8 Steps to Create an Attractive and Engaging Survey

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all – Michael LeBoeuf

You have decided to survey your customers. Great!

But is it enough to be aware of this strategy? Of course not, you need to understand what makes a good survey and how can you effectively gauge customer satisfaction with it.

Surveys are one of the best ways to collect the information business needs. They help you answer important, specific questions that can help you understand what your customer expects from you. However, the most important aspect you should gauge is Customer Satisfaction.

In this blog, let’s try to understand some crucial aspects of creating a survey.

Benefits of a Customer Survey

No matter if you are a service-based company or a product-based company, surveying customers is beneficial. Getting feedback from customers about your products and offerings gives you the following insights:

• What did they like about the product/service?
• What they dislike about your product/service/brand?
• What can be done to improve the offerings?

Let’s look into the basic survey methodology that is followed while creating a survey.

Read More: 20 Best Online Survey Software

Basic Survey Methodology

Create a Survey in No-Time

The process of creating a survey starts by establishing the survey goals and target audience. Next, you have to create a list of survey questions that can get you relevant responses from your customers. The major step is to distribute the survey to the target audience in the most frequent manner.

All you need to do is to select the right platform to create and share your survey. Here are your options:

• Facebook: Best platform with a poll feature to survey your target audience on Facebook. However, this method limits you to customers on Facebook.
• Google Forms: One of the fantastic suites of Google’s office tools, Google Forms, offers an easy way of survey creation and tracking of survey responses. However, this old tool doesn’t leave much room for customization, which is the need of the hour. (Related Read: Best Google Forms Alternatives and Competitors)
• Microsoft Excel: Microsoft Excel is a highly used way of creating surveys to collect heaps of data and analyze it further to draw actionable conclusions. Due to the lack of major functionalities, it is suitable for startups or small businesses.
• Microsoft Word: Easily accessible, MS Word is not a contemporary survey tool. However, emerging businesses, managers, retailers, and educators find this an easy way to create and distribute surveys in person.
• ProProfs Survey Maker: Online surveys are one of the best methods of data collection. Unlike traditional survey methods, ProProfs Survey Maker eliminates any friction or stress in collecting customer feedback, with features like customization, branding, reporting, and integrations.

Creating surveys may seem like a daunting task. However, it is not if you have the right tool at your disposal. You can engage the audience well to get insightful feedback.

Multinational companies, thriving businesses, retailers, young entrepreneurs trust online survey tools to pace up their way to growth and development. But you can achieve the desired results only if you have a versatile survey tool that makes the process of survey creation simple and delightful. A tool that helps you create a survey for free and share it online quickly will be an added advantage.

Let us now understand in detail how you can make your own survey.

Where to Begin

The first stage to create a survey is to determine your target audience and identify the kind of data you want to collect. Answering a few questions here will help you create a useful, interesting, and relevant survey:

• What is the objective?
• What information am I expecting from the survey?
• In what decisions, the survey feedback will help?

Having such information will help kick start the process of survey creation. Make sure you narrow down your target audience as much as possible.

Each survey question plays a significant role in extracting the best information. Survey questions should be clearly drafted. Customers should be able to understand what you want to ask.

Based on its purpose, surveys are of different types. Let’s learn about a few in detail.

Different Types of Surveys

We can classify surveys into:

1. Customer Satisfaction Survey

A quick customer satisfaction survey helps you gauge their sentiments. What do your customers think about your brand? Are they delighted with the product they bought? Are they stuck with some issue?

Example:

Read more: Everything you need to know about Customer Satisfaction Surveys

2. Demographic Survey

A demographic survey gives an understanding about your customer’s demographic details like location, gender, age, marital status, etc. It is a useful guide to know your target audience’s choices and preferences. Accordingly, you can tailor your products based on their tastes.

Example:

Read more: How to Ask Demographic Survey Questions like a Pro

3. Market Research Survey

A market research survey helps you understand the requirements of your potential customers. It equips you with crucial information to tailor your marketing campaign to acquire more customers. If done systematically, you can save overhead and wasteful expenditures.

Example:

4. NPS Survey

A Net Promoter Score Survey (NPS) helps you gauge your customer’s satisfaction on a level scale from 0 to 10.

For instance,

A customer score from 0-6 makes them a detractor of your brand, i.e, they are unhappy with your product. Passive customers are neither happy nor unhappy with your products and they give you a score between 7-8. Finally, a promoter of your brand gives you a score between 9-10, meaning they are happy with your product.

Example:

Read More: Checkout 20 Best NPS Survey Software

Survey vs Other Data Collection Methods

Are there other ways to collect data? How do they fare with respect to surveys?

Come, let’s find out.

1. Surveys vs Phone Feedback

A survey is a form of passive feedback while phone feedback is active. In telephonic feedback, you feel more connected to your customer. In a live environment, they are bound to give me more genuine and honest feedback.

But, on the other hand survey feedback offers more time and convenience to your customers. They can think and give their feedback in a flexible manner. Also, many of them would be reluctant to share personal information on a telephonic call.

2. Surveys vs Live Chat Feedback

Live chat is an instant mechanism to get feedback from your customers. Having a live agent to address the queries is a proactive way to know your audience’s response. There is more probability for your audience to respond to your queries as they are online.

But, compared to surveys, you don’t get to ask a number of questions to the audience. You have to gauge your audience’s opinion with a single question, which may not be very accurate.

3. Surveys vs Polls

Polls are useful for collecting quick information of objective nature. Suppose you want to know the major color preference of your audience, you can go for a poll. But, if you want to analyze their in-depth choices, surveys are the best way to go about for subjective and varied opinions.

