Feedback Surveys — Definition & How to create Feedback Surveys

56% of customers say they are loyal to brands that “get them” and align their approach with customers’ preferences.

But how can brands begin to understand their customers? The answer is simple – by asking customers directly. And the most effective way to do that is by using a feedback survey strategy.
What are feedback surveys? How do go about collecting feedback? How to create an effective feedback survey to learn all you can about your customers and their experiences? We have covered all the answers in this article.

Read on.

Feedback Surveys are designed differently for different companies keeping in mind their business and objectives to measure customer sentiment. They can be short or long and can consist of open-ended and closed-ended questions to get quantitative data or qualitative feedback like comments and thoughts from the customers.

Based on the industry as well, Feedback Surveys can be entirely different. For instance, when you’re measuring patient feedback vs when you’re measuring customer or student feedback, the questions in your Feedback Survey should focus on the individual experience. A patient feedback survey can focus on patients’ experience with the doctor, staff, etc. during consultations, appointment booking, and so on. A customer feedback survey can focus on customer satisfaction with transactions like placing an order, product delivery, dining at the restaurant, and more.

In this article, we will refer to all different types of surveys as Feedback Surveys or Customer Feedback Surveys.

What is a Feedback Survey Strategy?

A Feedback Survey Strategy is a system designed to collect and analyze customer feedback to produce insights required in improving customer experience. It helps businesses to overcome customer-facing challenges by making data-driven decisions in terms of products, services, customer interactions, etc. A feedback strategy is executed in four phases:

1. Ask: Ask customers for their feedback on experiences with your brand
2. Categorize: Analyze feedback to generate insights in terms of what’s working well for the brand and what needs to improve
3. Act: Use insights generated in the second phase to respond to customer feedback and resolve reported challenges
4. Follow-Up: Let customers know how their feedback was used to improve their experience

Streamline Customer Feedback Management with Actionable Insights

Build omnichannel experience for your customers and collect feedback throughout customer journey to improve satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement with Zonka Feedback.

Irrespective of the industry you’re in, a Feedback Survey Strategy is critical for doing all the right things to stay competitive, relevant, and in demand. Let's understand in detail the reasons why all businesses need a feedback strategy:

1. To Hear the Voice of Customer

Whether you’re selling a product, offering some kind of service, or handling employees or clients, there is always some feedback. A customer feedback strategy prepares you to listen to the Voice of Customer and understand directly from them what it is that they expect from your business.

2. To Communicate to Customers that their Opinions and Suggestions are Valued

86% of customers say that they are more loyal to brands that listen to their customers. And a customer feedback strategy is exactly what you need to let them know that you are listening. By collecting feedback and acting on it, you can create a positive image of your business and position it as a customer-centric brand.

3. To Understand How Well Your Product or Service is Doing

Customer feedback is like a report card that can help you understand how well your product or service is doing. For example, a SaaS product company can collect feedback on its software and see if it is performing as expected. This not only makes way for improvement but also ensures that the improvement efforts are made in the right direction.

4. To Measure Service Standards

Excellent customer service matters a lot to around 81% of consumers and influences their purchase decisions. By measuring customer feedback on the service standards of your company, you can find out if your customer service approach is impactful enough. You can also measure your support agents’ performances and understand clearly how you can enhance the service experiences of customers with your brand.

5. To Ensure Continued Improvement

Customer feedback motivates change and helps brands make calculated decisions for continuous improvement. This is extremely critical because of the ever-increasing competition and customer demands. With customer feedback, you can get feedback on everything that you have to offer and continuously improve to elevate customer experiences.

6. To Align the Brand with Customers’ Preferences

Salesforce research says that 66% of customers expect brands to understand their preferences and needs. This is the reason businesses all over the world are competing to become more customer-centric.

A customer feedback survey is a gateway to your customers’ minds when they engage with your brand. And this can help you put out exactly what is in demand. For example, if your customers find it difficult to make payments on your website or buy a certain size in your retail store, feedback surveys would help uncover such challenges before they become too big.

