survey questions

3 Net Promoter Score Questions To Ask

Survey Tips

When you use Net Promoter Score questions in your survey, you start the process of identifying loyal customers.

You start to recognize and distinguish your brand ambassadors. These are the people who will help lead new customers straight to your door.

With Net Promoter Score (NPS), you can quantitatively measure and then encourage customer loyalty.

To help you, we look at three Net Promoter Score questions to ask in your next survey.

#1: The Standard Net Promoter Score Question

In your initial Net Promoter Score survey, you don’t want to ask numerous questions. Keep it very short and to the point with the formulaic question customers are growing used to seeing.

The standard Net Promoter Score question looks like this:

Based on your experience, how likely is it that you would recommend our (product, brand or service) to your friends, family or colleagues?

Your scale should range from 0=not at all likely to 10=extremely likely.

With this NPS question, you’ll be able to do your Net Promoter Score calculation.

#2: The Reason Why Question

Your next question is really a follow up to the Net Promoter Score question. In addition to the main NPS question, you should invite respondents to let you know why they feel the way they do.

Provide a text area where your customers can actually write out their comments. You’ll find that you may receive glowing reviews or some negative comments here.

The “reason why” question should look like this:

Why did you provide this rating? or What is the reason behind your rating?

#3: The Follow Up Question

With this last question in your Net Promoter Score survey, you want to know what you can do better.

This is where you find out what your customers really think and how they perceive your shortcomings. The responses to this question in your NPS survey will help you determine which areas of your products and services need improvement and which ones are meeting or exceeding expectations.

For this question, craft something like this:

What is one thing we could do differently to increase the value of our (product or services) to you?

With this question, you leave it wide open for your respondents to offer their suggestions and hopefully, constructive criticism and comments. As we mentioned earlier, keep your survey to no more than three questions to encourage more responses.

You might even find you can eliminate either question #2 or question #3 or re-word them to encourage the kind of comments you are looking for, especially if your dropout rates are too high.

Final Thoughts

Now that you know the right questions to ask to get your NPS and additional feedback, you’re well on your way to using the Net Promoter Score to gauge customer loyalty.

You can use your Net Promoter Score to:

Segment your customers by their loyalty to you
Identify those customers who are unhappy and unwilling to refer you
Discover what drives your customer loyalty and how you can improve upon it
Benchmark your results against those in your industry

Finally, remember that according to NPS best practices, the power of the Net Promoter Score comes in what you do after the survey and after you have your score. Don’t miss this critical part. How you respond to your customers after you receive their feedback is integral to the entire process.

Your follow up may mean the difference between increased customer loyalty or an at-risk customer that walks away. Follow up is key to your success, and it’s what helps you encourage and gain long-term loyalty.

You earn your customers’ loyalty by creating relationships with them. Using the Net Promoter Score survey, you can start creating valuable and genuine relationships with your customers by showing them that you value their feedback and that you are willing to take action on it.

Your Net Promoter Score survey allows you to start a new conversation with your customers—one where they feel valued and important to your business.

Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial and try your hand at Net Promoter Score surveys? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: VisualHunt

5 Customer Satisfaction Survey Best Practices

Survey Tips

Do you know what your customers think about your business, your products and services or your staff?

Have you ever asked them?

A customer satisfaction survey is a great way to find out how your customers perceive you and to gain feedback so you can improve your products and systems.

When you send a survey to your customers, you’ll gain valuable data that you can analyze and then turn into action. (tweet this) This in turn helps you increase your strengths, work on your weaknesses and grow your business.

In this article, we look at five customer satisfaction survey best practices to help you send accurate, relevant surveys to your customer base.

#1: Have One Objective

Are you already saying to yourself, “But, wait, I have so many questions to ask?” That may be. So, in that instance we’d suggest sending several surveys spaced apart during the year.

The best practice when it comes to surveys is sending one survey with one very well-crafted objective.

Sit down with your team and find out what feedback you really want.

