Every business wants to know what their customers think about them. That too not just for vanity. It’s actually an actionable customer metric that tells you what’s right and what’s not with your business. The best way to find out how your customers perceive your business is through customer feedback surveys.
Even though feedback surveys are self-reported, they’re still very effective at measuring factors such as customer effort, level of customer satisfaction and the like. Whether you’ll get accurate information from the survey depends on the questions you ask and how you ask them.
So it’s more than just creating a form and racking submissions.
In this article we’ll look at what customer feedback surveys are and how you can create them for your WordPress site (and get actionable data in return).
Why Create Customer Feedback Surveys?
There are numerous types of surveys you can create for your customers. The data you get from surveys depends on what you ask your customers. However, all types of surveys fulfill these goals one way or another. Such as,
Customer Engagement
First and foremost, a feedback survey is a method of engaging customers with your business. Customer engagement is a challenge in and of itself that companies need to deal with. Creating feedback surveys provides an opportunity to engage customers to interact and evaluate your brand and its offerings. Nothing engages people more than being able to provide their two cents on an issue.
Business Evaluation
Customer feedback is your mirror to evaluate your business. A good feedback means your offerings are on point. Whereas a negative feedback means your business is not making the cut. Whichever the case, a feedback survey can tell you all about your business and how it’s perceived. Understanding your customers’ perception might be the most tangible data you’ll have about your company’s performance.
Voice of Customer
Customers want to be heard. It’s the only way to build trust and meaningful relationships as a business. Feedback surveys give the customer a chance to voice their needs and opinions. When a customer feels they have a voice you listen to, their trust automatically goes up. This trust goes a long way in building meaningful interactions and developing customer advocacy.
Roadmap for Improvement
The feedback you get from customers will provide the most valuable guideline to improve your business. A good feedback survey will accurately tell you what the customers like or don’t like about your company. Since customers are on the end usage of your service or product, making their insight the most accurate you can find. You can use this as a roadmap to prioritize your strategies to grow your business.
Different Types of Customer Feedback Surveys
Before we get into how you can create surveys on your WordPress site, let’s check out the most popular types of surveys businesses use to get feedback.
1. Customer Satisfaction Survey
A satisfaction survey, aka CSAT tells you if a client is pleased or dissatisfied. It could be with your products or services or your business as a whole. It helps you visualize the overall customer experience, what consumers expect, where you’re lacking, along with how you can improve customer experience.
2. User Experience Survey
User experience is a handy survey for newly introduced services or products. While it asks similar questions it’s quite distinct from the average CSAT survey. User experience surveys tell you about how users interact with specific service or app features.
3. Net Promoter Score
Net promoter score or, NPS for short is one of the most common surveys used. It acts as an indirect satisfaction score for your customers. NPS evaluates how likely a customer is to recommend your product, service or brand to other people. Usually a high likelihood indicates a high level of satisfaction as well. The score uses a scale of 1-10 to measure the likelihood to make it quantifiable.
4. Customer Effort Score
Customer effort scores tell you how easy it is to do business with you. A high effort score means it’s difficult whereas a low score means it’s easy. Customer effort score measures the effort a customer had to put in to complete a task with your business. The tasks include, getting help, starting off with the product/service, finding resources and making a purchase.
5. Problem Identifier Feedback Forms
Problem identifier feedback focuses on a narrow aspect of your business rather than your whole business or a product. Usually the feedback is gathered to evaluate a singular aspect of the customer experience. It could be anything from a service interaction, a sales question or even a discount request.
How to Create Customer Feedback Survey
So let’s get started with creating a feedback survey for your WordPress website. We’ll show you methods using 2 of the most popular form plugins and we’ve included a method that will work even in the free version.
Using Fluent Forms Templates
The first plugin we’re going to use has saved templates so we’ll use them to create the survey.
To create forms using Fluent Forms go ahead and install Fluent Forms from the WordPress repository. Simply navigate to Plugins > Add New and search for “Fluent Forms” then click Install.