7. To Keep Customers Returning and Earn Their Loyalty

Several types of research prove that existing customers are much more valuable than new prospects. Not only is it easier to sell to existing customers, but it is also profitable. And by giving your customers a platform to raise issues and share what they want, you can win customers who wouldn’t be easily swayed by competitive offers and fancy marketing tactics. This is because great experiences matter the most to a significant percentage of consumers.

8. To Ensure Good Decision-Making

A feedback survey strategy ensures that you’re not like a deer in the headlight. Customer feedback helps you understand where you currently stand and what you must do next. For example, if you build a fancy workplace but employees still feel unheard, you may end up facing a high attrition rate and a significant monetary loss. On the other hand, if you actively collect employee feedback using feedback surveys, you can actually work on what matters to your employees, for example, training, new software, workplace engagement activities, health benefits, etc.

Similarly, you can innovate without many fails if you take into account your customers’ feedback.

9. To Identify and Retain Dissatisfied Customers

Customer feedback can be positive or negative. Based on the feedback survey score, you can identify customers who are unhappy or dissatisfied with your brand. Not only that, but you can also understand the reason for the low scores your customers gave you and reach out to them to offer a resolution.

If you effectively listen to customer feedback and incorporate it into your customer service as well as products to make amends, 78% of customers, according to Salesforce research, would be likely to continue doing business with you.

How to Create a Feedback Survey?

Creating feedback surveys doesn’t just mean writing a survey questionnaire and sending it out to your customers. Before you chart our feedback survey plan, you must answer a few questions:

• What do you wish to achieve with customer feedback surveys?
• Who is your target audience for customer feedback surveys based on your survey objectives?
• What channels would you need to use to collect customer feedback?
• How will you get your customers to fill out your feedback survey forms?

The answers to these questions will help you create an effective feedback survey strategy.

To make it easier for you, we have explained how you can create surveys that can do wonders.

1. Identify the survey objective and align the questionnaire with the survey objective

Your subjective object defines what you plan to achieve with the feedback survey results. For example, some brands may want to capture the overall satisfaction score of customers for the brand. Similarly, another brand may want to identify specifically the customers who are likely to churn.

To make it simpler, you can measure customer feedback across the three primary metrics:

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS): To measure customer loyalty based on their likeliness to recommend your brand to others
2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): To measure the satisfaction or happiness levels of customers with the brand or a specific transaction
3. Customer Effort Score (CES): To measure customers’ efforts in doing business with you or getting an issue resolved

2. Design survey questionnaire in an engaging manner

Rolling out a customer feedback survey form isn’t enough. You must create the most effective surveys that fetch you some great insights while also ensuring that the surveys are engaging enough for your audience to take them.

So, here are the things that you need to keep in mind if you’re looking to create surveys that boost response rate and get you all the valuable information:

1. Add Quantitative and Qualitative Questions
   Quantitative questions are closed-ended questions that prompt the survey participant to rate a certain experience. For example, a SaaS product company that has just rolled out a new feature may ask its product users to rate the new feature on a scale of 1 to 5. The quantitative value or score tells exactly where your brand, feature, product, or service stands.
   
   On the other hand, a qualitative question allows customers to do more than just rate your product. Taking the same example, a qualitative question may help find out what is it about the new feature that users like or dislike. You can add a multiple-choice question like this:
   
   What did you like about our new product feature?
   • Automation
   • Relevance
   • Automatic contact syncing
   • Speed
   • Others
   You can also add an open-ended question to your survey so users can share feedback in their own words. However, make sure to not add too many open-ended questions so the effort of sharing feedback remains low. You can check out our detailed article on open-ended questions examples to learn more about this.
   