Read more: 150+ Poll Questions to Engage Your Target Audience

4. Surveys vs Census

Surveys and census differ in terms of sample size and frequency. For example in the USA, the population census is conducted every ten years. While surveys are more frequent, on a weekly or monthly basis.

Also, a census is conducted for the whole population of a nation while a survey is carried for smaller sample size, for example, customers in a particular region or a survey of the employees.

How to Create a Survey

Here are some essential tips that can help you create the best surveys to deliver invaluable insights.

1. Limit the number of questions you ask in the survey.
2. One question should target one idea. 
3. Questions should be simple and easy to understand.
4. Target the audience and make them answer only relevant questions.
5. Group similar survey questions together for more customer focus. 
6. Never ask a sensitive or personal question at the beginning of the survey.
7. Use skip logic to eliminate the question relevant to a particular respondent.
8. Prefer using words and not numbers in your answer choices.
9. Avoid presenting the survey questions in a matrix to get the user’s undivided attention on a single question.
10. Make sure every question is unique and holds some value.

8 Simple Steps to Make an Online Survey

Surveys are the best way to gauge a user’s beliefs and attitudes. They are relatively cheap and easy to administer. As stated, survey creation becomes easier when you have the right support. Online surveys are time savior. Being anonymous, they tend to draw more honest and transparent answers.

How to make a survey? Follow these simple steps to create a survey online in under 10 minutes.

Step 1: Select Online Survey Tool

Surveys are the best mode for data collection and draw meaningful conclusions out of them.

The best online survey software boasts a powerful dashboard to provide useful reports and rich insights. It features advanced filters and drop-down options, customized reports for easy analysis of the research data.

To create a quick survey, select “create a survey tab” from the dashboard.

Step 2: Use Ready Made Template

Have you heard of writer’s block, where they get stuck in with the content and fail to identify how to proceed? Creating a survey can come with a similar issue, especially when you do not have any prior experience.

Ready-made survey templates provide you a starting point. Choose from the various survey templates available, including employee engagement survey template and customer satisfaction survey template. If desired, you can choose to create a survey from scratch.

Step 3: Choice of Survey Questions

Surveys can be of different types, NPS surveys, scored surveys, yes/no surveys etc. The right tools have the library of question templates, including thousands of question types like multiple choice, rating scales, and more that makes survey creation a simple task. Here are some examples of the common survey questions:

• How satisfied were you with our product?
• How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?
• Please rate our product: Very good/ Poor/ Average/ Good/ Excellent

Click on the link to find hundreds of survey questions to build a survey.

Step 4: White Labeling and Customization

You have created a survey, but you want to give it a personalized touch of your brand. You have the option to choose various customization options to add your company’s logo, colors, and images.

You can select a predefined theme or upload your custom logo, backgrounds, fonts etc.

Step 5 : Apply Skip Logic, if Needed

The success of a survey is based on how closely it is tailored to the respondent. One of the biggest pitfalls of designing a great survey is that sometimes the respondent can get annoyed seeing the questions that don’t apply to them. Advanced features like skip logic and branching help you create interactive surveys that ask only the relevant questions to the user.

You can apply Skip logic, also known as conditional branching, a feature that changes the question respondent will see next based on their answer to the current question. It is mostly applicable for multiple-choice questions and choose from the list question types. After you have applied skip logic, the answer to the previous question will tell which question needs to be presented to the user next.

Let’s understand this process with an example:

Let us say you have created a car survey for respondents with the following questions:

 Q1: Which is your favorite car?

Q2: Do you own a car?

Q3: Do you have car insurance?

In this survey, the answer to question 1 will be given by the respondent in text format. After the second question, skip logic is applicable. If the respondent answers YES, that will lead the respondent to the third question, otherwise a NO answer will lead to skipping the third question. A survey that goes with the flow becomes short and sweet for the user. For businesses, this comes as a perk as the user is more likely to finish the survey and provide useful feedback.

Read More: The Importance of Collecting Customer Feedback

Step 6: Formatting Options

A well formatted survey enhances the readability and understandability of your survey. It ensures that your users are comfortable while taking your survey. You can achieve this by using proper spacing, page breaks, etc. Also, you can use sectional breakpoints to organize your survey better.

Step 7: Regular Surveys

Ensure that you conduct frequent surveys with the same questions with the same audience. This will help you to keep a track of their changing sentiments. If they are satisfied with your solutions, they might turn to be your loyal customers in the future.

Step 8: Gather Customer Feedback via Comments

A customer has made a choice in the survey question? But wouldn’t it be nice if you know the motivation behind a particular choice. Let them tell you what they want by adding a comment section.

You can add additional comment fields after the ranking and rating surveys to get more detailed feedback. You can fetch actionable data by asking an open response question at the end of the product, adding comments to multiple-choice questions, or to a grid of choices.

Having said that, all this becomes super easy when you have access to an online survey software.

Create Engaging Surveys 

Now, you know how to create an online survey. However, to yield the results from surveys productively, an easy to use online survey software is much needed leverage. Try ProProfs Survey Maker with ready-to-use survey templates and questions that help make your survey attractive and relevant to the respondent.

Also, the seamless survey sharing across multiple platforms after creating a survey can make this tool your obvious choice. The advanced reporting feature allows you to collect and analyze your data to reveal actionable insights and create long term strategies for business development.

When you invest in this survey tool you’ll enjoy the following benefits:

• Full control of the customer experience to make better decisions.
• Improve customer retention and minimize churn.
• Higher conversion rates in the most cost-effective manner.
• Product/service or business idea validation by the customer.
• Identification of loyal customers and brand advocates.