How to Evaluate a Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire Design

Customer satisfaction questionnaires and surveys are seriously useful tools that help you gauge how to improve your service and keep your customers happy and your client base growing. How effective they are depends on how well designed they are. Many a questionnaire is poorly designed before it ever reaches the respondents. Learn how to evaluate the effectiveness of a survey design that you create in-house or that you have custom-created for you.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Read the draft of the questionnaire closely. Have others in your organization read it, too. Then do your own mini-survey and ask each tester whether the questionnaire
   
   1) successfully targets a particular research question or is too general
   2) is short and concise
   3) uses easy-to-understand language
   4) uses unbiased language so as not to lead the respondents
   5) has sufficient variation in question format to keep your customers engaged

2. Test the questionnaire out on a small beta group before administering the survey widely. Get feedback from the respondents about what survey questions were confusing or unclear, which questions had insufficient answer choices, and which questions seemed to be leading questions. Ask your test customers if they felt there was anything they would like the opportunity to have left feedback on, but no survey question to address it. Also find out which questions they would like to have had an opportunity to write in the answer to, and which they would have liked multiple choice options to.

3. Revise the questions or have the company preparing your customer questionnaire do revisions. To prevent a loss of your investment in time and money as well as your customers' confidence, it's critical that the survey questions be evaluated and corrected before you administer the survey.

4. After you administer the survey and complete your data analysis, evaluate its effectiveness with your team. Track the accuracy of the data by figuring out whether new campaigns are effective or ineffective. For additional tips on understanding customer feedback survey design, see the Tips section and the Resources section.

Tips & Warnings

• You may want to include an "evaluate this survey" section in the questionnaire itself for your customers to give you their feedback. This will help you interpret the data effectively as well as improve future survey designs.
• Remain amenable to change. The faster you can adjust and improve your survey design, the more likely it is you'll get accurate, complete and plentiful feedback from your customers--which maximizes a survey's usefulness.

Resources

• Pros and Cons of Customer Surveys and Questionnaires