Do you want to know how your customers perceive a specific product or service?
Are you after their perceptions of your customer service?
Maybe you’d like to find out what they think about a new product you have in mind.

The possibilities are endless, and you do want to make sure that the objective of your survey is something you’re actually willing to take action on.

For example, if you ask several questions about your customer service, be sure you’re willing to do what it takes to help your staff improve.

When designing your survey, narrow down your survey goal. Once you have your goal, you can compose your questions. Be sure you stick to only the questions that apply to your one survey objective.

By doing this, you keep your survey focused. You also end up with better response rates because you won’t frustrate your respondents by bouncing all over with your questions and topics.

#2: Be Succinct

Now that you’ve narrowed down your objective, it’s time to come up with the questions. Brain storm questions so you have a pool to choose from.

The best surveys are short with very specific questions.

A general rule of thumb and best practice is to keep your survey under 10 questions. Better yet, make sure your customers can complete the survey in less than five minutes.

According to one study, adults lose their focus after just eight seconds. That means you have less than 30 seconds to grab their attention, convince them to take your survey and keep them interested.

Bottom line – the shorter the survey, the better chance you’ll have for a high response rate.

#3: Don’t Double Up

Make sure that you only ask one question per question as well. Sometimes survey writers are tempted to ask two questions in one. This isn’t a good idea. Make it easy on your customers so they don’t have to think too much to answer your questions.

For example, let’s say you want to know about customer service, and you ask this question, “Did you like the service you received in the deli department and the checkout lane?”

You aren’t going to get an accurate answer for either of these because while they seem related, they aren’t.

Don’t fall into the trap of asking two things in one question. Break your questions apart so your customers are very clear what you’re asking.

In the above example, they may have had a terrible experience at the deli counter and a lovely one at your checkout lane.

When offering check-boxes, don’t forget to also give respondents the chance to answer your question by selecting other or not applicable. Then, give them a text box for their answer.

This also helps ensure you get relevant answers.

#4: Test Your Survey

As with all things marketing, it’s a best practice to test your survey. Send it to your employees, a few friends or trusted advisors.

Ask them if it makes sense. Find out how long it took each one to complete the survey. Visit with them to learn if the whole survey made sense, and if they found it interesting to complete.

If you get positive feedback, that’s great, and you’re ready to send. If not, go back and revise what you need to so you can get the most valuable, relevant data from your customer satisfaction survey.

#5: Take Action

It’s a common problem – businesses send out surveys, compile the information, analyze the results, and then it sits on someone’s desk for months.

If you want to show your customers that you care about their feedback, you must take action on your results and share it with your customers.

Tell your customers what you learned. Then, explain to them what you’re going to do as a result of their feedback.

When you follow up with your customers, you show them that you value them, their feedback and their time. You increase their loyalty with your company and show them their opinions do matter.

What’s more, they’ll be happy to complete any other surveys you send them because they’ll feel like they have a voice and a say in your company’s products and surveys. This in turn confirms their reason for doing business with you.

Final Thoughts

While it may seem hard to craft your survey, it can be even harder convincing your customers to complete your customer satisfaction survey.

Your customers are busy, and as you build your survey, there are a few things to remember for the best responses. Make sure the following is in place before you send your survey:

A reason for them to complete the survey should be clear. For example, they are current customers with a connection to your business.
They believe they’re making a difference by completing the survey.
The survey is incredibly easy to complete.
There is a reward at the end. Consider offering something like a drawing or extra loyalty points for their efforts.

Now that you have five customer satisfaction survey best practices, you’re ready to begin building your survey so you can make the best decisions about your business, increasing customer loyalty in the process.

Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Clem Onojeghuo

5 More Questions To Ask In A Customer Satisfaction Survey

5 Questions To Ask in a Customer Satisfaction Survey

Survey Tips

You’ll find that when crafting your survey, you have several options.

First, you can ask open-ended questions. These questions don’t necessarily have an expected response, and they allow the respondent to craft their own answers.

Another type of question is the matrix or closed-ended question. This type of question allows you to collect stats and come up with uniform data.

