Share what you know with millions of people

The survey questions depend on understanding what specifcally you want to know. Is it an overall idea of how customers feel about they experience recieve from you or more detailed than that?

One thing to always make sure is that the questions asked will get you the responses you need. One way to do this is to make sure that you words you use mean the same to your customer as they do to you.

We were asked to work with a business recently who was asking survey questions on its "payment" services. They were confused by the responses when we looked into it for them we discovered that what they referred to as payment services was post sale changes such as direct debit dates etc. What "payment" meant to their customers was to make a payment there and then and were therefore giving responses to a different question which skewed the results.

As to what is most valuable this depends on what your business does, who your customers are and what you want them to do. Happy to discuss this further if it would be useful. rick@brandaudio.co.uk

Brad Nichols

Chief Operating Officer, Clientometry

Posted on Dec. 15, 2010

Hey Sam,

I think, in general, you want to:

a) Formulate the questions around mutually exclusive elements of the experience - ie don't confuse the customer with a question that tries to cover both agent knowledge and timeliness for example. This way you can ensure that what you get back will be completely indicative of a single element of your experience.

b) Structure the survey such that any outlier answer prompts a follow-up open ended question that collects verbatim input around the reasons behind the respondent's unusually high or low answer.

c) Finish with an 'overall experience' type question that relates to your situation

d) Use the mathematics of your response correlation together with the verbatim feedback to tell if you if there are any elements of the experience you've overlooked in your survey - ie if you get high ratings on all your element questions but a poor result on the overall final question then you know there is a factor missing - look in the verbatim for the insights you need to adjust and round out your survey.

Without question the verbatim questions are going to give you the most valuable insights if done properly.

Finally, although it goes without saying, you also will need to match the medium, length and style of your survey to the type of feedback you're collecting, the nature of the experiences you're asking about and the impact of those experiences on your customers.

I've spent a lot of time in this space and I'm more than happy to discuss/clarify further.

Brad