How to create a successful Customer Feedback Survey effectively?

Customer feedback surveys are an efficient way of collecting feedback to improve your product. But, this customer feedback method comes with its way of puzzles.

• How do you get meaningful responses from users for your feedback surveys?
• How do you raise your feedback survey response rate percentage?
• How do you know whether you’re targeting the right people for the feedback survey?

In this article, we’ll add some best methods for customer feedback surveys to guide us to get an answer for all these difficult questions once at a time.

Why Product Feedback Surveys Are crucial To Your Product Strategy?

As a product manager, it’s crucial to establish listening posts, collect product feedback from your user base, prioritizing the feature requests and product improvements. If you skip these steps, you will end-up in the risk of building a wrong product that people don’t enjoy using. So it's very important to include those steps while building product strategy.

A customer feedback survey can act as a powerful source to get your users to open up and get their insights to your internal teams that help to build out a successful product roadmap. Some of the customer-feedback survey research says, 87 % of survey-takers want to help in the company’s future products and services.

Now, I am pretty sure you would know the importance of getting the customer feedback survey. It is a better way to create a survey that people need and to know their actual needs. Instead of sending a long list of questionnaire feedback survey emails to all your customers and waiting for their response and getting exhausted after some time. It's better when you follow these best practices, your customer feedback surveys will be both successful and productive which gives you meaningful results.

How to Create Meaningful Customer Feedback Surveys?

Utilize these seven proven best practices while creating your next customer feedback survey to ensure you provide the best experience to customers while also raising your customer survey response rate.

1. Explain the advantage of participating in the Feedback survey to your customers

Did you know that customers are more excited to help when they know why their help is needed?

In some of my analyses, most of the survey indicates that when customers understand the reason behind a feedback request survey they are more excited to submit their answers. Instead of creating random questions and loading their inbox without explaining the purpose clearly.

For example,

• Hello, can you submit feedback on the experience of using our product? Received a positive response of 60%
• Hello, happy to work with you, can you provide us with feedback on how our product helps you in achieving your needs? So, we will help you by giving a better experience. yielded a positive response of 94%.
• This concludes that when we request someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we give a reason. Customers simply like to keep reasons for what they do.

To further raise your customer survey completion rates, create the reason for your survey relevant to the person explaining it. When customers know what’s in it for them and have a sense that they’ll get an advantage through future product enhancements or development, they’re more interested to invest few minutes out of their busy day to participate in your customer feedback survey. After getting a response from your customers for the feedback survey, don’t let it away; send them a response of thanking them.

Pro tip: Here is an article that helps you to write a successful thank you email response for your beloved customers.

2. Notify customers on how long the survey will take

The rate of feedback survey completion raises when you give an estimate of the time commitment needed to respond to all survey questions.

Airbnb does a great job of creating survey respondent expectations on how long it takes to complete their product survey, as well as explaining the reason behind the feedback:

If your feedback survey includes multiple questions, I will suggest using progress indicators or in-survey notifications to help customers understand their progress along the way.

Also, remember that a large number of questions can also be daunting and lead to feedback survey fatigue. Customers may feel they writing MCQ for an exam. Most customer feedback surveys are 10-20 questions, not more than that.

3. Prefer asking objective feedback survey questions to avoid skewing your results

If you’re not predictive, you can build an inclination to answer a particular way by how you write survey questions. It’s more crucial to get objective and honest feedback from customers than it is to get skewed product feedback.

Try to negotiate questions like this:

How you rate this product as good, or awesome?

Prefer, ask questions like this:

On a scale of 1 to 5, rate the experience of our product?

Keep in mind, that the goal of a customer feedback survey is to listen to gather feedback for your product roadmap. Perfect market research is critical to the success of your product.

4. Always prefer MCQ survey questions

To get better customer insights and the most honest input from customers on product surveys, leave space for the unexpected answer. A simple way to do this is to add an “Other” answer option on multiple-choice style questions in your questionnaire feedback survey. It’s a great idea to add some space for extra comments where it makes sense for various types of questions, as well.

You will not only open your team with the possibility of learning something new about the customer side and their needs of your product, but you’ll also negotiate the potential for unintentional bias toward other answer option that customers would have felt obligated to select because providing their accurate answer wasn’t possible.

Ensure that you have all questions simple, brief, and direct. You can feel free to be playful, as long as you don’t distract customers from the overall goal of the feedback survey.

Also, notify any particular complex questions. Initiate customers to leave a brief answer and thank them in advance for doing so.

5. Add at least one open-ended question in your feedback survey

The perfect customer feedback surveys add open-ended questions that find candid insights from surveyed customers on what can be derived better, or how a company’s performing on a particular aspect of a product. Some great open-ended questions include

• How can we improve?
• What would make this product better?

Answers to these sorts of questions give insights that can inspire product developments, new features—or even new products for your roadmap. Always provide enough space for your customers and also your target audience to share what’s on their mind. This will help your product to find a stable place in the market-fit

6. Analyze partial responses

When creating your customer feedback survey, ensure the survey software or provider records partially completed customer feedback. If a survey respondent can’t able to answer all of your questions for any reason, you don’t want to let the valuable feedback fly that they were able to share.

If you’re requesting over than 2 questions, align the priority questions at the first of the feedback survey to raise your chances of getting customer responses to them.

7. Prefer testing your product feedback survey with a limited group of customers first

Finally, never set a feedback survey without testing it on 5-10 customer responders, first. When you test your survey with a limited group, you’ll be able to determine the quality of the respondents’ answers and find whether you want to rephrase a certain number of your questions to get actionable feedback and insights. Testing can also help you to ensure:

• Customers understand what you expect them to do.
• Questions are direct and don’t distract customers from completing the survey.
• Technology doesn’t prevent customers from taking part in your survey.

Check and analyze the response rate and response quality. If you’re not getting better results, or realize that you need to reword your questions to get the proper insights you can work with, rework the questions again with clarity and good comprehension.

You can also request for survey feedback from customers, figuring out if there are any messed questions or barriers to complete the survey.

Recurrent process of testing your survey with limited-batch sends until you’re ensuring certain feedback survey is easy to use and the reason why you’re asking for feedback is clear-cut.

How to Utilize Customer Survey Feedback?

Customer feedback surveys give a chance to get a deeper dive into user needs, pain points, and expectations. Highlight on the insights you collect from organizing product feedback surveys by prioritizing requested product developments and enhancements.

Rerun the process until you sense the confidence that the feedback survey is easy to use and that you’re making a compelling case to urge your customers to participate.