The Lifestyle: Business - The Art of Writing Customer Satisfaction Questionnaires

Customer satisfaction questionnaires are made so that you can confirm or refute some ideas that you may initially have about your store or people’s performance. Surveys should be focused and easy to answer, to limit check-box fatigue for the one answering.

Here are some tips to remember when writing your customer satisfaction questionnaire so that it delivers accurate and helpful results from your respondents.

1 . Nail the objective. This goes beyond “satisfaction levels.” Be specific about the departments, procedures, or products you wish to enquire about. You may include questions outside of your determined objective, but it’s useful to be sure about what you want to achieve.

2 . Ask the right questions. Focusing on getting actionable information will chart the course of your business for the better. For example, a questionnaire that helps ABC Deli decide to offer a lunch loyalty program may have a bigger undiscovered impact than ‘feel-good’ questions.

3. Be as specific as possible. Write each question to refer to one thing and avoid ambiguity. If you ran ABC Deli, and wanted to survey the frequency of lunch take-away, don’t say, “How often do you buy sandwiches or coffee to go?” Make sure your question is clear by asking a friend to answer the questionnaire and see how easy or confusing it is for them to answer.

4. Simplify by using a scale (1-5). Assigning qualitative values like Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Not Sure, Agree, and Strongly Agree to your scale, for example, simplifies the answering.

5. Be consistent on-year. If you are doing regular surveys, use the same questions as before, so that you can compare results.

6. Throw in some open-ended questions. When the survey is written with a good pace and hovers around the particular objective that you chose, you will get amazing and truthful answers that fit in a modestly-sized box. If people today express themselves in 140 characters or less, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Having a clear idea of the kind of information you want to get from this survey allows you to craft an effective questionnaire. And priming people with clear, simple to answer questions leads to unexpected and useful insight into what your customers think about your company and service. MP:)