From Basics to Mastery: Your Ultimate Guide to Feedback Surveys

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Feedback survey: definition and why it is important Feedback survey
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With the competitive market and the race to stay on top, it is important that you know your employees and customers well. As we know, employee satisfaction influences customer satisfaction on a large scale. If your employees are engaged and satisfied to work in your organization, they will ultimately serve the customer with utmost respect, patience, passion and integrity.  

Irrespective of the type of feedback you get (positive or negative), it’s important to accept it openly. While praise can boost your morale to continue doing great work, negative feedback can help you improve your product or service. 

In this blog, we will focus on understanding what feedback survey is, their types, and their benefits. 

What is a feedback survey?

A feedback survey is used for identifying or measuring the experience of customers or employees. It helps uncover insights into a company’s products or services or the working environment. 

By leveraging an efficient customer feedback survey, it becomes easy for organizations to understand their buyers’ experience with the products or services. Likewise, using an employee feedback survey empowers organizations to know their employees, and understand their concerns & opinions related to the culture or environment. 

In any case, you can use survey software to create a survey, share them across multiple channels, and gather relevant feedback. 

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Why should you focus on feedback surveys?

Feedback survey: definition and why it is important Feedback survey

Gathering feedback is essential for the success of every business. Every time a company gets in touch with its customers or employees directly, feedback surveys help collect relevant information and empower an organization to make the most of this insightful data.

Being open to accepting both negative and positive feedback will help you identify the weaknesses and strengths of your organization. Whether it is coming from your employees about the working environment or customers about your brand, the feedback will help you make strategic decisions for internal and external growth. 

Here are some reasons why you should implement gathering feedback into your business process. 

There will be feedback always 

No matter if you sell products or manage a team of employees, using a feedback survey allows you to understand their ideas and opinions. For instance — using a VoC survey empowers brands to know their customers well, i.e. what they think and expect. 

It also highlights the areas where improvements are required and what competitors are doing uniquely. It also plays a key role in gauging a product’s performance even before a launch. With the inception of online survey tools, it has become easier for organizations to gather feedback digitally. 

Every feedback matters equally

It’s important to ensure respondents that their feedback matters to you and you’ve accepted it completely. Always let your respondents know that they’re adding value to your organization and contributing to the betterment of your products & services.

Moreover, this represents a positive brand image and delivers a satisfying experience to the respondents. 

Additional read: Why conducting surveys can help your bottom line?

Feedback helps to drive changes 

When asking respondents for feedback, you’re ready to add them to a process that drives change. While they become a crucial part of the strategy that drives innovation, they also become more loyal to your brand.  

Also, it enables organizations to meet the expectations of the respondents and build a better relationship with them. 

Negative feedback promotes growth 

By taking that negative feedback constructively, your organization can make better and more informed decisions for the future. This plays a crucial role in increasing your brand’s performance while boosting the respondents’ satisfaction. 

Feedback is a continuous process 

A feedback survey is a continuous process of learning that involves different respondents from different aspects of a business. All it needs is some constructive thinking, passion for innovation, and efficient survey software for gathering information. 

Also, it’s important to keep yourself aligned with your organization’s vision and mission while seamlessly accelerating the performance of your brand.

Voxco helped Frost & Sullivan conduct 100K surveys across 300 industries.

How to conduct a feedback survey?

An organization/business is run by its employees and its customers. So, there are two basic types of surveys you should consider conducting – customer and employee. 

Customer Feedback Surveys

A customer feedback survey helps to gauge the customers’ perceptions about your company as well as your products or services. It plays a crucial role in tracking your brand’s performance and determining the factors behind sales. 

Customer surveys help you understand whether your products and services are offering the right solution to their problem. It helps you evaluate the impact you have in their life and how satisfied they are with their experience. 

A customer feedback survey can help you: 

  • Determine the level of customer loyalty and their repurchase intent.
  • Acknowledge the rate of customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value.
  • Address negative feedback to retain customers and reduce churn.
  • Identify the brand promoters and ambassadors who spread positive word of mouth. 

3 types of customer feedback survey

There are three commonly used types of customer surveys: CSAT, NPS®, and CES. 

Feedback survey: definition and why it is important Feedback survey

CSAT – Customer satisfaction survey measures how ‘satisfied’ a customer is with the product, features, or services they receive. 

NPS® – Net Promoter Score® measures the sentiment and loyalty of a customer. Also, a satisfaction metric, helps you evaluate if you have successfully met their expectations that they are willing to recommend you. 

CES – Customer effort score defines the ease with which a customer can conclude a task. Be it navigating through the website or contacting a support agent to resolve an issue, the ease of experience defines how much effort they had to put in. 

