Customer Experience: The Role of Satisfaction Surveys

All companies face stiff competition, regardless of their field of activity. The offer is vast and the customers do not hesitate to flutter. To define their loyalty strategy, more and more companies are probing their customers. What is the role of satisfaction surveys in the customer experience.

The issues of customer relations and satisfaction surveys

Customer loyalty is never fully acquired. The customer relationship must maintain itself to continue. It is important for this to know their real feelings. This is the challenge of satisfaction surveys. Knowing the opinion of its customers helps to confirm or not in its decisions. It’s a way to refine your business strategy, and prevent a possible bad buzz.

Expressing customers’ expectations and desires allows them to take action to bring them the customer experience they expect.
The satisfaction survey is therefore part of a customer loyalty strategy, thanks to a unique customer experience and quality; but also to anticipate their needs and desires, to be one step ahead of its competitors, to position itself as a forerunner. It is therefore also a strategy of conquest.

Good practices in conducting a customer survey

In order to measure customer satisfaction, it is necessary to establish the customer satisfaction score, the SCAT. The customer survey must be conducted with seriousness to give results that are true to reality and exploitable.

The satisfaction questionnaire must be carefully written so that clients want to answer it and that the answers are authentic and relevant for the purpose. The questionnaire should be concise, precise, with an accessible vocabulary.

Often, the survey starts with rather general questions about the brand. They can more easily be confronted with the reality of the market and the known data on its direct competitors. It can be the subject of a second more precise study to refine some points specific to the brand.
As a matter of form, the satisfaction questionnaire usually contains closed questions, but at least one open question allows customers to express themselves more freely. It serves mainly to justify their positions and feelings towards the brand, and is an additional source of information through which suggestions are collected, outlining new avenues of work.

Some examples of questionnaires and their objectives

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) questionnaire is very short. It goes straight to the point and makes it easy to measure customer loyalty to the brand. It is a support for the research of recommendations and networking for the development of your customers.
The customer satisfaction questionnaire allows to know the real feeling towards the brand. It is a tool for measuring customer satisfaction, which aims to know its strengths and points for improvement.

The customer service evaluation questionnaire measures the satisfaction level of the customer experience throughout the sales channel, ie from pre-sales / prospecting to after-sales service.

Gathering customer insights, including their expectations, is particularly useful for communicating with new products or services. It’s a market study.

Probe a professional customer, in a B2B relationship therefore, requires special attention. Companies are not yet used to being interviewed. Their questionnaire must be submitted as soon as the business relationship is established, and it must be personalized to the maximum.

The customer experience is a key factor in the success of a business. The satisfaction survey is an essential tool for refining your business strategy, measuring customer satisfaction and guiding your decisions accordingly.