In this article, we look at five more questions to ask in a customer satisfaction survey, and we’re going to look at the matrix question. Let’s define it now.

The Matrix Question

Matrix questions allow you to aggregate stats because they ask respondents to evaluate one or more rows of items using the exact same column choices.

Using the matrix question, you can also use a rating scale, which is a variation of the Matrix question. This allows you to assign weights to each answer.

Now let’s look at five more questions to ask in a customer satisfaction survey using the Matrix question.

We look at how to phrase the questions and set up the rankings for the best results and which questions are ideal for your product or service.

#1: Matrix with Choices

You can compose a Matrix question that allows respondents to pick one answer per row.

For example, let’s say you just bought a car, and the dealer sends you a survey. One of your Matrix questions might look something like this:

The following qualities were important in my sales manager:

The list would include qualities like approachable, qualified, honest and believable, while the radio button options for each of the qualities would include options to check that include extremely important, very important, somewhat important, slightly important and not at all important.

By keeping your options short and specific, you’re more likely to get accurate responses.

#2: Matrix with Multiple Answers

In this question, your respondents can provide you with multiple answers.

Using the above example, you might revise the question. It would state, The following qualities are important in my: (select all that apply):

Then, for the options, survey takers are presented with a sales manager, finance manager, and general manager. For each of those rows, respondents can choose from approachable, qualified, honest and believable.

With just some slight re-working, you can find out how each member of your team performed during the sale of the car.

#3: Matrix with Drop-down Choices

Another option is to include a drop-down menu for respondents.

The question from the above examples could again be re-worked to look like this:

Select the team member you worked with, along with their name and let us know if they were helpful.

To accomplish this, you’d list each of the team members (sales manager, finance manager, general manager) vertically.

Then, in each of their corresponding rows, you provide drop downs for respondents to check the team member’s name and another one to click whether they were helpful.

#4: Matrix with Rating Scale

The Likert Scale allows survey takers to give a rating for the question on a scale from 0 to 10.

You would mark your scale by two endpoints from lowest to highest.

This type of question is especially helpful when evaluating products.

#5: Contingency Question

Finally, another option is the contingency question. You would ask this in a customer satisfaction survey to weed out people you don’t want responding to your survey.

For example, before sending respondents through to your Matrix question(s), you might ask them questions to find out if your survey still applies to them.

Final Thoughts

Matrix questions are a quick and easy way to build your survey. They are efficient and allow you to collect a lot of data in one question.

You do need to be careful when using them, though.

A table of Matrix questions can be overwhelming on a mobile phone.

So, let’s say you have six rows across, and respondents can choose from five answers. You can break each row up into its own question. You then end up with six separate questions that all have the same five possible answers.

This makes it easy for mobile phone users.

You also want to keep your Matrix questions short. In any given group, stick to five or fewer options. This helps ensure your respondents answer each row accurately, and that they don’t select the same answer for each question.

Matrix questions are overall a great way to get and interpret your survey questions. Just be careful to keep them short and simple to encourage accurate answers. (tweet this)

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free SurveyTown trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Alejandro Garrida Navarro

What Makes Your Survey Statistically Significant?

Survey Tips

What is statistical significance? For some, the term can be misleading. So, before we answer the question, “What makes your survey statistically significant,” let’s determine just what we mean by the term. Let’s break it down:

The word significant to most of us means something is important.
For statisticians, significant means something is probably true, and it leaves nothing to chance.

Bottom line – in surveys, something that is significant is most likely probably true, but it doesn’t always have to be important. So, the “trueness” of your survey is what’s important.

According to one source, your survey is statistically significant when it is large enough to accurately represent the population sample being surveyed.

This brings us to the topic of this article. We’re going to look at how many people you need to respond to your survey for it to be statistically significant. In other words, how many respondents do you need to trust your survey results?

You’ll find there are a few things to take into consideration when considering if your survey is statistically significant.

Population Size

When we talk about population, this is the group of people to be surveyed. As your population grows, you can usually get a better response.

