You’ve got your Customer Satisfaction survey all good to go, and you’re raring to ask how satisfied your customers are with their experience of your product or service. However, it's important to think about the variety of questions you want to ask. Only asking if they’re satisfied with the overall product may give you a general idea, but it won’t help you understand what you can do to drive your Customer Satisfaction even higher. You want to keep ‘em coming back for more!

The flip-side of this is also important - what aspects of your product makes people less satisfied, and how can you fix it? You won't know what these things are unless you ask. This is why it's important to not only ask how satisfied customers are with the overall product, but also with various aspects of their experience. These more granular questions will allow you to hone in on the things that cause dissatisfaction. Then, you can turn the dial-up on the things that you already do well.

Know Thyself (or at least thy Product)

What, specifically, to ask about is entirely contextual to your product. If you run a hotel, you could ask about your guests' satisfaction with various parts of the experience. This can range from services (check-in, room service), the product (e.g. the bed, the room itself), to facilities (e.g. gym, restaurant). Widget manufacturers would ask about how well the widgets fit into the widgets, if any widgets broke, and so on. It’s essentially up to you to work out which particular aspects of your product you want to know more about.

Less is more

Avoid the temptation to ask about everything. Whereas it may be tempting to ask how your guests enjoyed the Dream-Maker-3000 pillow, this may only be relevant to those who ordered that pillow especially. Furthermore, if you ask about too many aspects of your guests’ stay, they may become tired of all the questions. This can result in flat-lining or respondents failing to complete the survey at all. Consider striking a balance between what you want and need to know vs. the effort for the respondent. When it comes to the analysis stage it’s also possible that an excess of statements will require you to first conduct principal components analysis in order to reduce them down so that you can make sense of the driver analysis.

Scales

When asking your clients to rate several aspects of your product, it’s important to keep the scale the same. This aids incomparability between the different product features. It may also make the analysis side of things easier and more consistent. Thus, if you have a 1 to 5 scale in your overall satisfaction question, you should also have a 1 to 5 scale for all other product features.

What your customers know that you don’t!

It’s all good and well to ask about the things that you think drive your customer’s satisfaction. Just remember that you could be wrong. A pair of open-ended questions that allow users to type in what they particularly enjoyed about their experience, and what they did not enjoy, can give a clear understanding of areas that you perhaps hadn’t considered. At first glance, you won’t be able to use this data in your driver analysis. You can nevertheless use it to create new aspects to ask about the next time you run your survey and to inspire improvements you might never have considered otherwise.

Learn how to do Customer Satisfaction Driver Analysis

Check out the interactive tutorial