Customer surveys: Benefits, templates, and examples

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Customer surveys are an easy way to gather important feedback from clients, get insights, and take actionable steps to improve your business. Customers are the lifeline of your business. Tending to their needs ensures that your business won't flatline. And what better way to improve customer relationships than by asking them directly what they want? Surveys are an easy way to gather important feedback from customers, get insights, and take actionable steps to improve your business. With SurveyPlanet's templates, conducting customer surveys has never been easier.

The benefits of customer surveys

The most important relationship for any business is with customers. Without them, you don't have a business. Customer surveys are a great tool to nurture that relationship and drive your business to the next level. Here are the five greatest benefits of customer surveys:

• Stop relying on guesswork. Instead, get valuable feedback that will give you actionable info on what to do. As a business owner, you know the ins and outs of bringing products or services to market. But it's easy to make assumptions about what's great and what isn't, and your opinions may have biases. On the other hand, the opinions of customers are what count.
• Show them you genuinely care. Ask for honest feedback with customer surveys and implement the insights gained right away. There is no better recipe for getting loyal, repeat customers than knowing what they want.
• Gather important information about your customers. If you know who you serve, you'll better adjust your products and services to suit their needs.
• Discover problems customers encounter and find new opportunities to solve them. Some problems can go unnoticed, but with a customer survey, you'll know exactly what's bugging customers, and your business can excel at customer service by reacting. Such insights will also help you develop new products and services that customers will love and gladly purchase!
• Learn the reasoning behind customer purchasing decisions. You may think that certain features differentiate you from your competitors but your customers may be buying from you because you have great customer support. Customer surveys help you know exactly what to improve and the actual strengths and weaknesses of your business.

Different types of customer surveys

Which type of customer survey works best for your business? There are different types to use based on your goals and what you want to measure:

How to implement customer surveys in your business and use data to your advantage

Theory is great, but practice is where the magic happens. Asking your customers to fill out a survey may seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be. Especially since any type of business can benefit from it. There isn't a business where customer feedback doesn't matter, whether you own a retail business, B2B, fitness center, restaurant, or anything in between. So how do you start? Here are some customer surveys best practices and ways to implement them efficiently into your business:

• Use templates. Customer survey templates will allow you to focus on what's important, instead of coming up with the best questions to ask your customers. Why spend time creating a survey when the work has already been done for you??
• Figure out your goals. Write down what you want to achieve with your customer survey. Your goals will highly influence which type of customer survey you should use.
• Combine different types of questions. Multiple choice, Rating, and Scale questions get high response rates. Essays are great for gathering qualitative data but don't overuse them because they're time-consuming. That can result in people being overwhelmed and reluctant to complete the survey.
• Keep it short and simple. While you may fall into the trap of asking as many questions as you can, make sure not to overwhelm your customers with too many questions. You can always ask a friend or a colleague what they think about the length of your survey.
• Show your customers you're genuinely interested. If you politely ask your customers to fill out a customer survey, more often than not they're glad to do it. Additionally, you can always offer an incentive.

Use the data you've collected via customer surveys to your advantage by analyzing the answers in-depth. You'll gain a clearer picture of where your business stands with customers, areas for improvement, and how to move forward.

Customer surveys pros and cons

There are many advantages to customer surveys; we've already mentioned some of them. They're an easy and affordable way to:

• Understand your customer's expectations.
• Measure how satisfied they are.
• Improve your relationship with them based on feedback.

However, there are also some disadvantages to customer surveys you should be aware of:

• Depending on the sample size, you won't get complete data.
• If you offer an incentive or the survey is not anonymous responses may be biased.
• If you don't use the data to improve your business, you're wasting everyone's time with customer surveys.

Customer survey questions

It's time to take a look at some questions that work wonders for customer surveys:

• How often have you purchased our products in the last six months?
• How did you find out about our website?
• How user-friendly did you find our website?
• How long have you been a member of our gym?
• Would you recommend our restaurant to a friend or a co-worker?
• What additional equipment, features, or classes would you like our gym to offer?
• Would you work with our company again?
• What could we have done to make your experience better?
• How would you rate our staff's level of professionalism?

Find more customer survey questions and examples by signing up with SurveyPlanet. It's free, full of pre-made customer survey templates, and allows for customization that can be tailored to your needs.

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