Why are customer satisfaction surveys important?

Updated: Sep 19

There is the saying “the customer is always right” but how do you know if they are happy with the service they receive? Or what elements can be improved? This is why customer satisfaction surveys are important, where you can gain a great level of insight from the data collected to move the business forward, improve various elements of the business and have a greater understanding of your customers for better customer retention.

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Carrying out a customer satisfaction survey will not only help to answer the questions mentioned above with understanding the needs and concerns of your customers to enhance the products and services you provide but the benefits of a customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) are more wide range divided into the following 6 areas:

1. Customer feedback

You gain important feedback from customers on how satisfied they are with your brand, whether or not your meeting their requirements and highlights areas that you may not know were damaging your business and you are then able to take action to address this.

2. Listening to customers

The survey gives your customers a platform to voice their views and opinions of your brand, where otherwise this may come up on social media, which is largely out of your control.

3. Understanding your customers

It helps build an understanding amongst your employees of how satisfied your customers are about different aspects of the business that they may be responsible for. This is particularly relevant if certain areas are not performing well in the eyes of the customers and for the need to be more customer centric.

4. Prioritisation of elements of the business

The results of the survey will show what your brand’s strengths and weaknesses are and help to first tackle elements of the business that need to be improved such as the time it takes to process orders or bad communication amongst staff.

5. Customer retention

If there are low levels of customer satisfaction amongst many of the elements of your business then your customers are more likely to go to your competitors (customer churn), so it’s essential for your business to keep up high levels of customer satisfaction and benefit from the loyalty of your customers through customer retention.

6. Monitor progress

Following the initial customer satisfaction survey, which you can use as a benchmark and your able to run pretty much the same survey again at different time intervals like every quarter to monitor any improvements you have made to your service.

Where can you create a customer satisfaction survey questionnaire?

If you’re not a large company with a sizeable research budget to afford research agencies then you’re better off with using DIY survey platforms that hold a number of different survey templates that you can customise and apply to your website, email to subscribers or invite via social media networks. You should try JotForm that is relatively inexpensive, easy to use, consists of a number of useful features and serves many purposes like quizzes, polls, online forms and different types of surveys (employee, customer, NPS and chat surveys).