Satisfaction surveys have become popular and nowadays it is very common to receive invitations to fill in short questionnaires after a hotel stay, to buy a product online, to participate in a training programme and in many other situations. The idea is clear. The more satisfied customers are, the easier it is for them to repeat their purchase choice. That’s why more and more companies are introducing the satisfaction survey as a key tool to improve customer and consumer loyalty.
A satisfaction survey is a quantitative study that measures the perception and level of satisfaction that customers, consumers, employees and all types of stakeholders have with the products, services and experiences provided by an organisation. Like any survey, it consists of a questionnaire that is addressed to a sample of people to be answered through the chosen medium, often online, but also through other channels.
Satisfaction surveys provide important benefits to companies that decide to implement them:
Selecting the right sample for your satisfaction survey will depend on the objectives you want to cover with your study. In some situations, you will have direct access to the sample. For example, if you want to measure customer satisfaction with a telephone service, you can invite them to participate in the survey at the end of the conversation with the operator. And if, for example, you want to measure the satisfaction of e-commerce shoppers with the delivery service, you can invite them by sending them an email once the delivery company informs them that the product has been delivered. In all these cases, the company that wants to organise the satisfaction survey has direct access to the customers.
However, in other cases, the company does not have access to the people it wishes to interview (or not all of them). For example, when a company sells through an intermediary or distributor, it may not have access to the final customer in order to send out a survey. This is one of the reasons why many companies look to consumer panels to sample their satisfaction surveys. The other reason is that through proprietary channels, it is possible to understand how a brand performs, but it is not possible to compare it with the performance of competing brands. This requires interviewing customers of competitors. Again, consumer panels can be an invaluable help in comparing our performance with that of competitors.
Getting a sample from a consumer panel is easy, as they usually collect a lot of information about the characteristics and buying habits of the people on the panel. Whether you are a bank, an insurance company, a telephone operator or an ecommerce company, your panel provider will probably be able to provide you with the sample you need immediately. And if they don’t have information on the category, it is always possible to do a ‘screening’, i.e. send out a few filter questions to a large sample to identify the right people to complete your satisfaction survey.
There is no single way to create a satisfaction survey questionnaire, but there are a few methodologies that have established themselves as benchmarks in the field:
Another important factor in defining the questionnaire is the type of target audience.
When creating the questionnaire that suits your needs, you can incorporate various types of survey questions. Rating scale questions are very common in surveys, especially the Likert scale. However, it is good to combine closed and open questions to give customers the opportunity to tell you in more detail about the reasons for their dissatisfaction.
A satisfaction survey should start – like all surveys – by defining the objectives you want to cover and the answers you want to give. Once you have a list of objectives, you need to write them down in a questionnaire. In turn, the objectives of the study will tell us whether we can interview a sample to which we have direct access or whether we will need to contact a supplier to provide us with a sample of panels and users.
Most satisfaction surveys are done online, although there are exceptions (such as the case of the satisfaction level of a telephone answering service). To do this, you should choose a platform that allows you to both access the sample you need and programme the questionnaire.
Once you have the sample and the questionnaire – which is very important to test to make sure there is nothing confusing or incorrect – you can launch the satisfaction survey in the field. If you use a panel of consumers and users, as they have signed up to participate in surveys, you can have data in a few hours or days. Most research platforms allow you to easily analyse the data, draw conclusions and create the necessary reports to take back to decision-making forums.
If you need to create a satisfaction survey, we can help you with everything. Our team of research experts can advise you on your research objectives and approach. When it comes to selecting your sample, you can use your own customers if you wish, or draw from We are testers’ consumer panel of 130,000 members. To compose the questionnaire, you can use our research platform, which will allow you to include all kinds of questions, filters and logical leaps, or let us do it for you. With We are testers you decide the level of service that best suits your needs.
Ready to get your satisfaction survey up and running? Contact our experts today.
Update date 17 August, 2024
