Your customers and potential customers are a fantastic source of information about your business. Your customer surveys can help you measure customer satisfaction and learn how your clients and customers feel about your business and the experiences they have with you and your team. If you take the time to ask them, they will provide you with valuable feedback that you can use to make improvements to your entire business, from product and offerings to customer service and after-sales care.

What should I ask in my survey?

If you want general information about your how happy your customers are with business, ask questions about their satisfaction and allow them space to provide candid feedback about your business in general. This will allow you to spot a trend if there is room for improvement in a particular area of your business.

How would you rate your experience with us?
Would you buy from us again?
Why or why not?
Would you recommend us to a friend?
Why or why not?

If you are having a particular problem in your business that you want to address using the information from your surveys, ask questions about the process and that point in the customer journey. Leave your customers room to provide freeform answers with anecdotes about their experiences. Pay attention to the trends in the responses. What do your customers expect the transaction to look like? What are you actually providing? How can you make that experience better for the customer? How can you set or adjust their expectations if you cannot make major changes to the process?

Who should get my survey?

When you conduct surveys for your business start with your current and most recent customers. Your current customers and clients are already invested in your business and therefore have an interest in your business and its success. Send your survey to the people who have bought from you in the last 12 months if you sell products (particularly if you offer seasonal goods) and people who have done business with you in the last 6 months if you offer a service.

You can also survey your past customers with an exit survey. You can learn a bit more about how to create one in our post "Conduct an Exit Survey" from last fall.

The short version is... When your projects or relationships end, ask your customers how they feel about the project, your business, whether they would come back to you, and whether you can count on them for a referral in the future.

Now get out there and ask people how they feel about your business!

TB