STANDARD QUESTION SUGGESTIONS & QUESTION SCALE
Net Promoter Question or Likelihood to Recommend – “How likely are you to recommend X to a friend or colleague?” This question makes more sense when you know the customer has had enough of an experience with your company to make a recommendation. This question gives you a sense of whether or not customers are willing to spread positive word of mouth about you. And NPS is a widely accepted calculation as a success/loyalty indicator. It also really gets the customer in the mindset of putting their personal credibility on the line. Was the experience good enough that they would personally tell others to try it? The likelihood to recommend question might not make sense in all scenarios or for all organizations. For example, if your customers can’t recommend you for some reason, you shouldn’t ask this question. But it’s a great addition if you’re interested in benchmarking, and if want to perform additional calculations on loyalty and word-of-mouth with the results.
Scale: The standard scale for likelihood to recommend (if you want to do NPS calculations) is 0-10.
More information on Net Promoter here.
Satisfaction – “How satisfied are you with ABC’s product/process/experience?” A satisfaction question is standard, it’s easy, and everyone understands it. While this is standard, it is not necessarily considered the best indicator of loyalty. Just because a customer is satisfied, it doesn’t mean they will stay. However, a question on satisfaction does have its place. You can ask satisfaction as it pertains to a particular aspect of the experience, rather than the experience as a whole. And save the broader experience questions for something that claims to indicate loyalty like NPS or Customer Effort.
Scale: Typically satisfaction questions use a scale of 1-7 or 0-10. These are used because they provide a mid-point. You should consider what other questions you are asking when deciding on what scale to use and how you will present that data. For example, if you are asking the likelihood to recommend on a 0-10 scale and satisfaction on a 1-7 scale, will your audience understand the difference in results? It is best to consider how people will be interpreting the results when choosing a scale. Keep things as easy and consistent as possible. There’s no need to overcomplicate your results.
Customer Effort: I’ve seen customer effort measured in two different ways. The first: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to do xyz?” This version includes a scale of Very Low Effort to Very High Effort. The second: “ABC made it easy for me to do xyz.” This version includes a scale of Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. Either version gets you to the desired result: Do you make things easy for your customers? This question is great because just about every customer values an easy experience. They expect things to follow a predetermined path, they expect you to keep them informed and handle any surprises, and they expect you to deliver what they’re paying for without having to go out of their way to get it.
Scale: Typically this question uses a 5 point scale from Very Low Effort to Very High Effort or a 7 point scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree, depending on which version of the question you are asking.
More information on Customer Effort here.
Open-Ended – “Why?” Asking why or what you can do differently after any of the above questions is critical to taking action on your results. Allowing customers to elaborate on why they gave you a particular rating will provide you with more valuable information than just a rating. These questions are time-consuming to interpret and analyze, yet very insightful. I recommend only having one open-ended question per survey. The reason being, the customer will use whatever open text field you give them to tell you what they want to tell you, regardless of what you’re asking. Keep your analysis simple with just one.
Scale: Open Text Box
SURVEY LENGTH
Have you taken one of those 40 question surveys about a website experience before? If the answer is NO, it is probably because the survey is 40 QUESTIONS LONG! Long surveys serve their purpose and they can be acceptable as long as your organization is comfortable with a 2% response rate and a 50% abandonment rate.
Keep it short. My recommendation is to keep the survey short enough that you (1) don’t irritate your customer (2) don’t lose them halfway through and (3) don’t become inundated with response data that you don’t have time to analyze. If you adopt the mindset that you plan to take action on the responses to every question you ask, you’ll find it much easier to shorten your survey. I love the one question surveys, but I do wonder what companies are doing with the data from that one question. Is it enough information to make positive customer experience changes? Is it just for the sake of having a score? If you’re planning to ask only one question such as Customer Effort or Likelihood to Recommend, make sure you can match those results up to your operational metrics. If you’re able to find correlations between the score and what happened, one question might suffice. If you don’t have those reporting capabilities, considering adding a few more questions pointed at the key aspects of the experience. A good goal for a company trying to pair down a survey is no more than 10 questions or no more than 2 minutes.
It depends on how often you’re sending it. Another consideration to make about your survey length is how often you are requesting feedback. The less often you want a response, the longer your survey can be. For example, an annual survey of your relationship with the customer can be longer than a survey that goes out after every transaction. More on survey intervals in Part 3.
Next up in Survey Design Part 3: Survey Intervals, Reviewing and Adapting Your Surveys
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