Write Your Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire in 30 Minutes

It’s not difficult, time consuming or expensive.

In just a few minutes, you can be writing your own customer satisfaction questionnaire. Once you launch it, you’ll be on your way to getting real customer data and implementing action plans to grow your business.

How is this possible? It’s all about focus… about putting your efforts into crafting simple but powerful survey questions and into understanding the steps you’ll need to get them in front of your customers, clients or followers.

If you want your business to grow, one of the primary drivers of that growth will be the willingness of your customers or followers to recommend your products or services to others. In the case of a blog, the same applies to your content. This crucial concept provides a solid starting point for your customer research efforts.

Think in terms of ‘value exchange’. Do the benefits of using your product or service (or consuming your content) outweigh the costs of doing so? Remember that for the customer, your products benefits and costs extend well beyond those associated with functionality or dollars. They also include emotional and/or psychological benefits – and costs translated into time, energy and ease of use.

Your First Customer Survey Question

Based on the concept above, you should build your first survey around the following question:

“How likely would you be to recommend xxxxxxxxxxxxxx to a friend or colleague?”

Of course, you’ll need to tailor the question by inserting words which capture your product or service category or refer specifically to your brand or blog.

For example, the question for this blog could read… “How likely would you be to recommend 30 Minutes to your First Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire to a friend or colleague?”

Use a Well-Tested Rating Scale

It’s important that you use an appropriate measurement scale for this survey question. You’ll want the ratings to come back as numbers between zero and 10, where ’0′ translates to ‘Not at All Likely to Recommend’ and ’10′ means ‘Extremely Likely to Recommend’. This question and scale combination results in a thoroughly validated approach to customer satisfaction measurement. Together, they ensure you will actually be measuring what it is you’re trying to measure, i.e., customer advocacy.

Follow Up with an Open-ended Query

Your second question should be a ‘follow-up’ to the first. You’ll want to give your customers an opportunity to tell you in their own words how you could improve. For those who rated you at anything less than a 10, you’ll ask “And what, specifically, would it take to get your rating to a 10?”

Add In a Problem Identification Question

Next you’ll want to ask customers and followers what they find most challenging about your category. The idea here is to get a better understanding of the ‘pain points’ that your followers experience. Those pain points often lead to new product or service ideas.

End With a Quick Question or Two for Classification Purposes

This type of question is designed to help you look at your responses from the perspective of different groups. Choose them so that they provide groups that you know (or believe) will be related to differences in purchase patterns, needs or expectations. For example, the survey for this question asks about the type of list that customers might want to survey. “Is your survey intended for customers, prospects, channel partners, vendors, subscribers or others?” A multiple choice format is most appropriate for this type of question – so that each respondent can fall into only one group.

Simplicity on the Far Side of Complexity

These few questions form the ideal starting point for your customer satisfaction questionnaire. Besides being quick to implement, they are easy for respondents to understand and to answer. They are equally easy to analyze. Yet, in spite of their simplicity, they will provide extremely valuable insights into the health of your relationships with those on your list and how to improve them.

Fred Reichheld, management consultant and author of The Loyalty Effect, tells us exactly how to interpret your results in his book The Ultimate Question.

In essence, those who rate your product, service or brand as a 9 or 10 are your ‘Promoters’. They are willing – and likely – to  endorse your product enthusiastically and to provide positive reviews whenever they are given the opportunity.

Scores of 7 and 8 are characteristic of customers or clients who are ‘Passively Satisfied’. While not likely to leave in the near term, they are also unlikely to mention you in an unqualified positive way. With this group, your product or service  is  not remarkable enough to warrant discussion. They will, if pressed, be likely to point out at least one area that needs to be improved.

Anyone rating your product or service at 6 or below is likely to communicate a negative experience with your brand. Reichheld calls this group the ‘Detractors’. Not only are they much less likely to buy in the future, they are likely to dissuade others from buying.

Calculating Your ‘Net Promoter Score’

To arrive at a single number, or metric, for purposes of managing your brand, you’ll need only simple arithmetic.

Step 1. Calculate the Percentage of Promoters
(count of responses with a rating of 9 or 10) divided by total responses

Step 2. Calculate the Percentage of Detractors
(count of responses with a rating of 6 or less) divided by total responses

Step 3. Calculate the Net Promoter Score (NPS)
(Promoters (%) minus the Detractors (%)

The resulting number, i.e., the Net Promoter Score, should become one of your top metrics if you are serious about managing by customer or subscriber feedback. For an easy read and engaging account of the Score’s development, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Reichheld’s The Ultimate Question. It’s brief and to the point and is very helpful in providing case studies on how to work with the NPS in your business.

The Really Bad Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire

More Satisfaction Questionnaire Articles:

1. Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire by Adding Another Dimension
2. A Satisfaction Questionnaire Example
3. A Satisfaction Questionnaire for the Paisley Hippo
4. Why You Shouldn’t Really Want a Satisfaction Questionnaire
5. The 3 Satisfaction Survey Questions You Have to Know!