These days, most people are at least slightly unwilling to be questioned by online merchants. With growing news about how social media companies aggressively harvest our personal information, things aren’t getting much better. However, customer data is still worth its weight in gold, and the customer survey remains the gold standard in responsible and democratic data collection.

As an online merchant, you have a reasonable interest in knowing what you’ve done right, what you’ve done wrong, and how you can improve customer satisfaction in the future. Customer satisfaction surveys are based on previous voluntary interactions by customers with your online business. As much as people hate spam, they still love to be listened to. A customer satisfaction survey gives you the chance to say, “Hey, thank you for your business. Would you mind telling us how we can do even better in the future?”

There is nothing more reasonable or friendly you could say to someone who has paid for your products or services than that. That being the case, there are many advantages to using customer satisfaction surveys. Here, we will discuss what they are and how you can get the most out of them for some extremely valuable info on how you can better serve your customers.

As stated, a customer satisfaction survey is a great way to ask your paying customers how you can do better next time. They come with the advantage that you are asking for input, rather than just scraping it from general use data. But it also allows you to benefit from the fact that people love to be heard. People love to feel like their opinions and experiences matter and will be listened to. Now, let’s get into the benefits.

Accurately Determine Areas for Improvement

If the customer had a great experience and loves the product or service rendered, then you can pat yourself on the back. However, if the customer sees room for improvement, they are likely to tell you so. Even if you believe they are wrong, eliminating the perception of a bad experience from your transactions is a good idea. If a customer believes they had a bad experience, even if they are incorrect, that feeling is real, and it will adversely affect future sales. Doing a survey gives you the chance to show them that you intend to improve.

Understand Your Customers

Developing an accurate model of your optimal customer personality profile is very important for a marketing campaign. Over time, companies that last are the ones to develop a deep, complex, and accurate model for the way their customers think. This includes the thought process before making a purchase, how often they make a purchase, what pain points they seek to ameliorate, and more. But this information can take years or decades to become fulsome, deep, and truly predictive. By asking the right customer satisfaction survey questions, you can obtain deep customer insights much more rapidly.

Identify Buying Trends

The human ideosphere is a mysterious thing, but it does seem that we are not just isolated units. Human beings in a society think together; they process information as a whole and influence each other. On the most superficial level, these changes are called trends. Buying trends may change often, but they can be predictable, and they can be sufficiently lasting for you to take advantage of. By asking the right customer satisfaction survey questions, you can get your finger on the pulse of buying trends and make the most of them.

Improve Customer Relationships

The most important thing in developing a solid customer base is nurturing loyalty. You want your customers to like your brand, enjoy interactions with your company, and love the products or services they buy from you. With well-written and thoughtful customer satisfaction surveys, you can show them that you care about their experience and optimize it to give them the experience they want.

Reduce Negative Word of Mouth

No matter how great the products or services you offer are, no matter how competitive your prices, no matter how fast your shipping and how responsive your customer service is, you will occasionally get unhappy customers. A good customer survey gives you the chance to turn bad word of mouth around before it hits the streets.

Optimize Customer Experience

If a customer has a bad experience that you did not anticipate, or if they have an expectation that you did not foresee, these are examples of UX deficiencies that are difficult to know. There are two ways to get this information: through bad reviews and customer satisfaction surveys. The latter is clearly preferable to the former. But of course, everything your customers tell you is good information. Use this opportunity to make the customer’s experience what they want it to be. You may even be able to give them a positive experience that they didn’t expect.

Earn More Opportunities to Access Customer Information

Your customers will have a shopping experience, a buying experience, and a customer service experience. By normalizing customer satisfaction surveys, we add another phase to the life cycle of a purchase. If the customer has a positive customer satisfaction survey experience, they will be more likely to give you more information in the future. So, you should strive to make the survey experience enjoyable and satisfying.

Show customers that you listen to their concerns and complaints. This will all but guarantee a positive response to further customer satisfaction surveys- and that means even more valuable and responsibly collected data for you. Looking for help reaching your customers? Contact us today!

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