It seems that everyone has figured out the best way to get direct customer feedback: a questionnaire. You get them at the grocery store, you get them at the drive through, you even get them at the movie theater, so why shouldn’t you be giving one out as well to see how your business is doing? Here are some best practices for creating your own B2B survey to see how your customers think that you are doing.
Make Sure Your Survey Flows
You want to make sure that someone who is taking your survey can follow what is being asked. To do this, you should create a logical flow to the questions that you are asking and how they are grouped together. The best way to do this is by using section headers that introduce the topic you are asking about.
If you are giving customers a longer survey, then try to break up the sections by moving each separate topic to its own page. This way people taking the survey can autosave between pages.
Have a Specific Topic
You want your survey to hone in on a specific aspect of your company. Service, products provided, support, ad hoc reporting, whatever the topic happens to be, you want to make sure that you stay focused on that particular topic. Your customer should know what you are asking about and be able to provide clear and concise feedback on that topic. Don’t confuse the survey taker or the results by mixing up topics.
Get to the Point
If a survey is too long, people taking it are going to give up halfway through. You need surveys completed to get the necessary data, so encourage the takers to finish by keeping the survey short. Target a time frame of five to ten minutes max to complete the survey. This shows that you value the taker’s opinion, but that you also value their time.
Know What You Are Measuring
Do you know what your results are going to tell you once you have them? If you don’t, then you might as well not bother with the survey at all. When you author your survey, make sure that you have very clear and measurable results that you can translate into real world solutions. You are just going to be wasting time and effort otherwise.
Test Your Survey Out
Before putting your survey into the wild, give it a spin. Pick a small sample of people that you trust and have them give the survey a try. Take their feedback into consideration and make any changes you need before issuing the survey to your customers at large. This is critical for tuning the length of the survey and testing the flow out.
For a deeper look at B2B customer surveys, read this blog, “Customer Satisfaction Surveys & Research: How to Measure CSAT,” and “10-Step B2B Customer Satisfaction Survey Pre-Survey Checklist (free registration required)”.
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