Great customer experiences are what keep clients coming back for more. They also increase the chances of recommendations and referrals, helping you to grow your business. But how do you know if your clients are happy and what changes you could make to improve their experience? You could try conducting a client survey to find out.

What is a client survey?

A client survey is a questionnaire which you send to clients to find out what they think about your business. It can help you to find out how your services are perceived by your clients and what’s going well and not so well.

Why is client satisfaction important?

Client satisfaction is central to retaining clients and also to receiving referrals, which will grow your client base. It’s a factor which can contribute to the success or failure of a business.

Conducting a client survey can help you to:

✔ Gain better insight into your clients’ needs, wants and expectations

✔ Identify any gaps in your services

✔ Find out what’s going well and what isn’t

✔ Identify what changes you could make to improve your business and increase overall client satisfaction

If you want to take positive action to improve customer satisfaction, you’ll need to ask the right questions. Taking the time to carefully craft your survey will help you to gain meaningful answers to help you improve your service.

1 What are your objectives?

The first step is to think about your objectives. What do you want your survey to achieve? For example, do you want to improve a product or service, identify a gap where you could offer a new product or service, or improve your processes to make life easier for your clients?

Getting clear on your objectives will help you to decide what questions to ask in your survey. Ask yourself questions like:  

• What’s the purpose of your survey?
• How will the feedback help you?
• What choices should it help you make?
• Who is your survey for (e.g. all clients, new clients, clients from a particular part of your business)?

2: Choose your survey method

How will you conduct your survey; for example, by email, online, or face to face?

How you choose to conduct your survey will depend on what is most appropriate or convenient for your clients and your business, timescales, cost and how many people you are sending your survey out to. For example, older clients may prefer a postal survey to an online one.

3 Write your survey questions

And now for the most important part: writing your (meaningful) questions.

Here are some tips to keep in mind:

i. Keep it simple

Make your survey as easy as possible for clients to answer by keeping your questions simple and not having too many of them. People won’t want to spend ages answering lots of complicated questions.

Equally, it is a good idea to give people the option to elaborate if they want to. Don’t make it compulsory or you will risk people abandoning your survey out of frustration.

ii. Be specific

Don’t ask more than one thing in a question. For example, instead of:

How was your experience with Service A and Service B? Would you recommend them to your friends?

Try breaking it up into different questions:

1. What was your overall experience of Service A?
2. What was your overall experience of Service B?
3. Which of our services would you recommend to friends and family?

In the first example, people will probably only answer one of the questions or skip it altogether, losing you valuable data. However, by breaking up the questions, you are more likely to get an answer for each one.

iii. Avoid leading questions

If you want honest answers from your clients that will help you make real improvements, avoid asking leading questions – a question which is phrased in a way that prompts the desired answer or forces someone to answer in a particular way.

For example: 

What did you like best about our amazing new payroll service?

This is a leading question because you’re telling the respondent that your service is amazing. Not only may they not agree, but you also won’t be able to gather accurate, unbiased information. And you could miss out on an opportunity to find out how you could make that service even better.

Instead, try:

What did you most like or dislike about our new payroll service and why?

This is unassuming about whether the client liked or disliked the service and is more likely to attract honest and insightful answers.

iv. Consider what type of data you need

Multiple choice questions work well for collecting numbers:

At Made Up Company Inc, we like to keep you up to date with what’s going on. How do you prefer to receive your updates? [ ] Email [ ] Post

For other questions, you may want more insightful answers, in which case open-ended questions work better:

What are your three favourite things about our service and why?

However, bear in mind that you will need to go through every answer for each respondent, which can be time-consuming. While this can be great for small scale surveys, it probably won’t be practical for a large survey where you anticipate hundreds of responses.

💡 Once you’ve written your questions, don’t forget to proofread them.

4 Test your survey

Test it on friends, colleagues, or a selection of clients for feedback on your questionnaire. Then you can make sure that the questions are clear and your survey does what you intend.

5 Write your survey invitation

Your survey will need an invitation or covering letter that introduces your survey and encourages people to fill it out. Information you need to include:

• What is the survey for (purpose)?
• Who it is for?
• Approximately how long will it take?

You should also include a Call to Action with clear instructions on how or where to fill in your survey. Also, make sure to include any relevant links and contact details.

It’s always nice to be polite. Use a warm and friendly tone in your invitation and don’t forget to thank your client for their time.

And Finally…

Send, collect and review.

Remember to proofread everything and check all links are working before you send it out.

Bonus Tip: Making this a yearly process means that you can continue to keep track of how things are going and continue to evolve your offerings to meet and even exceed the expectations of your clients.