When you’re asking for customer feedback, often one question isn’t enough. That’s especially true when you want to delve into why customers are responding the way they are, and what you can do to fix it. With fully customisable surveys from ViewPoint, you have access to a mix of rating, multiple-choice, and free text options to get the precise data you’re after. However, creating a good survey that gives you useful data can be a challenge. Here’s a primer on when and how to program multi-question surveys.
When Should You Create a Multi-Question Survey?
Research shows that on average, shorter surveys are likely to have higher response rates—but they have a much narrower scope, meaning they’ll result in a limited data set. When you’re creating a survey, you have to balance these two factors. In some circumstances, omitting a question can narrow the scope of your survey too much.
For example, asking customers to rate their overall satisfaction with their experience might not give you enough data on its own. If you follow that question up with a free text question asking what you can do to improve, you’ll know how to act on that information. Even though fewer people will fill out the text form, it’s worth adding that question if it means getting more in-depth data from those that do respond.
Designing Survey Questions
The most important insights you can gather are the ones that are actionable, meaning you can do something about the results. Creating actionable questions also means carefully considering the wording of your survey, so you avoid questions that result in biased or useless answers. For example:
- Be specific: in general, specific questions are more actionable. Asking customers to rate their overall experience in your store won’t give you as much insight as asking customers to rate their experience at checkout, or in a specific department.
- Don’t ask leading questions: leading questions are questions that contain an implicit bias towards a particular answer. For example, the question “What problems have you experienced with management?” is a leading question, since the question assumes that the respondent has experienced problems with management.
- Design questions that have a complete list of responses: this is often an issue in multiple-choice questions—you offer a set of choices where the respondents’ preferred choice isn’t there. In this situation, it’s always good to follow with a text answer in case your customer wants an option you haven’t thought of.
Reducing Response Burden
Response burden is the effort it takes to complete a questionnaire. The higher the response burden, the fewer people will complete the survey. Keeping your survey short is one way to reduce the response burden, but keep in mind that time isn’t the only factor.
A feedback kiosk from ViewPoint helps reduce the response burden since it’s integrated into the customer journey. It’s also important to keep the wording simple and the questions short, to further reduce the response burden.
Here are a few approaches to consider:
- Hone your questions: you can hone questions by starting with a longer survey, then taking away the questions with the least variance. If 98% of your customers will respond a certain way to one of the questions for a significant period of time, chances are you have the answer you need for that question and can take it off the survey. For this step, having a customisable kiosk-like ViewPoint is essential.
- Provide evidence that their feedback matters: your customers’ primary motivation for completing your survey is to make their voice heard. Show them you’re listening with signage, email updates, or other information that references the changes you’ve made in response to their feedback. You’ll lighten the response burden of your surveys when you show that their time matters and that their feedback helps create the change they want to see.
Putting Your Data to Good Use
Flexible survey solutions like ViewPoint can delve deeper into your customers’ thoughts and opinions, giving you the ability to pinpoint what improvements will be effective. With all the data at your fingertips, you’ll be able to deliver precision feedback to the departments and employees that need it. In turn, you’ll be able to wow your customers with changes that show you’re listening.
How ViewPoint Can Help
ViewPoint kiosks can help you better understand your customers at every step of the process:
Creating: ViewPoint offers you the flexibility to create bespoke surveys, and professional guidance when you need it. Survey questions can easily be changed as your business evolves over time, to keep your feedback loop current with your business needs.
Capturing: Capturing data is easy with ViewPoint kiosks placed at strategic locations, such as near exits or checkout counters. Companies can opt to have parallel online surveys that collect the same data, so you can get feedback from both online and in-person shoppers.
Analysing: ViewPoint kiosks automatically aggregate data in real-time, so it’s all on one dashboard whenever you need to analyze it. You can send alerts to management to deal with urgent issues right away, while you’re collecting data for more long-term fixes.
Acting: When it’s time to act, it’s easy to send relevant datasets to management teams that need them. You can also update your new survey with a sentence or two about previous survey outcomes, so new customers know their voice matters.
Feedback should be an ongoing dialogue. Just like you need to give your employees feedback, your business needs feedback to tell you what you’re doing right and what needs improvement. Understanding the feedback loop can help you grow by leaps and bounds ahead of your competitors, but it’s putting that understanding to action that counts.
About ViewPoint survey solutions
ViewPoint helps organisations to radically improve the quality of their services. Our interactive feedback technology engages with customers, employees and stakeholders to understand their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the experience they encountered.
Our unique smiley face surveys attract, engage, and encourage users to leave their thoughts. Four reasons feedback kiosks are the preferred feedback collection method:
- Lower cost customer survey solution
- Suitable for all environments
- Reliable and always on
- Highly accurate insights
Find out more about how real-time surveys can help you assess customer and staffing issues, monitor improvements, and compare departments to deliver the best service possible.