Also, take a look at the types of questions you can use in your survey; check out sample surveys by Voxco. 

 Employee Feedback Surveys 

An employee feedback survey enables you to uncover the experience and satisfaction of employees within your company.

Moreover, it makes it easy to understand how employees feel about the company’s atmosphere and determines their motivation levels. It’s important to conduct employee feedback surveys annually and analyze their sentiments over time. 

Using employee feedback surveys help to: 

  • Identify specific areas where there’s a need for improvement.
  • Involve employees in the crucial decisions of the company & boost their morale.
  • Uncover key drivers behind employees’ behavior & track their satisfaction over time.

Check out the type of questions you can ask using our sample survey. Take inspiration and start creating interactive surveys. 

Learn how you can gain customers’ trust and loyalty.

Download Voxco Guide to Improving Customer Loyalty.

Our guide will give you an all-around view of customer loyalty – from its significance, ways to measure it, to the strategies to enhance it.

How to use feedback surveys?

Feedback survey: definition and why it is important Feedback survey

A survey needs to be created carefully in order to help businesses get the most of their potential. Be it CSAT or employee surveys, soliciting feedback through surveys has always been the most convenient and effective option. 

 It’s important to create a feedback survey with questions that directly target the respondents’ perceptions and uncover their ideas. Here are three best practices to creating feedback surveys. 

A) Keep the objectives of your feedback survey in mind: 

There’s no doubt that the main goal of creating and sending a feedback survey is to reduce customer churn. However, before creating a feedback survey, it’s essential to know the real motive behind that survey. 

Discover the need of conducting a feedback survey, what can be achieved through a feedback survey, and how to utilize the collected information through that survey. Once you identify the intent of a feedback survey, it gets easy to pick the right set of questions for your survey.

B) Ensure your feedback survey is engaging 

A well-designed feedback survey ensures a great completion rate so, always focus on creating questionnaires that can keep respondents interested and engaged. While designing a survey, keep the respondents’ interests, expectations, and habits in mind to ensure a seamless experience. 

Here are 4 best practices that you should follow: 

1. Keep the survey length short:

While creating a feedback survey, always follow a less is more approach. It’s essential to keep your survey short and crisp. Try not to include more than 8-10 questions in your survey

→ Include quantitative questions:

On collecting feedback from your respondents, you can’t rely on open-ended questions only. In fact, it is difficult to analyze such qualitative answers or discover trends from them. Whereas including quantitative questions make it easy for the respondents to answer as they come in a numerical form. This improves the survey completion rate too. 

  • Rating scales questions. 
  • Ranking questions. 
  • Image choice. 
  • Matrix questions. 
  • Single/multiple choice questions. 
  • Yes/no questions. 

2. Use a neutral language:

While writing your survey questions, it’s important to use unbiased language that appropriately communicates the message. This helps in keeping your survey participants focused and enables you to fetch the most accurate data.

3. Ask relevant questions: 

A feedback survey asking questions irrelevant to a customer/employee experience will bring you useless data. This will not only provide you insignificant data but also upset your respondents. 

Make best use of an online survey software that offers you advanced skip logic and branching functionality. Skip logic optimizes the flow of the survey question based on the “If-then” condition. This ensures that participants only see questions based on their answers making the survey relevant to their experience. 

4. Brand your survey: 

Branded surveys allow your customers, to recognize that the survey is authentic which increases brand awareness and also boosts response rates. Use an online survey maker that provides the white-labeling functionality. 

Add your logo, brand theme, color, fonts, and icons, and create custom domains to ensure brand continuity. 

5. Make it mobile-optimized:

As mobile devices have certainly become popular in the technological landscape, respondents prefer to participate in surveys through their mobiles only. So, creating, testing, and deploying a mobile version of your feedback survey has become more important than ever!

Additional read: Creating a survey; the right way!

c) Send surveys at critical touchpoints 

Now that you have created the feedback surveys you need to plan when you should send the surveys. 

In the case of customer surveys, you should identify key touchpoints such as post-purchase, post-customer service support, post-product delivery, website intercept surveys, etc. 

Similarly, for employee surveys, you should also identify key touchpoints such as after onboarding, after the event, pulse surveys, etc. 

Once you identify when you should send surveys, you should also determine the channels you should use. The distribution channels play a vital role in boosting the response rate. Leverage a market research tool that enables you to gather consumer insight on your brand at critical touchpoints. 

Create interactive surveys that gather insightful feedback on your brand’s attributes.

100+ question types, white-label, advanced logic, multi-lingual capabilities, and more.

What are the benefits of using a feedback survey?

Feedback survey: definition and why it is important Feedback survey

Irrespective of the type of survey you want to conduct or the industry you are in, a feedback survey can help you how well you are doing, where you stand, and how to stay competitive. Here are some reasons that tell you why surveys are critical for your business. 