Sampling Error Tolerance

Ask yourself how accurate your results should be. If you are surveying your population with soft questions, your results don’t necessarily have to be spot on.

If you’re making major business and financial decisions, you have little tolerance for sampling errors.

Response Variance

Consider your survey as a moving object. If you begin your survey, and the responses are all very similar, then perhaps you don’t need to continue the survey.

If the answers are vastly different, you might continue with the survey, polling more and more of your population.

If the variance is large, you would continue to survey for more statistical significance.

Final Thoughts

Now that you know what makes your survey statistically significant, you want to know how many people to invite to your survey.

If you know your expected response rate, you can decide how big of a population to survey.

For example, if you want 100 responses, and you expect that 25% of the people will respond to you, you should invite 400 people to take the survey.

The math is straightforward: 25% of 400 people is 100 responses. Here’s another example:

If you want 1000 responses, and you expect that 30% of the population will respond, you should invite 3,333 people to your survey.

The formula is n (respondents needed) divided by the response rate percentage equals the number of surveys to send.

In the long run, it’s always better to invite more people then less, especially if you don’t know how many people will respond. (tweet this)

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Mauro Mora

Have You Used Allocation Questions In Surveys?

Survey Tips

Choosing the right types of survey questions is critical to the design of your survey. The type of question you ask determines not only the type of data you generate, but the quality of it.

Have you used allocation questions in surveys? If not, or if you’d like some more information on them, we’re going to look at allocation questions and their usefulness in your survey.

What is an Allocation Question?

Allocate means to distribute something for a particular purpose or reason.

When it comes to your survey, you’re looking for respondents to tell you how much they’ll allocate.

For example, you might ask this question, “You have $100 to spend on three areas – marketing, operations and software. How do you allocate the $100?”

Allocation questions allow respondents to tell you things like how much time or money they’ll give to something.

You can pose questions across multiple categories. Consider this question, “How much time in a 24-hour day do you allocate to family fun, work, eating, sleep and chores?”

Again, you’re asking respondents to allocate something.

Good Allocation Surveys

When creating a survey with allocation questions, you’ll want to follow this basic design:

Limit your categories to three-five. After this, your data won’t be as reliable because you are asking respondents to think too much.
Your categories must be completely independent of one another. In other words, you don’t want to overlap them as this skews your data.

Final Thoughts

Online surveys open a wide world of actionable data. It’s always important to develop a survey that meets your needs as well as those of your respondents.

It’s your goal to ask the right types of questions at the right time to keep respondents engaged. (tweet this)

When you use allocation questions in a survey, you give your respondents freedom to choose and allocate their responses. The only requirement is that their answers add up to the number you specified – for example, $100 or 100 points.

Respondents will appreciate the freedom and flexibility to allocate their answers, while you’ll find your data is easily summarized and interpreted.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Elizabeth Lies

7 Survey Incentives That Get Respondents Every Time

Survey Tips

According to a survey by the American Statistical Association, surveys with incentives have a better response rate.

They tested a control group with no incentive, a group that was given $5 as an incentive upfront and a group that was told they’d receive $5 at the end of the survey.

Their data showed that the use of prepaid incentives not only increases response rates, but it increases the quality of the survey data.

What’s more, when offered the prepaid incentive, survey respondents were less likely to ignore a question and more likely to offer longer answers.

What does this tell us? It suggests that offering incentives is a valuable way to increase your response rates and the quality of your answers. (tweet this)

In this article, we look at seven survey incentives that get respondents every time.

#1: The Monetary Incentive

Have you ever been asked to take a survey that offered you money for doing so?

This is one of the most common types of incentives and the most successful.

When using a monetary incentive, it can come in several forms:

Cash (think PayPal)
Check (either mailed or e-Check)
Gift card

You’ll often find a higher completion rate when respondents are offered a cash reward.

Why is the return better? Survey respondents who are offered a cash incentive are more likely to complete your survey because there is a monetary reward. What’s more, they are more likely to feel compelled to take their time when responding to your survey because they feel obligated to do so.

