Sunday, August 27, 2017
Co-construct your satisfaction questionnaire
Introduction
The creation of a satisfaction questionnaire is the first test of a long series. More specifically, the aim is to set up and operate a customer satisfaction barometer. The various departments involved in operating the barometer must be involved. But it's also important to ensure that the questionnaire remains consistent and relevant to the customer experience.
At SatisFactory, we have implemented several hundred customer satisfaction questionnaires. The same problems and errors seem to recur systematically. From this experience, we have summarized the best practices in the following lines...
Set your objectives to prepare your satisfaction questionnaire properly
How many questions?
It's up to you to decide how many questions you want to ask, so that your questionnaire is both informative and not too long. For example, a questionnaire that is too long will tend to reduce your return rate. However, it's a large number of responses that will enable you to make more interesting operational use of the data (at a finer level). In our experience, rest assured: a long questionnaire will significantly reduce your return rate.
What kind of operation?
This may seem obvious, but each question or group of questions asked must meet a clearly identified operational objective. For example, what's the point of asking customers about room size if no major renovation work is planned (and if specifying room size in marketing brochures is out of the question)? All too often, the questions asked are simply curious. There are also many marketing/CRM or quality questions. These are yes/no questions. In principle, these have no place in a satisfaction survey. They can, however, be the subject of an ad-hoc survey.
What level of detail?
The expected level of detail can generally be based on your company's organizational chart. For example, it's a good idea to ask one question about room cleaning and another about restaurant cleanliness if there are 2 separate cleaning teams. Otherwise, you need to ask yourself what you'll get out of these 2 questions specifically, and whether it's worth it given your target number of questions.
Brainstorm with your teams
Why and how to involve teams?
It's important to involve operational staff in the choice of themes (or attributes) that will be reflected in the questions asked. As we've seen in other articles, operational staff will be at the heart of any changes you make with your satisfaction survey. So it's important to quickly secure their support by involving them in this exercise. A brainstorming exercise is the best way to obtain the information you need, without it turning into a series of endless meetings.
Are there any compulsory questions?
There are no mandatory questions for a questionnaire to be considered "satisfaction". However, the general satisfaction question (possibly replaced by the NPS recommendation question) and an open-ended question are found in all the satisfaction surveys we have carried out.
How do I choose themes?
After a brainstorming session, you may end up with too many attributes to measure. You can then ask your teams to rate the importance of the attributes present in order to arrive at the right number of questions. If you're still unable to decide, some questions can be eliminated. These include questions with no possible corrective action, Quality questions (yes/no), CRM/Marketing questions. Other questions are of limited interest and can perhaps be eliminated. These include questions about satisfaction with the quality/price ratio, satisfaction with loyalty (highly correlated with NPS)...etc.
Finalize your satisfaction questionnaire
Once the topics have been defined, it's up to you to draft your questions, alone or in small groups. Finally, keep your questions short, simple and consistent. For example, try to keep the same rating scale from beginning to end, and maintain the same tone. It's also a good idea to follow the customer's path to define the order of your questions.
