How to raise your sales and marketing IQ in 6 easy steps

Steps to building a customer satisfaction survey

This guide takes you through the process of conducting market research and gathering client feedback. Creating a customer satisfaction survey will give you insight into how well you operate your business and where you can improve. You’ll learn how to:

• Set clear goals for a reliable and useful customer survey
• Ask the right questions based on what you want to learn
• Test and retest your survey over time to improve effectiveness
• Create incentives and minimize friction to increase participation
• Avoid analysis paralysis to interpret the results and take action

Asking the right questions

A customer satisfaction survey is great at gathering two types of data – objective facts and subjective states. If your goal is to identify your most profitable clients, you’ll want to gather objective demographic data (age, marital status, etc.) as well as subjective information (behaviors, interests and opinions, etc.)

But beware. The way you ask a question can have a big impact on the answers you receive. When measuring customer satisfaction, you could use a numerical scale (“How satisfied are you on a scale of 1 to 5?”), Net Promoter Score (“How likely are you to refer us to others?”), an open-ended question (“How would you describe the quality of our customer service?”) and more. The results and reports you get will vary greatly, depending upon your approach.

Knowing how to ask the right questions is more art than science. However, the table on the next page can help you identify the right types of questions to ask, based on the circumstances.