Once installed, hit the Add new Form button on the All Forms page. Here you can select the template for the survey form.
We’ll use the Client Satisfaction Survey form for this demo.
Note: Only the Client Satisfaction Survey is available in the free version. With Fluent Forms Pro you can get templates for all the surveys we mentioned earlier.
Edit the template to include (or exclude) the fields you want in your form. To add more fields simply drag and drop the field from the right-hand panel. Similarly you can edit options for each field from the Input Customization panel.
After you’re done editing, simply hit Save form and the form will be available in the All Forms tabs.
Now you can add this form to any page you want using the Gutenberg block editor, whether by importing a Form block or adding a short-code block and using the forms ID.
Using Fluent Forms: Free
In the free version of Fluent Forms you can create feedback surveys manually with the following steps.
You can manually create the forms using Fluent Forms free too.
Same as before, go to the Fluent Forms All Forms tab and hit Add new Form. From the pop-up window click Create a Blank Form.
Once the editor loads, you can drag and drop fields into the form. For this demo we’re going to create a simple satisfaction form from scratch.
For a satisfaction form we need the following information:
Basic information
Product information
Satisfaction Score
To enable these fields, we’ll drag in a Name field, Email field, a Drop down field and a Multiple choice field.
After adding the fields you can customize the labels and options for each field. We’re leaving the Basic info fields (name & email) as is. For the Product information we’ll add Product names to the Dropdown field options. We added only 2 products here, but you can always add more.
Similarly, we edited the option in the Multiple choice field. We’ve limited the number of selections to “1”. In the options we added 5 satisfaction levels for the customer to choose from.
Same as before, just save the form and you can use it on any webpage you want using short codes or the Gutenberg block editor.
Using Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a popular form builder that has a dedicated Survey Add-on. Let’s get started.
Install Gravity forms and then enable the Survey add-on from Forms > Add-Ons on the left-hand menu.
Next, click Add New Forms from the Forms menu. In the pop-up box, add a title and description for the form.
From the right-hand panel select the Survey fields option. Now you can enter the question then select the type of survey field you want to add to the form from the dropdown menu. Use the plus and minus icons on the right to add or remove options.
Check the appearance of the form with the preview option and then hit Update. For every question you’ll have to add a new field and select questions from the Survey Fields menu.
Similar to Fluent Forms you can add the Gravity Forms survey to a webpage using the shortcodes option or the Gutenberg editor.
Customer Feedback Survey Best Practices
Creating the forms is only half the job. To make sure the customers take the time to fill out your survey you need to make the form engaging and simple. Here are some best practices you can follow to make your customer survey forms effective.
Ask Straight-Forward Questions
People respect honesty. It’s also the best way to get honest answers from your customers. To get the most reliable answers, ask straight forward questions that don’t sway the customers honest opinion. After all, it’s crucial to get the most accurate feedback.
Use Simple Language
As important as the questions themselves is the language you use to construct them. Most customers will not take the time to answer questions that are difficult to read or understand. Your survey’s success rate depends on how easy you can make it to understand and answer.
Do Not Exaggerate
You’re not going to get everything you need to know from one survey question. Keep the form simple and on point. Don’t ask multiple unrelated questions on the same form. It’ll only reduce the chances of getting honest feedback.
Survey Questions Should Be Easy to Answer
While it’s true that subjective answers about satisfaction and ease-of-use are hard to quantify. It’s still important that your questions are easy to answer and don’t involve too much thinking on the customers part. It’s good to remember that genuine feedback is the one that comes instantly without any pondering.
Stick to the Issue
Stay on point with the survey’s purpose. If it’s a CSAT only ask about satisfaction. If the survey is for NPS keep it limited to that. Trying to gather multiple feedbacks and metrics in one form will only reduce your accuracy and make for less actionable data.
So these are the best ways you can create effective and accurate feedback surveys on your WordPress site. Customer feedback is a gold mine for businesses because the customer can give you an unbiased opinion along with actionable data. So what are you waiting for? Design a form today and see how your business is doing in the customer’s eyes.