3 Tips to Help You Send Effective Client Surveys

One of the most powerful ways to obtain feedback from clients is a Client Survey. That said, if the survey isn’t carefully crafted, it is also one of the easiest ways to obtain skewed information that doesn’t truly give you a realistic view.

Often, business owners write and send out a survey, but either don’t hear back from the respondents or receive information that doesn’t do them any good.

Awareness, both of what you are trying to accomplish and how quickly you can skew results, is one of the biggest elements to consider when undertaking the creation of a client survey. Something that I see in too many surveys is wording that is slanted either negatively or positively, and that tone affects the responses that are received.

This is never helpful to the business owner.

To help more business owners obtain realistic results that they can use to build thriving profitable businesses, here are some further aspects to consider.

Considerations when Drafting Client Surveys

• Use surveys as a method to gather research on what clients like, what they don’t like, and what else they want to see from you.
• Remember: the rule is to obtain unbiased feedback to help you improve – which means that the survey must be carefully constructed to not elicit a skewed response.
• Generally, over half of the survey build is spent on strategically outlining the questions while framing them in a way that makes sense and leads the reader through the journey of questions while not creating bias.
• Care must be taken as to whether to request written responses versus a scale of responses that range from zero to 10 or using words to describe that scale such as “not much”, “too little”, “not enough”, etc., which can be vague and cause confusion.
• Consideration should be given as to whether the survey will be anonymous or tracked by participant with their name attached.

Platforms and Methodologies for Sending Client Surveys

There are a wide range of platforms available for sending surveys; the one that’s right for you will depend on your goals and bandwidth for sending and tracking the responses.

On one end of the scale, you can simply send an e-mail asking two to four questions and wait for a response. If you’re asking in person, you might simply hand out a piece of paper and ask for a response.

At the other end of the scale, there are platforms that offer very advanced technologies that allow anonymous and random solicitations for survey responses. These are designed to remove as much bias as possible when surveying a large, random sample.

Both have their benefits and drawbacks.

While yes, there can be an inherent bias created when we cherry pick key clients who we think will fill out the survey for us and submit the surveys only to that select audience, sometimes we have to go with the quickest, easiest, and simplest solutions available. In a more perfect world where we can use a third-party surveyor to obtain a truly random and unbiased survey (which could be phenomenal), the cost, time, and energies for such results sometimes do not outweigh the need.

As with everything we do, these are data points and considerations to take into account. It’s incumbent upon the business to ascertain to what lengths we should go to obtain survey results.

Tracking and Analysis

Once we send the client surveys, we want to make sure that there are good tracking methodologies in place to determine what percentage of people responded and further break down the information. Many different platforms offer tracking functions, but even an old-fashioned spreadsheet that identifies the date it was sent and subsequent efforts for reminders can offer useful data.

The compilation of the data and analysis is an additional consideration that should be determined in advance of releasing the survey. Using quantitative survey questions that can easily be compiled and give us data can be very useful versus written responses which are often vague and fail to perfectly fall into categories.

Another consideration for survey responses is who shall compile and create that analysis. While someone on the team may have the insights or capacity to do so, they can also create an inherent bias based on their slant or skew of the information. These are all again data points that should be considered in assessing the best method to proceed.

While all of the above may seem daunting, the biggest lesson is to simply get started. Our clients and customers are a wealth of information and have such great perspectives as to how we can make our products better. Start with what you have and refine from there – never let the nuances preclude you from getting something out there. With each survey you send, it will become easier and easier.