We have all heard the adage “The customer is always right”.
Now whether or not you agree with this saying, it is also impossible to ignore the power of the customers in this digital age that can influence both the success and failure of any business.

Therefore, whether you like it or not customer sentiment plays an important role in any business, and so it is most crucial that companies should remain aware of their customer’s opinions and experiences as they relate to your brand.

According to a recent report, 86% of consumers are ready to pay more for finding better customer service.

Therefore, to remain on the receiving end of such opportunities, you essentially need to listen to what your customers have to say.

Now, to do this the best way businesses can evaluate the requirements of their customers is through tracking customer feedbacks, which can be amassed through reviews, questionnaires, online comments from the customers and more.

A well-executed survey can, however, provide quantitative and insightful data, uncover challenges and problems, and therefore ultimately help any business gauge its improvement and/or progress over time.

Furthermore, another great benefit of carrying out a well-constructed customer feedback survey program is that it decreases customer churn, increases retention of existing customers and most importantly thereby pull customers away from your competition.
Therefore, in a gist by paying close attention to customer survey data, businesses can augment or adjust their offerings to best suit their customer’s wants and needs.

Hence to get the most accurate sense of your customer’s experience with your brand, here are a few best practices which can help you design a strong survey for your business.

• Primarily make sure that you keep the amount of questions in your feedback form at a reasonable number (not more than 5). Since when customers are bombarded with too many questions, they tend to ignore and not finish the survey.
• Offer your customers a small number of rating choices. Since providing a manageable range boosts the chances that the survey will be considered more acceptable by the customers.
  For example, a rating range o 1-5 will have a much higher success rate than a range of 1-10.
• It is best to avoid demographic data, such as income or age, as they may infringe on the privacy policies. However, if your customer survey needs these questions to be answered, make them optional, for the convenience of your surveyors.
• Another most important tip for conducting an effective survey is not to harass your customers to finish the survey. No customers like to be pressurized, which can lead to a negative outcome. Therefore sending a remainder once to your customers is enough.
  Moreover, along the same line, always make sure that you respond promptly to any negative feedbacks in the survey and offer solutions instantly, which will help to demonstrate that you really care for your customer’s opinions and feelings, and in the same line always personally thank your customers for taking time to praise your business and show them their efforts are highly appreciated for sending excellent feedbacks for your brand.
• Finally, allow your customers to express their ideas and opinions that are not included in the survey form through an empty text field at the bottom of the survey.

How to implement an effective survey?

Now that we have discussed how to create a customer survey, let us explore how we can implement this survey to find the maximum results from this activity.

It is needless to say if you know what is CRM , that one of the best tools for doing a survey of your customers is an easy to use CRM software.

Therefore integrating a customer feedback program with your CRM like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software can allow you perform the task both effortlessly and efficiently, as easy to use CRM software helps to gather customer feedbacks into one easy-to-access CRM database .

Moreover using all-in-one CRM software which is capable of catering to marketing, sales, and customer support in your organization can also help your company to take appropriate actions by directly routing any feedback that comes to the right people in the department in charge, which helps in avoiding any misplacement of the valuable data.

Takeaway

When coupled with the right easy to use CRM software customer feedbacks are most important for any business which helps in strengthening customer loyalty, boost engagements, improve brand reputation-and hopefully increase sales, as successful companies are those that seek to know more about their customers.