Best Practices for Customer Surveying

Customer surveying is one of those concepts that most organizations agree is a great idea, yet a minority of them actually engage in it. Talking to one’s customers to find out their likes, dislikes, wishes and preferences is one of the best ways to ensure that you’re delivering the highest possible quality customer service. Many organizations assume they are providing acceptable service, and are shocked to find that customers believe it to be sub-par.

The reasons more companies don’t engage in customer surveying are practical: they don’t have the staff to survey; they have no skills in designing or administering surveys; they feel their customers won’t like it; or they’ve engaged in it once before with less-than-stellar results.

There are a number of places organizations go wrong in conducting customer surveys, and the most common include:

Obsessing about numbers. While it’s tempting to skip open-ended questions and have customers rate you on a scale of 1-10 or some other numerical value, it’s largely meaningless without context. So your customers give you an average of six. What does this actually mean? Where do you start to improve it?

Steering customers toward the feedback you expect. Since you may believe you’re aware of your strengths and weaknesses already, you may find that your surveys are unconsciously designed to get the results you expect in advance. Doing this, you’ll miss the opportunity to uncover valuable information you don’t already know.


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Make it easy. While it’s tempting to ask customers 250 questions in order to gather the most feedback, you need to be realistic. Customers simply won’t take a survey that complex that requires them to invest too much time in the process. Short and sweet, coupled with well designed, will yield the best feedback.

Do it often. Customer surveying isn’t very helpful if the data is old. Customers’ opinions change, as do their circumstances. By doing shorter surveys more frequently, you can keep better track of customers’ opinions today.

Don’t dismiss feedback. Customer surveying may yield results that surprise you, or results you’d prefer not to acknowledge. (“But our ads were designed by a Madison Avenue firm! They can’t be annoying! We paid a fortune!”) It’s critical to remember that the customer knows best, and there should be no arguing with a consensus of customers. You exist to serve them, not to feed your ego or reinforce a perception of your reality.

Be multichannel. Different groups of customers will prefer different types of surveys, so ensure that you have a variety of survey avenues depending on what works best for the survey’s goals: this may be telephone, it may be e-mail, and it might even be social media.

Smart companies that wish to reap the benefits of customer surveying but don’t have the skills or resources to do it themselves often turn to third-party organizations for solutions. Companies like BPA Quality are experienced in the process of customer surveying and understand how best to approach the task.

BPA Quality’s BPABuilder.Customer Satisfaction Surveys not only uncover the data companies are seeking about their customers, they pinpoint the reasons behind the perceptions and generate actionable data that companies can use to make improvements. BPA conducts its Customer Satisfaction Surveys in a variety of ways to fit a client’s (or its customers’) needs:  phone, postal mail, e-mail or even on a face-to-face basis. The company employs researchers who are skilled in the art of obtaining vital information from customers that will yield real intelligence into a business’ operations and help it build new initiatives to make the most from that intelligence. 

Collecting customer surveying data shouldn’t be an onerous task for a company unprepared to handle it. After all, the onerous task will truly begin once the data are obtained and interpreted, and an organization needs to get busy making changes to better serve its customers.

Edited by Blaise McNamee

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