How to Conduct a Customer Survey

Conducting customer surveys can help you gauge customer satisfaction with your products or services, and understand where improvement is needed. Fortunately, creating customer surveys is neither difficult nor time-consuming.

Things You'll Need

• Pen
• Paper
• Computer with Internet connection (optional)

Instructions

1. Create your survey questions. Think about everything you want to find out. For instance, you may want to know how customers rate your products and services, what they think about your employees’ demeanor and whether they feel that your prices are competitive. In addition to these types of questions, it may be useful to ask some basic demographic questions, such as customers’ age group and earning bracket, to give you a picture of who are the people using your company the most, and what groups of people you may need to target more aggressively through marketing.

2. Create multiple choice answers for each question. Stick to no more than four or five possible answers. One answer should continue where the other left off. For instance, if a question is “How often do you use our services?” answer a) might be “daily,” answer b) might be “several times a week,” and so on.

3. Put your survey in the format in which customers will be taking it. If you plan to conduct it online, sign up for a survey-making company and put your survey online. The survey-making websites will typically guide you step-by-step on how to do it, then will give you a link that you can give customers to take the survey online at their convenience. As customers take the survey, the websites will compile and analyze results for you. If you plan to have customers complete the survey in person, print it up and take it to a copy shop. You might want to ask the copy shop to create a small pad with one survey on each page so customers can simply peel a survey off, complete it on the spot and hand it in.

4. Create an incentive for people to fill out your survey. For instance, you may want to have people put their email addresses at the bottom of the survey, and then raffle off a prize by randomly choosing one who completed the survey at the end of the survey-period.

Tips & Warnings

• Don’t try to include too many questions in your survey; otherwise, people may lose interest halfway through and not complete it.

• If conducting the survey with pen and paper, have a box nearby where customers can deposit their completed surveys.

References

• Survey Web: How To Conduct a Customer Survey
• Institute for Citizen-Centered Service: How To Conduct Customer Surveys

Resources

• Survey Monkey