Customer satisfaction surveys are incredibly valuable tools to help you optimize the customer experience, build loyalty. But how do you create surveys that people will complete? And how do you make the most of the data your surveys collect?

Success depends on asking the right questions – ones that make sense in the context of the customer’s experience and can be answered easily. A mix of mobile-friendly, open-ended and closed-ended questions tends to get good response rates, which equates to more information that can provide actionable insights.

How you design, deploy, analyze and act on the results of customer satisfaction surveys makes the difference in surveys that are little more than “feel-good” exercises, and surveys that deliver quantifiably positive business results. We’ll cover the following sections in this article:

• Why You Need Engaging Customer Experience Surveys
• How Survey Analytics Can Generate Actionable Insights
• Act on Customer Feedback and Amplify Survey Results

Why You Need Engaging Customer Experience Surveys

Getting a high response rate to your customer satisfaction surveys is necessary for the most meaningful results.

Creating and delivering an engaging customer experience survey depends on knowing your customers in detail. Are they more likely to use a mobile device or operate in a desktop environment? What do your various buyer personas value most? Are they likelier to respond to customer satisfaction surveys via SMS, email, or social media?

Customized customer satisfaction surveys are a must, so that both positive and negative feedback most accurately reflect the insights you are seeking. And they should offer a top-notch user experience on all devices, and as brief as possible while covering all the bases. It’s important to make sure they’re convenient for people to use, whether they’re on mobile or a regular laptop or desktop computer.

How Survey Analytics Can Generate Actionable Insights

Survey data can be overwhelming; the right survey platform helps you make sense of it.

What do you do with the information that comes to you via customer satisfaction surveys? You need analytical tools that help you make sense of it and develop insights that your team can act upon.

Reputation‘s Surveys solution not only helps you create custom surveys that people want to answer, but it also gives you the analytical tools you need to make sense of the data. In addition to quantitative tools, you can use qualitative tools like word clouds to help you gain insights into customers’ answers to open-ended questions.

Act on Customer Feedback and Amplify Survey Results

Actionable feedback sent to the people best suited to respond to it helps you make the most of customer satisfaction survey results.

There’s not much point in deploying customer satisfaction surveys if you don’t plan to act on the results, and Reputation Surveys facilitates that, as well. If your business has multiple locations, you can automatically send survey results to the proper representative at the location for which the survey was completed. And when every location uses analytics, they can all learn exactly what they need to do, to optimize the customer experience.

Reputation also makes it easy to automatically stream the most glowing customer satisfaction survey results to your website, to showcase your outstanding customer service while improving local search results. When people see positive survey results upon visiting your website, they know right away that your customers are your number one priority.

Customer satisfaction surveys are remarkably powerful tools for improving your online reputation, but you have to know what to ask, how to ask it and what to do with the results. When you commit to doing these things, you can improve the customer experience further, strengthen customer loyalty and, ultimately, have a healthier bottom line. To learn more, Reputation invites you to download our top trends for online reputation and CX management report.