Keeping up with rising customer expectations, managing customer experience, and maintaining high standards for customer retention can get tricky and increasingly difficult for both B2B or B2C organizations. That is why conducting customer satisfaction surveys are crucial to get an insight into consumer expectations and update business strategies. A dynamic customer survey can help collect feedback from consumers and identify service or process gaps to create a strong plan of action in order to serve them better.
Surveys are integral part of effective customer experience and business growth. They help businesses know about brand perception, also increase loyalty, customer satisfaction, audience engagement, and customer retention.
Here are some of the most useful survey methods successful businesses use.
1. Online Surveys
Online surveys are perhaps one of the most effective survey methods to obtain customer feedback. With the help of online survey tools, you can create web-based questionnaires for surveys and polls, and seek a response from customers.
Online surveys are cost-efficient, quicker compared to other techniques, and convenient for their sheer magnitude of reach. To maximize the benefits, create a responsive design that is fully functional on mobiles, tablets, and desktops for the best customer experience.
There are multiple types of online surveys; these are:
- Email surveys: Through this technique, you can send emails with an embedded survey link or response form to a target audience for quantitative data collection.
- Surveys Embedded on Websites: Engage your audience and customers on your website by displaying auto-triggered surveys prompting them to share feedback on product or services.
- Social Media Surveys: Creating social media polls and surveys are another effective way of seeking an opinion from customers. Social media surveys help you reach a wider range of audiences and gather valuable inputs.
2. Personal Interview Surveys
It is one of the most personalized approaches to collect feedback. Personal interviews or face-to-face surveys help establish trust, seek cooperation, and build better relationships with consumers. Data collected in this process is first hand and also original in nature.
With the help of fundamental skills to conduct in-depth personal interview surveys, you would get a better chance to unveil deeper emotional sides of customer journeys, including their expressions. With the help of the collected data, you could create better marketing strategies to retain and attract customers. The only downside of personal interviews is that is can be time consuming and expensive.
3. Telephone Interview
Telephone surveys are essentially less expensive and less time-consuming than other methods. The standard procedure is to prepare a set of close-ended questionnaires that would help collect concentrated information from customers over a phone call.
With the help of this, you can get prompt responses from customers, but there are certain limitations. Telephone interviews do not reflect the emotional side of the respondents; neither can you see their facial expressions. As both parties do not see each other and entirely rely on the voice and tone, building trust can be difficult. And customers may choose not to reveal detailed information about something if they are sceptical.
4. Mail Surveys
In mail surveys, businesses send survey materials via postal service or other mail delivery carriers to customers and seek their response. This method of data collection allows customers to take time and think of answers to the feedback.
However, in the age of digitization, mailed surveys are not as popular as they used to be. An additional cost of printing materials and postal charges, and keeping up-to-date addresses of customers can also be challenging.
5. SMS surveys
SMS surveys are quick and popular among businesses of all kinds. With the help of SMS survey tools, you could create crisp, close-ended questions and send it to a target audience in the form of text messages.
SMS surveys are simple, fast, and affordable. This type of survey allows respondents to provide their invaluable suggestions or feedback while on the go. With an efficient SMS survey software, you would not only be able to collect feedback but also analyze responses that are crucial for creating an effective business strategy.
In a highly competitive business landscape, retaining consumers is crucial for any business, and clearly, there is no better way than to understand what your customer wants through feedback collection. You could use one or more survey methods mentioned here and utilize the inputs collected in statistical analysis to create a better strategy and ensure a positive customer experience.
Author Bio:
Prisha Gupta drives content marketing initiatives at GroCurv, India’s first B2B services procurement platform. She develops content on sales, marketing, and HR topics to help SMEs for the most part. She also loves doing content that decodes and discusses strategies that have worked for successful brands providing learning opportunities for her readers. With her busy schedule, reading and yoga keeps her grounded and traveling keeps her motivated.