Customer Survey Common Mistakes

Poor timing

It’s important to send survey invites at a time that is most convenient for your customers to complete them. You must understand your customers’ business cycles so you don’t survey them during their “crunch time”.

Likewise, it’s important not to automatically conclude that the weekend is the best time to deploy surveys. Consumers and business customers have different email reading patterns and consumers may be busy shopping or visiting friends and family on the weekend.

The main idea is to gain some intelligence on the lifestyles of your customers so you can send survey invites at the most opportune time.

Surveys are too long

If your survey is too long, that may discourage a customer from completing it. There are a variety of ways to shorten surveys with Zarca’s platform, and conserving valuable survey space should be a priority when designing surveys.

A shortened survey will strengthen the relationship between you and your customers because it shows you respect the time and effort they give in taking your survey.

Failure to speak their language

There may be a communication breakdown when surveys are filled with jargon, technical language, or double-speak. Questions should be asked in a direct, clear, concise manner that leaves no room for interpretation.

Likewise, when there is a significant non-English-speaking customer population that impacts your company, it is of great interest to deploy surveys to them in their native language.

Zarca’s platform can deploy surveys in all major languages and even some lesser known ones. Connecting and relating to these cultural groups will lead to a higher sense of loyalty and more long-term sales.

No follow-up

What good is a survey if nothing is done with the insights drawn from it? Most companies administer surveys so they can gain insight on a specific problem and take action to remedy it.

No company should deploy a survey if they intend to do nothing, or very little, in reaction to the findings.

Survey invites never reach customers

Spam filters are increasingly trapping email that it considers “spoofed” or junk, so it is important to find ways around that to keep response rates high.

Zarca’s Trusted Email Relay bypasses spam filters to allow your survey invite to reach its destination untouched.

No memory of past initiatives

It should be of interest to companies to view how customer perceptions on a specific issue changes over time.

Consider having a common section in your survey to explore a topic that was surveyed on in the past.

This will help the company see if they are improving, staying the same, or declining on that topic by viewing customer attitudes in a time-series format.