4 steps to conduct e-commerce customer service surveys efficiently

Here are 4 steps to conduct a proper customer service survey at your ecommerce which will make you collect immediate insights effectively.

EBANX
September 24, 2020
6 min read

Poor customer services is something that may hurt your ecommerce business and reputation in the online market. However, you can always pay attention to what consumers think about your product or service and come up with more satisfying services.

But, how to make sure if you are providing the excellent customer service?

Today, most ecommerce companies conduct customer service surveys to unlock their customers’ deepest desires. Undoubtedly, surveys are one of the most practical ways of determining what matters to your buyers, what’s broken or missing, and what’s the reason behind low conversions.

Customer surveys can also help you put together a result-driven marketing strategy.

Why is It Important to Formulate Customer Service Surveys?

By conducting an efficient customer service survey, your online business will have a higher potential for success in the long term because you can find out those areas where you are lacking and what things you are doing right. Several advantages are associated with customer satisfaction surveys such as:

– Collect Valuable Feedback
– Understand Customer’s Perspective
– Retain Customers
– Maintain Reputation
– Maintain Customer Loyalty
– Identify Trends
– Competitive Advantage

Regardless of the size of your e-business, surveys help you determine the level of satisfaction your buyers are getting from your products and/or services offered. But, how will you formulate a successful customer service survey? Let’s find out:

How to Conduct Efficient Customer Service Surveys?

From your customer service to ad campaigns and newly-launched products to site navigation, surveys can help you collect valuable information you may not get from any marketing tools.

In this article, we will explain 4 steps of conducting customer service surveys for your ecommerce that will further help you collect immediate insights effectively:

Step 1 – Define Target & Prepare a Plan

The customer satisfaction surveys are smart ways to understand what matters most to your buyers. In order to make your survey successful, you must research and prepare a proper plan:

Clearly define your goal

Before conducting the customer service survey, you must have a well-defined objective in place. With a clear purpose, you can be assured to get conclusive results at the end. If your objectives are clear, you don’t even need to spend on freebies or incentives to know the desires of your customers. When customers know that they are granted the power to initiate change in your process, they get motivated to come up with honest responses. Here, you also need to avoid goals that can be easily answered with open-ended statements. When responses are too comprehensive, it will be challenging to turn them into actionable insights.

Who to include

Once you have created a goal of your eCommerce survey, you’ll need to decide who to add to it. For small businesses, it may be easier to include all buyers in the survey. But, companies with an extensive customer base may find adding every buyer to be too expensive and time-consuming. Besides, analyzing the massive amount of data can become a hectic task. Every feedback survey must have a target audience. All the time, efforts, and resources invested in conducting the survey could go to waste if you do not know whom are you targeting.

Note: Narrow down your target audience in order to boost the accuracy and usefulness of your survey. If you have any doubt, it’s recommended to include all rather than exclude.

Step 2 – Keep It Short, Simple, and Relevant

Customers can get impatient if you provide them with a complex and time-consuming survey process. You must avoid double-barreled questions, double negatives, jargons, and especially lengthy surveys. The idea is to keep everything short and simple.

Ask specific questions

Remember, only a few of your customers will be willing to solve a puzzle while answering your survey questions. Others will only check the first box regardless of how it is counted. Hence, you must keep your questions short and straightforward. The biggest problem with vague questions is that you may end up confusing the customers. If there is something customers find hard to understand, they may skip the survey without filling every required field. So, the credibility of customer responses is highly dependent on the type of questions you have asked. Also, make sure the questions are relevant and to-the-point.

Here are some of the best questions to ask:
– How well do our products meet your needs?
– How would you rate your last experience with us?
– How easy is it to navigate our website?
– How would you rate the value for money of our products?
– On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?
– How likely are you to buy again from us?

Provide options

Conducting subjective survey can be challenging. Therefore, you must provide options to your customers while asking for feedback. You can use pre-defined options i.e. Yes/No, Likert Scale (measure from 1-10), or ratings. Here is the best example of customer feedback survey:

Did you try our new protein shake”? If the answer is yes, you can ask other queries related to the new product. For instance, on a scale of 1-5, how will you rate the taste and effectiveness of the protein shake? Or, would you recommend this to your friends? These are examples of some relevant questions, and your customers won’t feel overwhelmed answering them. On the contrary, if the answer is no, you can promote your product by describing a few UPSs.

Nevertheless, you must avoid going overboard with the specifications.

Step 3 – Survey Implementation

Once your customer service survey plan is ready, it’s time to implement it. You need to choose the right feedback channels to make the survey highly successful:

Use the website as a primary channel

One of the best channels for e-commerce survey is the website. But even on the site, you can customize what questions to ask at which page or part of a specific page. However, you must avoid using pop-up which may distract your customers from navigating products. It is always recommended to ask for the feedback once the user confirms the order on the confirmation page. The process involves zero risks of distracting customer from placing an order since the survey is only conducted once the order is placed. If you are looking to understand user behavior during checkout, you can design a survey pop up on the checkout page. But, you shouldn’t restrict yourself to just your online store as a source for collecting customer feedback.

Consider other ways to collect feedbacks

If you want to get feedback from your repeat customers, send out an e-mail and ask them why they enjoyed purchasing at your website and if they have any complaints relating to their shopping experience. In some cases, you can also give them a call and conduct a survey over the phone. Smart or AI chatbots are known as the future of customer servicing. You can also leverage this advanced technology to conduct the customer service survey.

Step 4 – Evaluation

Once the customer service survey cycle is finished, it’s time to evaluate the verdicts. You can even plug the feedbacks into a database and prepare a visual data (charts or tables). By looking at all the insights, you can get the bigger picture of areas that need improvements and implement suggestion to enhance user experience and customer service. It is also a good approach to appoint someone from your sales team to follow up with customers who mentioned they had a poor experience. The evaluation process will help you figure out what you can do to make customers happy and keep them on board.

Conclusion

So, these are the basic steps of conducting customer service survey for your e-business. Remember, a successful e-commerce feedback survey starts with defining your survey’s objective and target audience. By conducting customer service surveys on a regular basis, you can analyze the results of any improvement programs you have started. Ask customer the same set of questions in each survey and track the results while addressing the problems they are facing.

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