority if you want to remain competitive and retain their loyalty.

Satisfaction surveys gather valuable feedback from your customers, helping you to identify weak points with a view to making improvements.

What’s more, by showing customers that their opinion counts, companies reinforce trust, commitment and thus their brand image.

In this article:

✔ Why is it important to send out a satisfaction survey? ✔ What tools are needed to assess satisfaction? ✔ Questions to ask in your survey ✔ On which channels should you send your satisfaction surveys?

✔ 5 tips to make your satisfaction surveys effective ✔ Analyzing your satisfaction surveys

1. Why is it important to send out a satisfaction survey?

Satisfaction surveys are a key element of your strategy.

The reasons:

• Improve the quality of your service : feedback helps you identify areas for improvement. Competition is fierce, and if you don’t improve, you risk losing customers.

• Detecting dissatisfied customers: sometimes a customer is very unhappy with a product or service. If they leave a negative review, you can contact them to suggest a solution, discuss the issue and ultimately satisfy them.

• Innovate : Sometimes your customers leave suggestions in satisfaction surveys: “You should do this…”. This feedback is invaluable, as it enables you to stand out from the competition with new ideas.

• Create a virtuous circle for your company’s image and sales : the more you listen to your customers, the more you’ll be able to solve their problems. They’ll be happier, more likely to recommend you and call on you again. This has a positive impact on your sales and brand image.

• Improving well-being at work for greater commitment : a survey can also be carried out internally. It’s important that your employees feel they’re being listened to, in order to boost their commitment and well-being (see article on well-being), and thus increase your performance.

Thanks to the Eloquant platform, you can tailor your internal and external satisfaction surveys to your needs and wishes.

We suggest 4 internal surveys:

✉ O n-boarding feedback: one or two months after hiring a new employee, get their opinion on their integration, how they feel about the company and how they view your company, your processes and the organization between departments. This is an essential opinion to take into account, as it can help you identify areas for improvement in your induction process, and provide a new perspective on your company.

✉ “The pulse survey”: these one-off surveys can help you focus on a specific point in your company. For example, you can solicit your employees’ opinions on new software, new installations… and identify areas for improvement.

✉ O ff boarding survey: neglecting the reasons why your employees leave would be a serious mistake. The off-boarding questionnaire enables you to detect underlying problems in your company, especially if your turnover is high.

✉ Post-call/chat survey: in your contact center, following a call or chat with a customer, a survey can be sent to your advisor so that he can note the difficulty he had in handling the customer’s request. This will enable you to review the call/chat and identify any obstacles encountered by the advisor.

2. What tools can be used to assess satisfaction?

To assess your customers’ satisfaction, it’s important to pay attention to 3 indicators:

➔ The NPS or net promoter score is used to measure the proportion and likelihood of your customers recommending your brand, products or services.

➔ The CES or customer effort score is an indicator that measures the effort made by your customer after an action. In general, it is scored out of 5: 1 meaning that the customer made little effort and found what he undertook rather simple and easy (making a purchase, calling customer service…) and 5 indicating that the action required a lot of effort.

➔ CSAT or Customer SATisfaction is the indicator of customer satisfaction. You can analyze it via a satisfaction scale, for example a score from 1 to 10 on customer satisfaction. Also, AI can analyze all the comments and feedback collected to reveal the overall level of satisfaction, with details on the reasons for delight and dissatisfaction.

If you’d like to find out more about customer review analysis, please contact us via our demo form!

3. Questions to ask in your satisfaction survey

• Essential information

Surname, first name, e-mail address, telephone number, gender, account number/login… these are the basic details you need to collect to identify and call back your customer.

• Open questions

Open-ended questions give customers the opportunity to express themselves freely, and are very useful.

– Do you have any suggestions for improving our service? – What do you like about our product / service? – What would you improve about our product / service? – What did you think of your in-store experience? – What prevented you from becoming a customer of our company?

• Questions about indicators

Customer SATisfaction – On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your purchase/call/service?

Customer Effort Score: – How much effort did you have to make this purchase? 1 corresponds to little effort and 5 to a lot of effort.

Net Promoter Score: – On a scale of 1 to 10, would you recommend our brand to your friends and family?

4. Which channels should you use to send out your satisfaction surveys?

When it comes to external surveys, Eloquant offers you 100% customization: drop-down list, image, qualitative questions… Thanks to our Customer Experience platform, you can send them to various digital channels according to your needs:

• Web link via SMS

• SMS: we recommend SMS for on-the-spot surveys, i.e. directly following the customer’s action or interaction.

• EMAIL: email is an interesting channel to exploit, as the survey is often sent cold. Your customer therefore has time to respond.

• QR code: often used in stores, you can also print it on a flyer or even a receipt.

• Post-call: the voice survey generally contains one or two questions, which are asked before the customer leaves the call. This makes them more likely to respond.

• Pop In: a pop-in window appears on your page, encouraging visitors to leave their opinion. Thanks to the Eloquant cloud platform, you can choose the style of your pop-in window, how long it takes to appear, on which page…

For more information, we recommend this article on digital channels: Satisfaction surveys: which channels to choose?

5. 5 tips for effective satisfaction surveys

• Be precise but concise : give the essential details without going into too much detail, at the risk of your customers abandoning the survey.

• Adapt your level of language so that everyone can understand: no specific words or terms in strong French, no English words or abbreviations.

• Don’t make your questionnaires too long: it could discourage respondents.

• Pay particular attention to the presentation of your questionnaire and email. A cold, vague email won’t make you want to linger over it, just like a questionnaire without colors or with illegible typography.

• Above all, don’t forget to ask for essential information such as surname, first name, email or telephone number, so that you can contact the person again.

6. Post-satisfaction survey analysis

The main use of a satisfaction questionnaire is to draw conclusions for improving your products, services, brand image and customer relations.

To do this, you need to analyze the tens, hundreds or even thousands of customer reviews and detect the most frequently recurring and serious negative reviews. It’s by learning from our mistakes that we become better.

With the Eloquant cloud platform, we integrate AI to analyze and categorize customer verbatims.

After analysis, AI provides you, via a dashboard, with all the support and strategic information you need: precise reports, graphs, statistics, visuals on the positive and negative opinions of your customers and prospects.

If you’re looking for software to manage your surveys and send them to one or more channels, we’ve got the solution: the Eloquant Cloud Platform. Don’t hesitate to ask us for a demo!