How do you find the right amount of money to offer? First, look at your survey length. How long will it take to complete?

Then, think about your audience. If it’s college students, and it’s a five-minute survey, anywhere from $1-5 should suffice.

On the other hand, if the survey is sent to a professional group like doctors, and your survey takes 30 minutes to complete, your price should be significantly more – around $25-100.

#2: The Sample Product or Service

Knowing your audience is key to deciding what type of incentive you want to provide.

While cash is always a great idea, offering respondents a sample product or service is another way to give them what they want.

Let’s say you want to survey people to find out how they feel about your sports drinks. You’ve just developed a new flavor, and for completing the survey, you offer them a sample of the new flavor.

This can work if your respondents are your current sports drink customers, and they’re interested in trying new flavors.

Likewise, if you offer computer-type services, you might offer respondents a beta version of your newest software.

With this type of incentive, make it relevant to your company so it encourages your respondent’s continued business.

#3: The Coupon

Coupons are another often successful way to incentivize respondents.

Many businesses have success offering a 25% discount to people completing their surveys. This is often enough to encourage and grow your response rates.

The coupon or discount costs you less than offering a straight cash reward. Why? With a coupon, you are still driving business.

#4: The Charitable Donation

Again, you’ve got to know your target audience. For example, pick a charity that ties into your product line.

Let your customers know that for each survey returned, you’ll donate X amount to your favorite charity.

Your customers will feel good knowing that by completing your survey they did something good for the world.

In addition, you’ll provide a good feeling for your customers. In today’s world, people are more charitable than ever before, and they want to feel a part of something bigger than themselves.

This can be a good way to build good feelings for your brand while helping others.

#5: The Drawing

Another type of incentive is the drawing or raffle.

With this incentive, you tell survey respondents that for completing your survey they’ll be entered into a drawing to win something.

Popular items include gift cards, cash and iPads.

Just be sure the lottery incentive won’t break your marketing budget.

#6: The Whitepaper

You can also offer your survey respondents something tangible. For example, you can offer them something of value.

Let’s say you run a marketing business, and you are sending your survey to all of your retainer customers.

You might offer them a how-to manual, video or whitepaper that you aren’t offering anyone else for free.

While not the most enticing incentive, it can work for the right audience.

#7: The Giveaway

This type of incentive includes branded giveaways. We’re talking pens, cups, notebooks, etc. with your company’s logo.

You want to know your target audience well, and if you’re giving away something they find useful, this can work.

Things to Consider

Now that we’ve looked at survey incentives that get respondents every time, we’re going to provide you with a few more things to think about.

Know your budget. This is the most important thing to consider when deciding on an incentive. Make sure you can afford to give away the item you promised.
Decide if every respondent gets your incentive. You can also offer the first 200 respondents the incentive or even the lottery option giving them a chance to win the incentive.
Know your audience. When choosing your incentive, it’s vital that you can define this group of people. Offering an incentive that’s valuable is of utmost importance. If they don’t care about the incentive, it won’t matter.
Decide on your delivery method. You want to provide an incentive that is easy to redeem and one that doesn’t eat up your manpower.
Pick the time you’ll offer the incentive. Will you offer it before they complete the survey or after? Upfront surveys have been known to increase response rates because survey takers feel obligated to complete the survey.
Set up some form of quality control. This is especially true if your survey incentive is really valuable. You don’t want people completing it more than once.

To Conclude

If you aren’t sure where to start, you can begin with testing a few different incentives.

Begin with a small group of respondents and see if they respond. For example, if you decide to offer cash, test this out with half of your respondents. Then compare it to your control group and see if it made a difference.

Through testing you’ll know what works and what doesn’t. You might have to test a few times to find out which one works best for your target audience.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Annie Spratt

The 3 Best Questions To Ask In A Customer Satisfaction Survey

Survey Tips

So, you’ve decided it’s time to collect some data. You want to know just how happy your customers are.

The best way to find out is with a customer satisfaction survey.

