It’s important for business owners to be cognizant of how their current and potential customers feel about the services they’re providing. One simple, effective way to maintain an understanding of your customers is through distributing and analyzing customer surveys.  Customer surveys allow you to expand your relationship with customers while discovering ways for your business to improve. If you’ve never written a customer survey before, you may not know where to start. To help you out, we’ve created these 5 tips to help you create a customer survey:

1. Define your goals. Once you have a clear, concise objective, creating your survey will become much easier. Each step of the process will always tie into your initial goal. Find your goal by asking yourself these questions:

What am I trying to learn?

Why am I trying to learn this information?

How will I analyze the results?

A few topics you may want to consider include customer loyalty research, new product development, and customer service reviews.

2. Choose Your Audience

After you’ve identified your objective, this step should be easy. Do you want to hear from current customers? Potential customers? Or a mix of both?

If your survey is going to be based on past experiences with your company, you’d be wasting time and resources if you send it to potential customers. Always keep your goal in mind.

3. Create Your Questions

You should start your survey with a brief introduction and include a simple set of directions. If you plan on using responses as testimonials, include a brief disclaimer explaining so.

Each question should be as specific as possible. Make sure you only ask about one point per question. Varying the format of questions can make the survey seem less monotonous and hold the survey taker’s interest. Always include at least one open-ended question, which will give the customer the chance to share their opinion and offer suggestions.

Conclude the survey by thanking the survey taker. Often, surveys will include incentives as a way of thanking that individual for taking their personal time to help your business, but this is optional.

4. Distribute Your Survey

When distributing your survey, keep your audience in mind. Three main types of surveys are phone surveys, direct mail surveys, and online surveys.

Today, you’ll find many free resources to help distribute your survey online. Some of these websites also include tracking data.  Sites such as Survey Monkey or Survey Builder are great places to start if you’ve never worked with online survey distribution. You can link the surveys on your Facebook page, send it out via Twitter, or include it in an email.

5. Analyze Your Results

Make sure you’ve planned how you’ll interpret and track the data you receive from the surveys. Create a timeframe for when you’d like the survey to start and finish, schedule showing how frequently you’ll check the results.

After the survey has concluded, it is important that you do not ignore your results. Don’t keep them sitting in a spreadsheet. Share them with fellow employees and don’t ignore negative feedback. Hopefully, you’ll be receiving positive feedback, but negative feedback deserves a follow up email or call.

This article from Inc provides insight on how you can make the most of your customer feedback.

We hope this article helps  you create a fantastic customer survey! Surveys will always be a simple way to stay in touch with your customers while learning how your business can grow. If you’d like to read more about surveys, Mashable has created a great article with a few more tips, tricks, and suggestions. 

As always, please let us know if there's anything you'd like us to address in our blog! Our Incorporation Specialists are always available for assistance by dialing 800.421.2661.