We want to conduct customer surveys to get feedback on where we are going wrong in stores. What kind of questions do I need to ask to get the most useful responses?
Empathica managing director Gary Topiol, who has worked with retailers including Boots and Asda to create customer surveys, says you need to ask a mixture of questions to get actionable information.
“You need to ask a combination of questions on outcome measures, such as how satisfied are they and would they recommend you, but support these with some questions about tangible service attributes. These could be questions such as how friendly were the staff, etc.”
Topiol adds that it is important to ask some open-ended questions, as they can be useful for discovering the solutions to problems that are highlighted by questions where the consumer must give the retailer a ranking out of 10. He says, for example: “The ranking will give a measure of the satisfaction taken with the time to pay, but the comments might say that staff are not doing all they could to serve customers quickly, such as chatting or not serving customers in order.”
As to how long the survey should be, Topiol says it depends completely on the method you are using to collect information. For instance, four to five minutes is likely to be the maximum time a customer will be prepared to spend answering questions on a phone call, but they may give 10 minutes or more to an online questionnaire.
His final advice is to monitor the responses you receive and be prepared to change the questions if you aren’t happy with the quality of feedback you are gathering.
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