Customer Surveys for Product Managers

Your company is in business principally because of customers. And how long it exists depends on your ability to continue to please those who buy what you offer. Customer surveys are among the tools that can help you to ensure and maintain relevance.

When it comes to getting useful feedback, not just any survey would do. You need to design and present your surveys in a way that customers feel encouraged to respond and objectively, too. How do you achieve that?

Gathering Customer Feedback with Surveys

Surveys are just one out of several research methods that you can use to elicit user feedback. They are lists of questions that are targeted at getting specific information. These days, they are typically carried out online, although they could also be done in-person or over the phone.

Research techniques usually have a phase in a product development lifecycle that they’re most relevant in. Customer surveys help with the ongoing improvement of a product. They offer one of the most affordable means of getting user feedback.

Through surveys, you can learn more about the reasons behind customer behavior and preferences. They enable you to know what users are not pleased with and what they wished you could do better. Surveys can also help find out if whatever assumptions you have hold any water.

How to Design Effective Customer Surveys

Product people can sometimes be confused about what it takes to craft surveys that deliver valuable findings. Yet, you need to get them right for customers to give due attention to them. So how do you create customer surveys that generate a high number of useful responses?

Know what you want

Your survey should have underlying assumptions. These are mainly what you’re testing with this research tool. Having an idea of the kind of information you hope to get will guide you on the structure and questions to ask.

Limit your questions

There is a potential for you to want to include every question that comes to your mind. Avoid that!

Review the questions you have come up with and pick only the ones that can provide the most useful insights. Most of your customers may not complete your surveys if they feel swamped. The best surveys take 3-5 minutes, or less.

Ask more probing questions

Yeah, questions by their very nature are probing. What we mean here is that you should ask questions that seek to find the reasons behind responses – the “why” underlying the “what.” For example, if you ask them to select a rating on a scale for a question, you can ask why they selected what they did.

Add open-ended questions

When asking the “why?” question, you may have crossed outside the limits of where you can have preset responses. You will also need to ask open-ended questions and provide text fields for them to write their responses.

Besides, open-ended questions are important because a rating of 8 out of 10, for instance, could mean something different to different customers.

Avoid regular patterns

It is crucial to pay attention to how you arrange your questions. Do not put related questions in sequential order or too close together. You should avoid asking questions from only one perspective – something like “Do you like this?” and then “Do you like that?”

Vary perspectives from positive to negative, and vice versa, to prevent one response from influencing another. You need to ask about what you could do better as well.

Tips for Encouraging Customer Participation

Create an interesting subject line

You will most likely be inviting customers to take part in surveys via email. The success of your research, or otherwise, starts with the subject line. Don’t just implore them to respond to your survey. Give them a sense of value, which they would get or be providing, by responding. A good example is, “How can we make [product] work for you?”

Leave it to customers to provide responses

It helps to give your respondents the freedom to respond to only certain questions. Make it optional for them to respond to the others. This can reduce the chances of them viewing the survey as too much work.

Give something back

You should consider providing some value to customers in return for their time. People do not do business with you simply because they want to help you succeed – they are seeking value. Offer something – a monetary reward, gift card, or chance to enter a prize draw. The value you offer could even just be the chance to inspire your product for the future.

It shouldn’t be a frequent affair

Take care to not conduct user surveys too often. Limit them only to times when they are absolutely essential. You risk your company being seen as a pain in the neck if you send them out too often.

What to Do After Getting Customer Feedback

Your customer surveys would amount to nothing if you don’t do the right things when you are done with them.

Go over your findings and summarize the insights that your customers have provided. Check whether these validate or disprove your earlier assumptions and see how they can contribute to ongoing product improvement.

You should make the research data available to your entire team. This way, the data can promote alignment and facilitate better product decisions. Everyone will see clearly where you are coming from and are heading.