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13 Best Practices For Designing Customer

Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT)
Micah Solomon

6-8 minutes

5,354 views|May 25, 2018,5:42 pm

Micah SolomonContributor Opinions expressed by Forbes

Contributors are their own.
Consultant, keynote speaker, thought leader.
micah@micahsolomon.com

There are many places you can go wrong in constructing and delivering
a customer satisfaction survey that can keep you from getting an
accurate picture of your customer experience.  And most companies
do go wrong in their survey design and delivery–often in multiple ways.
(Alarming but true: If you send out a defective survey, it might be worse
than not surveying your customers in the first place, because of the
risk that the data you get back will be invalid but nonetheless used to
guide company strategy.)

What follow are 13 principles of correctly surveying your customers on

their experiences with your company, best practices that are both
scientifically derived and informed by my own work as a customer
service and customer experience consultant and designer. (I know it’s
an odd number, but all of these principles are essential, and #13
perhaps most of all.) 

1. Ask for the customer’s overall rating of their experience you’re your
company first.  You don’t want to influence this answer by asking
smaller, more nitpicky questions before you get to the biggie; asking
your customer several individual questions and onlythen getting around
to asking for an overall rating reduces the validity of that all-important
rating.

2. Limit your survey to a reasonable number of questions. You want

your responses to come from the mainstream of the people you’ve
sent the survey to, rather the response be skewed to only recipients
with the time and patience to slog all the way through a too-long
survey. (Do you really only want to know the preferences of customers
who took the time to answer a thirty-question survey without leaving a
single answer blank?)

3. Only offer a small number of ratings choices. Generally, I suggest

1-5 as your rating scale; 1-3 might be even better. Definitely don’t go as
high as 1-10; it’s fruitless to expect a survey participant to choose
between 10 different possible ratings–c’mon! What does a “6” even
mean?)

4. Phrase your response categories in the most concrete language

possible. Don’t use rating categories like ‘’excellent’’; ‘‘excellence’’ is
essentially indefinable, so look for something that is based on your
customer’s own experience. Consider calling your top rating something
emotive and simple, such as ‘‘Loved it!’’ or “Wonderful!”

5. Don’t expect your customers to be mathematicians. Demanding

participants make calculations along the lines of, ‘‘estimate your
chances of returning to our store this month in terms of percentage of
100’’ will create confusion and frustration.

6. Don’t ask intrusive demographic questions such as income, gender,

or age without making the responses optional. Don’t assume that
respondents will trust your privacy practices. (Would you?)

7. Don’t use internal jargon. You need to speak the language of your
customers, rather than your internal lingo. (However: if all of your
customers are from the same industry, as is common in B2B, you can
certainly use jargon that is familiar to them.)

8. Surveys are most meaningful if completed soon after a customer’s

experience. This means that you need to survey customers soon, and
that you need to close the window for accepting responses not long
after. (An exception to this principle, of course, if you’re sending out a
survey asking about a product’s longevity and such.)

9. Don’t hassle recipients for not filling out your survey. Maybe remind
them once. I wouldn’t remind them twice. These are your customers;
they’re not obligated to do what they’re not interested in doing.

10. Include a free-form text field or fields to leave room for novel
responses that you may not have even considered and to offer your
customers an opportunity to express themselves.

11. Be sure to respond personally and promptly after receiving

strongly negative feedback. And don’t set a batch of surveys aside for
later en masse response without scanning them in a more timely
manner for negative responses that require immediate replies.

12. Be sure to thank anyone who offers personal praise on a survey. A

handwritten note is a wonderful way to accomplish this if you have the
customer’s physical address. An email is also fine, as long as it’s
clearly from a real person and not boilerplate.

13. If you send out similar surveys over time and expect to compare
results, it’s essential to understand that you cannot change anything in
your delivery approach, introductory materials, or survey content
without making your results impossible to compare as apples to
apples. One of the consistent findings of social psychology and
behavioral economics (aka “psychology with a name-change for
marketing purposes”) is the often-intense and disproportionate effect
of what would seem to be small, even trivial, changes in
circumstances. In the world of surveys, this means that, for example,
there can potentially be huge effects from changes as apparently
minor as:

Changing your survey’s introductory language, or even its subject

line
Changing whether your survey’s delivered by email or weblink
Changing the number of days until it’s sent out and how long it
remains open for responses
Changing the number of choices per question

So what to do if you absolutely have to change an aspect of your

survey? You’re on your own, here buddy. At the very least, make a
careful internal note of which element you’ve changed and caveat your
results internally to avoid putting too much reliance on cross-survey
results.

[A note about this article's content: This is the most comprehensive peek
under the lid I’ve ever offered on great survey design.  However, portions
of this have been recycled, with updates as appropriate, from a related
article of mine published here in 2014.]

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(484)343-5881. Micah Solomon is an author, keynote speaker, trainer,
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Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, keynote speaker,
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