The company should be sure about why there is need of conducting a customer satisfaction survey. It is important to make sure that the value of the data collected through customer satisfaction survey is more than the cost of conducting the survey. A defined objective will enable the company to use the survey results effectively and efficiently.
Once the objective is defined, the company is required to devise an actionable plan to achieve the objectives. The company should decide the initiatives it will undertake after the results and insights from customer satisfaction survey are derived. For instance, the company might plan to boost customer service interaction or it might invest on customer education programs.
Different metrics or type of questions can be included in a questionnaire to evaluate customer satisfaction:
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): To measure how satisfied a customer is with a particular aspect. Answers are collected on a scale of 1-3, 1-5 or 1-10. All responses are added and divided by the total number of respondents to get a CSAT.
Customer Effort Score (CES): It measures customer ease of experience. A low effort experience enhances customer experience. It is measured the way CSAT is measured.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): It shows how likely a customer is willingly to recommend the product to others.
It is important to keep the questionnaire as small as possible and irrelevant questions should not be included as response rate decreases with longer questionnaires.
In this step the company has to decide when and where it will trigger the survey. Survey should be triggered to a customer only after a meaningful part of the customer lifecycle is completed. Customer’s view may change over time and therefore it becomes necessary to trigger the survey to the same at different time intervals.
Different survey modes can be used to gather information from different customer: