Katrina Oko-Odoi
Copper Blog Chief Writer
How to use surveys to improve customer experience
We know how important improving your company’s customer experience is to you. We believe the secret to long-lasting, happy customers lies in understanding who your customers are so you can better support them and meet their needs. And what better way to do that than a customer survey? That is, if you focus on the right things.
If you caught our blog about speaking your customers’ love languages, you know that adapting your communication style to your customers’ love language is a terrific way to improve customer relationships, build trust, and relate to your customers in a meaningful way.
The problem is, you need to know your customers’ love languages before you can use them to improve the customer experience. Enter the humble customer survey.
Here at Copper, we just completed a survey around customer support, with a great response (thanks to you, friends). So we want to walk you through conducting a similar survey with some tips for using surveys to unlock your customers’ love languages and improve customer experience.
What makes an effective customer survey?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of what to ask on your surveys, we want to address how you ask. Surveys aren’t as simple as just typing up a few questions and emailing them to your whole database.
Like every other piece of the customer relationship management puzzle, it’s super important to think about customer communication and how the real human at the other end of the survey thinks and feels.
Here are five quick tips to make sure you’re developing your survey in a way that will improve customer experience – not hurt it.
1. Understand what you’re trying to learn.
The best surveys are focused on a specific theme or question. Before you begin any survey, ask your team, “What are we trying to figure out with this survey?” This will keep it as focused as possible for you and your customers.
So let’s look at how to effectively build a survey that asks, “What is my customer’s love language?”
2. Keep it simple and short.
Your customers are busy people with full lives, so respect their time. Ask simple questions in an easy-to-answer format. Keep the questions and the entire survey short and straightforward.
The original Love Language quiz may have 30 questions, but your customer survey should be much shorter. Ten questions and 5 minutes is the maximum length and time duration you should aim for in any survey. (Any longer, and it will need to be an incentivized survey to get a good response rate.)
3. Give plenty of options.
Yes or no questions don’t give you much information. You might be asking a yes/no question when respondents actually have another answer entirely. Be sure to give your customers plenty of options to really get to the bottom of the question.
If you’re trying to figure out love language, each question will probably have five answers that correspond with one of the five love languages.
4. Don’t interrogate them.
Be sure you’re only asking one question at a time. Too often, surveys ask questions like:
“How did you discover our company? Have you gotten the results you wanted? Why or why not?”
What a doozy, right? That’s three questions baked into one. Don’t make customers feel like you’re giving them the third degree! Just ask one question at a time.
5. Add some open-ended questions.
Open-ended questions are a fantastic way to get an unfiltered glimpse of your customers’ opinions. By giving them the freedom to tell you how they really feel, you’ll have more information to help you improve the customer experience and better support that customer.
Word to the wise: don’t make your entire survey open-ended, and don’t make the open-ended questions required if you want a lot of people to actually finish the survey. Instead, look at open-ended answers as a fantastic bonus instead of a requirement.
Ask specific questions to figure out their love language
Now that those tips are out of the way, let’s take a few minutes to talk about how you can turn a business survey into a personality quiz to uncover a customer’s love language.
First, it’s important to know what the five languages are and how people in each language feel and express love:
a) Words of Affirmation – words and verbal compliments
b) Quality Time – undivided attention and time devotion
c) Acts of Service – kind and helpful actions
d) Physical Touch – touch and closeness
e) Receiving Gifts – thoughtful gifts
Once you have a handle on each of the languages, it’s easy to see the kinds of questions you can ask to gain insight into a person’s love language. It may sound obvious, but you basically want to ask questions that point to one of the love languages.
At the end of the survey, total all the answers, and the language with the highest score is likely your customer’s love language.
If you don’t want to devote a whole survey to love languages, dropping one love language-centric question into a customer support survey can help you get an idea of their love language and ultimately improve customer experience.
Here are some examples to get you started. (Each answer corresponds to the love languages above, i.e., all the As are Words of Affirmation, Bs are Quality time, and so on.)
1. Which of the following would you most like to see us do as a brand on social media?
a. Post more informative information about our brand, products and mission
b. Do occasional interactive, live Q&A sessions
c. Provide more “how-to” content and tips
d. Post more behind-the-scenes content
e. Post more exclusive coupons
2. What type of support would you most like to receive from us when there’s an issue?
a. Any support is fine as long as I get my questions answered
b. A dedicated phone call or chat session
c. A detailed email walkthrough of how to solve my problem
d. An in-person meeting or video chat
e. Any support is fine as long as I get a discount for the hassle
To determine love language, you can also ask questions that align with a certain love language. For example, a question like, “On a scale of one to five, how important is our handcrafted packaging to your experience?” could give you a good idea of how important acts of service are to that customer.
Other open-ended questions like, “Can you share a time we exceeded expectations?” or “Can you share a time we didn’t meet your expectations?” can give you a clear idea of what’s important to that customer.
- If they rave about the time a customer service agent stayed on the phone with them for hours, quality time is probably their love language.
- If they say the friendly chat agents won them over, acts of service is probably their love language.
- If they mention the free gift with purchase, they probably respond to gifts.
Think about your internal processes and work backward to come up with questions that can illuminate your customers’ love language, and ultimately, help you improve the customer experience.
Start to improve customer experience with surveys
It’s no secret that customer surveys are key to improving customer experience. It’s one of the only tools we have to really see how well we’re meeting our customers’ needs.
Our personality type and love language affect how we want to give and receive connection and information. So, the key to understanding who our customers are might be to unlock their love language through customer surveys.
Meeting your customers’ love languages starts with communication. Improve your end-to-end customer communication with Copper, the CRM for building better business relationships.
Try our 14-day free trial.
