3 steps to designing an effective customer feedback questionnaire

Collecting customer feedback is one of the most effective ways of improving your performance. It allows you to measure satisfaction and progress, demonstrates that you value customer opinions, helps retain customers and gives you intelligence and insight to make business decisions.

You probably already collect unprompted feedback, through ad hoc conversations, social media and online reviews, all of which are useful. But a regular, prompted feedback collection process will provide a different level of insight and be a potential game changer in how you make decisions.

The first tool you will need is an effective question set. But how do you get started? Here are the three steps you need to take to design a questionnaire that ensures you get all the benefits of a prompted customer feedback process.

1.                   Be specific

There are hundreds of template questions out there, which can be a useful way to kick start your thinking. But resist the temptation to use an off the shelf questionnaire. The most important consideration is to develop a question set that is meaningful to your business and your customers.

Produce questions that are specific to your service. This will better reflect the customer experience and allow them to give meaningful, accurate and useful answers. In turn you will be able to act on the information to make specific improvements to your service. There is only value in asking questions that you can actually do something about.

On the same theme, resist the temptation to ask questions that are ‘interesting’ but not necessarily useful. “That would be interesting to know” is the phrase that should set alarm bells ringing when you are developing your questionnaire with your team. Be brutal and leave the interesting questions out. Keep it tight and focussed on elements you can act upon.

Benchmarking answers with other organisations in your sector is a legitimate consideration. This can be a useful tool where questions are identical, but should not be at the expense of creating your own specific question set. Broad comparisons are not as useful as having intelligence that is specifically directed at the service you provide.

2.                   Keep it short

Leaving out unnecessary questions is particularly important as it is imperative that the questionnaire is not too long. When customers are introduced to the questionnaire (either online or on the phone), anything over 7-8 minutes is perceived negatively in terms of their willingness to fully complete it, so straight away anything exceeding this will have an adverse impact on response rates.

For those who do complete it, the risk of a lengthy survey is that it will lead to throwaway answers and a loss of accuracy. Even the most committed customers will have a limited attention span so concentrating on as few as 5, certainly less than 10, key question areas will keep the respondent engaged and give you the higher quality information that you need.

A further tip to keep the questionnaire the right length - Avoid repetition. “That’s the same as the one I’ve just answered!” is a common complaint. Nothing annoys a respondent more than answering similar questions and seemingly wasting their time. No doubt the difference will be clear to you but if you think your customers will struggle to make that distinction then leave it out. Lose one of the questions, keep the survey short and keep the customer happy! But in doing so, never merge questions. A question that judges two different aspects e.g. “Did we listen to your views and act upon them?” is frustrating for the customer and almost worthless to you. If there is a negative response to this, how do you know which part of the question it applies to?

Remember, providing their feedback should be a positive experience for the customer and reflect well on you, regardless of their satisfaction levels. So keep the customer experience in mind at all times when designing your questions, the most important part of which is keeping it short.

3.                   Ask why

Which bring us to the final, and most important, consideration – Asking your customers why? You will need to decide which response scales you are going to use, but don’t get hung up on it. Various arguments exist about the merits of 5 point versus 10 points scales, and everything in-between, but respondents will easily grasp the concept of all of these as long as they are consistent throughout the questionnaire.

You should direct your focus on finding out the reason behind the score more than the score itself. Ask your customers why they have given such a score. Headline figures are undoubtedly a useful indicator of satisfaction, particularly to track performance over time, but if they are not accompanied by reasons for the score then they are to some level meaningless and certainly very difficult to act upon. People tend to be fearful of asking qualitative questions, usually because they don’t have the time to analyse the responses. You have to make the time for this. The richness of the customer’s experience can only be relayed through qualitative feedback.

And the customers themselves will recognise the superficiality of a questionnaire without qualitative questions. They will be interested in you what you do with their feedback and make the most of their opportunity to air their views. They will be disappointed if they are denied this opportunity or don’t believe that the questions are actionable.

4.                   Conclusion

The feedback process has to work for your business and your customers. To that end:

-          Be specific

-          Keep it short

-          Ask why

What next?

Choose your method. Read our blog here explaining why telephone questionnaires are the most effective method of collecting customer feedback

Communicate the results and changes. How you act on the information you collect will be unique to you but whatever you do, tell your customers what you have done. It will be an own goal to make the effort to ask your customers their views but not let them know that you have listened to them. Highlight the key findings and the changes you have made as a result of their feedback. It will complete the cycle and further build trust between you.