Demystifying Customer Psychology – For More Satisfying Surveys

Believe it or not, how you frame and word your surveys has a phenomenal effect on how likely it is to attract insightful feedback. That means your survey needs to think from the mindset of a customer.

Be it pre-launch customer development work for your new startup or a way to measure customer satisfaction for an existing business, we need to have a method that lets us smoothly interact with our prospects, customers and other stakeholders in our business. All this can be accomplished by a survey that asks the right questions in the right tone with the right people in mind.

What makes for a Customer-Friendly Survey

For starters, no one wants to sit for your survey and stare at a list of never-ending questions. And then there are survey monitors who like to lead their witness to answer the questions (inaccurately of course). Sometimes your survey has poor targeting /segmenting of audience when questions are framed. The underlying psychology of these surveys is important too to make it customer-friendly.

Here are 3 things that can help you make the most of customer psychology in your surveys:

Make a Customer feel Successful

When a survey is sent out to ask about a customer’s experience, make it a point to give them an outlet to vent as well as list down their experience in detail. Yes, it’s true that a disgruntled customer might be upset and that may influence their decision extremely negatively. But the idea here is to know what went wrong.

Let them give you their version of a desired outcome. Once you know that, you might find that the issue isn’t at your end or that the issue can be resolved since you know there are avenues to increase customer satisfaction.

You really don’t have to Survey ALL unhappy customers out there

If you know a customer whose input has nothing new to offer (no solutions, only anger), then it isn’t a good idea to survey those customers at all. Not even a suggestion to recommend your service to other colleagues.

For these kinds of customers, surveys aren’t the right resort.

For Best Results, Survey a Small Sample of Customers

A survey is one of the potent tools at your disposal to identify any customer issues that you might not be aware of. Experts suggest that instead of surveying every customer, it’s far more efficient to survey just a small cohort of customers, and apply their feedback to any other potential customer with identical gripes. It’s a one-size fits-all model sure, but in the context of business as well as customer service improvement, it makes the most sense to utilize.

After all, if you identify a customer with similar issues AND rectify their issue without giving them a survey, they’ll be pleased to know that you go the extra mile in taking care of them.

And that, is how customer psychology is important when you are building your survey and choosing the right way to use them for your business.