Customer feedback survey is a great way to get insights that help you know your customers better. Not only it lets you measure customer satisfaction but also offers you the methods to improve customer retention. This is the reason that businesses of every size are investing their time and resources in gathering feedback from their customers.
However, when even the well-crafted surveys fail to achieve their purposes, the task becomes a tough one. The need for cataloging users’ experience has brought many marketers to some common mistakes that often go unnoticed. And the thus, the most prominent confusion of what works and what not takes its place.
To take you out of the enigma, below are the 3 big mistakes that spoil your customer feedback survey and the ways to avoid them.
Table of Contents
1. Taking Personalization Too Seriously
Though marketing with a personalized touch is the hot trend of the era, it can topple-up your entire marketing efforts when applied excessively to the customer feedback forms.
To explain further, let’s take an example. Your company has just completed your second project or deal with a marketing agency and you receive an email from the agency asking for your feedback on their service. The first question that gets opened is:
Isn’t it too personal and confrontational?
Many companies won’t like to answer such questions at the very opening of a questionnaire, no matter if they are your new or long-termed clients.
Instead, keep the initial questions general but to the point. Don’t ask things that can give the reader an assumption that you are crossing the lines.
2. Making the Survey Too Long
The buying and selling journey of B2B professionals is long and complicated. Also, they have lot many things on their table to deal with. And in such cases, sending them surveys that are pages-long can lead them to ignore you.
Second, if your survey is too small, it might show-up as incapable of asking everything the customers want to say about your brand or services.
So, focus on the length of the survey:
- Make sure to maintain the ideal length – 15 to 20 questions.
- Use multiple-choice questions, table of checkboxes, yes/no, and descriptive questions
- Simplify question wordings
- Omit questions that ask similar things in different words
3. Mandatory Questions
As marketers, you should accept that when a customer fills-in a feedback form sent by you, he is actually investing his time to give you actionable insights on his behavior and experiences. And thus, forcing them to answer a particular question can become a huge mistake.
The chances are that the readers either ignore the mandatory questions or if they answer, they might not give the proper response. And in both the cases, your customer feedback survey will not achieve its purpose. Hence, give your customers the flexibility to opt what questions they like to answer and what to not.
#Bonus tip: Adding an “other” option in the multiple-choice questions can give the customers more flexibility while writing their feedback.
4. Wrong Timing
One key to reaching and getting desired response from the B2B professionals is to watch the time. Many marketers skip to do this and in-turn, regardless of their skillfully constructed surveys, they fail to get the reaction they were looking for.
Pay attention to the time you roll-out the surveys– either online or offline.
- Sending survey-emails to B2B professionals on weekends or Mondays and Fridays is not always a good idea as these are the days of the week with low email open rates
- Know about the busy or peak hours of your customers. Avoid sending them feedback forms on that specific time of the day
- Don’t send them follow-up emails regarding the survey. Bugging them to fill your feedback form can annoy them taking you to their spam folders
Remember that you don’t just need customer feedback, you need customer feedback with quality, and your every single customer holds that quality feedback for you. All that you need to know is the practical ways to gather it. Avoid the above mistakes and create your next customer feedback survey that is actionable and analytical.
Also read: How to Target B2B Customers with User-Generated Content Marketing?