It helps you learn how satisfied your customers are while finding ways to improve your products or services. And, finally, it helps you identify people who love your products and might be your brand ambassadors.

But, where do you start?

It can be confusing trying to decide the best questions to ask. In this article, we’re going to help you.

Here are the three best questions to ask in a customer satisfaction survey.

#1: What is your biggest challenge in ___?

Depending on your business, you can fill in the blank at the end of this question.

Your goal is find out what the biggest problem your customers are facing as it pertains to your company, services or products.

When you find out what their challenges are, you can meet them head on and help them solve their unique issues.

Hopefully, once you start receiving responses, you’ll see some common threads so you can create actionable solutions.

Here are some example questions you might ask:

What is your biggest challenge in speaking to our customer service staff?
What is your biggest challenge in using our services?
What is your biggest challenge in using our products?

#2: What would you most like us to know about ___?

This is a great open question that lets your customers know you really care about their opinion. You’ll find that you gather some very useful information through this question.

It can be tricky to elicit the right answers from this question. So you will need to direct your customers a bit. You might limit the number of characters they can use in the text box or give them a few choices so you can narrow their answers.

You might find that the answers to this question allow you to tailor your business model to meet customer needs directly.

#3: How would you describe us to a friend?

Wouldn’t you like to know what terminology your customers use to describe your business, products and services?

With this open-ended question, you’re sure to gain a great deal of insight. You can use the answers to this question to position your company and fine-tune your marketing strategy.

This question also provides good verbiage for testimonials and reviews on your website. Please just make sure you have permission to use them.

Through this question, you can also pick up on any negativity and make plans to change it.

To Conclude:

We’ve covered the three best questions to ask in a customer satisfaction survey. So, those of you ready to start have a good base.

For those of you still on the fence about sending out a customer satisfaction survey, we’re going to leave you with a few reasons why you should think about sending a survey at least once a year.

You can find out if your customers have had any problems with your company and your products or services. Some of your customers won’t complain, so a survey is a great way for them to respond anonymously.

Customer satisfaction surveys can shed light on the performance of your staff. You’ll learn how they respond to your customers.

Surveys also help you understand your customers’ needs, want and desires. The overall goal of your survey is to help your customers have a better overall experience. (tweet this)

Finally, the last two important parts of conducting a customer satisfaction survey are compiling the data and actually doing something with it. Don’t let the data sit on a shelf. Act on it to improve your business and your customers’ happiness.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Farrell Nobel

Why Bias Is The Biggest Survey Mistake

Survey Tips

What is survey bias?

Survey bias includes any error that occurs due to the design of your survey. Bias can occur when you write leading questions. It can occur when you survey the wrong population or one that isn’t equally representative.

Today we pose the question – “Why bias is the biggest survey mistake?”

We’ve put together a list of ways bias is detrimental to your survey and how it can skew your results so your survey is worthless.

Researcher Bias

When the person conducting the survey has an outcome in mind, researcher bias can sneak in.

While we all have our view points, researcher bias is a huge mistake and can affect the way questions are worded and the way results are interpreted.

The purity of your survey is important, so take steps to avoid researcher bias. Involve several people in the writing and review of your survey questions before sending it out.

Bad Sample

A bad sampling of the population is another reason bias is the biggest survey mistake because it doesn’t give you a representative view.

You’ll note in the most recent political polling and surveys that there is always a margin of error. This is to be expected, but you want it to be as small as possible.

From the beginning, focus on your sampling and make sure you survey a broad population for the best results.

Biased Questions

The final way bias enters into surveys causing faulty responses is through leading questions. Be sure your question doesn’t lead respondents to an answer by avoiding biased survey questions.

Asking a double barreled question is another way to introduce bias. Don’t ask two questions in one. Measure one item per question.

To Conclude

Bias is the biggest survey mistake you can make. (tweet this) To avoid it, take time when writing your questions and make sure you send your survey to a representative population.

It is helpful to involve others when creating your survey as they can review it with an open mind.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Simon Dalmeriv