   
2. Brand Surveys
   Most businesses use third-party software to survey their customers. Though this is usually the most preferred way to collect feedback, elements like third-party domain, watermark, etc. may sometimes make your surveys almost unrecognizable. Even worst, your customers may not even open the survey thinking it’s from some random brand.
   
   To prevent this, you can use branded surveys that allow you to add your brand logo, brand theme, custom colors, images, icons, etc. to your feedback survey forms. This makes your surveys easily identifiable since you can send surveys via your company domain. Moreover, it also increases brand recall.
   
   
3. Simplify Questions and Optimize Survey Length
   When you ask your customers too many questions, they may quit the survey halfway. Similarly, if the number of questions is too less or the questions are too complicated, you may not get the information you’re looking for. Therefore, optimizing the survey questions as well as length is key.
   
   What can you do?
   • Make surveys as short as possible to prevent opt-outs
   • Avoid jargon and don’t overload your surveys with dichotomous questions where a simple open-ended question may do the trick
     
     
4. Personalize Surveys
   As per Adobe research, 42% of customers are frustrated by impersonalized content. Additionally, 63% of consumers won’t buy from a brand that lacks personalization. Look at it this way. Would you rather engage with content that’s personalized for you or the content that’s sent out to hundreds of others without any personalization? If you’re like us and most consumers out there, you would prefer personalized content too.
   
   So, when you’re designing a feedback survey form, ensure personalization. For example, you can address your survey audience with their first name or use the name of the product or service that you’re looking for feedback on.
   
   
5. Create Relevant Customer Feedback Surveys
   A feedback survey becomes meaningless if you ask your customers irrelevant questions, for example, questions about products that they didn’t even buy. This is the fastest way to piss your customers off and mess up your survey responses.
   
   Therefore, make sure to create the most relevant surveys using survey logic. For example, you can use Skip Logic which optimizes the question flow in a way that the survey participants only see selective questions in a survey that are actually relevant to them.
   
   
6. Create Mobile-Optimized Surveys
   Most consumers prefer using mobile devices to shop and interact with brands. Therefore, it only makes sense to optimize your surveys for mobile. The survey should be perfectly visible on all screen sizes irrespective of what device the survey participant chooses to use.
   
   
7. Add Survey Details at the Start of the Survey
   If your users do not know how many questions are remaining and how much longer would the survey take, they may exit the survey halfway. But, if you add details like the number of questions and the total survey duration, the participants would know beforehand what to expect. And this may dramatically improve the survey response rate.
   
   You can also add a progress indicator so participants can see how much percentage of the survey is remaining.

3. Survey customers at the right touchpoints across preferred channels

Once you’re done creating your customer feedback surveys, the next step is to send them to your customers at the right time. For this, you will have to identify touchpoints that matter. Here are some examples of feedback survey touchpoints:

• Post-Transaction: To measure satisfaction right after a transaction, for example, a purchase, subscription, renewal.
• After Customer Service Support: To measure customers’ effort in getting an issue resolved and to measure agents’ performances while offering support
• App Transaction Feedback: To collect in-app user feedback in terms of app quality, user interface, speed, accuracy, content.
• Website Feedback: To collect feedback on various aspects of your website as well on certain user behavior, for example, exiting the website without a transaction, abandoning a cart.

Conclusion

Feedback Surveys is a continuous process that may start at the early stage of your business and continue in the growth and maturity phase. The objective of your feedback strategy keeps changing as you move from one stage to another.

When you’re looking to create an effective feedback survey campaign, you must choose survey software that makes feedback collection effortless yet effective, and provides you with the right reports and analysis to help your company grow. 

With Zonka Feedback, you can create customized Feedback Surveys and hear Voice of Customer at all touchpoints, get in-depth reporting and analysis to make better business decisions. 

Sign Up for a Free Trial to start creating and using Feedback Surveys within minutes. 

Streamline Customer Feedback Management with Actionable Insights

Build omnichannel experience for your customers and collect feedback throughout customer journey to improve satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement with Zonka Feedback.