1. Gain feedback in real-time:

Using a feedback survey empowers businesses to collect feedback at any point and gain insights into numerous aspects of their company.

Send surveys after key touchpoints or interactions to gather real-time data. Don’t wait for annual surveys to ask about a purchase, a customer made at the beginning of the year. Instead, ask them right after the product delivery to keep gathering fresh and relevant data. 

2. Give respondent a voice: 

It offers customers and employees a platform to voice out their opinions and suggestions. With surveys, they can share both positive and negative feedback with you which you can use to uncover insights. 

It helps you understand what customers and employees expect from your business and where you may have failed/succeeded in delivering a good experience. 

3. Be aware of trends: 

Leveraging surveys helps you uncover customer trends by understanding key drivers behind their behavior and gathering instant feedback from them.

4. Understand how well your products/services are performing:

Feedback surveys can help you evaluate your products and services in the market. It will help you gauge the current performance in the market and where it stands in comparison to the competition. 

You can also gather feedback on what’s missing in your products/services and identify improvement opportunities. 

5. Collect informative insights: 

Conducting a survey is a great way of understanding how respondents react to your business strategies. These insights play a crucial role in making informed decisions.

6. Align customers’ needs with the brand’s products:

A survey helps you identify customers’ demand, need, and preference which helps you ensure that you put out exactly what meets these demands. The reason why businesses fail in product launches is that they work under the assumption that customers will like whatever product they launch. 

To become truly customer-centric you have to listen to what your customers say. This will ensure that you meet the need and offer the right solution to your customers. 

7. Identify at-risk customers/employees

Feedback from customers and employees can be negative or positive. Feedback surveys such as NPS® (ENPS®)  can help you identify promoters, passive, and detractors among customers and employees. Identify those who are unhappy and dissatisfied with their experience with your brand and reach out to them to offer proper solutions. 

8. Compare & benchmark results: 

Using a survey tool allows you to create a survey and use it multiple times for gaining feedback from the audience on a continuous basis. It lets you compare data and benchmark the results to identify the changes that you should make.

9. Make respondents feel valued: 

Creating a feedback survey is a process of asking respondents to share their perceptions about a particular product or service or brand. Explaining how much you value their opinions, helps you deliver an exceptional experience that makes them loyal to your brand!

10. Make important business decisions:

Gathering relevant feedback from the right audience ensures that you are not working under assumptions. Feedback helps you gather hard facts and data on where you stand and what you should do next. 

Voxco helps the top 50 MR firms & 500+ brands gather actionable insights and make data-driven decisions.

See what Voxco can do for you with a personalized demo.

Conclusion

This sums up our guide on creating feedback surveys. Whether you want to gather feedback from customers and employees asking the right question will always get you insightful data that can help you make confident decisions. 

How Voxco can help you make the most of your feedback survey?

Voxco is trusted by 500+ brands and top 50 MR across 40+ countries. Leverage the omnichannel survey software to increase your research efficiency. 

Omnichannel capabilities

Voxco’s exceptional platform offers omnichannel capabilities that let you reach out to your intended audience through feedback surveys conducted online, by phone, or face-to-face

Statistical and text analysis

Analyzing the feedback of respondents has never been so easy! Voxco’s powerful analytics software can help you uncover intelligent and actionable insights from the feedback that you gather. Leverage the text analysis to uncover hidden patterns and understand customer sentiment. 

Robust online survey marker

Voxco supports your survey creation with its drag-and-drop interface enabling you to create responsive surveys. It also offers you with cutting-edge features like, skip logic, branching logic, survey scheduling, white-labeling, and more to create interactive surveys. 

Best-in-class support

Voxco’s advanced platform is known for delivering round-the-clock support and guidance so that our clients can truly make the most of their feedback surveys. 

Flexible hosting

By offering flexible hosting options that allow you to store the data on your premises or securely in the cloud, Voxco streamlines the process of conducting and evaluating your feedback surveys. 

Vast question library

Voxco gives you access to basic and advanced question types in its question library. You can select from a list of 100+ question types to create an interesting survey that keeps respondents hooked. 

FAQs on Feedback surveys

A feedback survey is a method to evaluate the level of satisfaction your customers or employees feel toward your company. You can gather data from employees/customers ginning them the freedom to share their opinion, criticism, and suggestions for the company. 

Surveys help you gather real-time data and make strategic decisions. It helps you uncover opportunities for improvement, validate business decisions, and understand how you can boost business growth. 

Here are three easy steps to take full advantage of feedback surveys: 

  1. Identify the objective of the survey
  2. Ensure that the survey questions are engaging
  3. Send surveys at critical touchpoints. 

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

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