How To Make A Great Survey For Restaurants & Retail

At Benchmark Intelligence, we've learned a few things about collecting feedback from your customers. From our CEO's beginnings in the online survey industry, to providing text message feedback software for hundreds of restaurants across the United States, we've seen the common mistakes businesses make when creating a survey.

Here are 3 tips to making a great survey!

1. Keep It Short

If you've ever been to a fast food restaurant, you might have noticed a link to a survey at the bottom, in exchange for a free food item. If you've ever filled one of those surveys out, you'll know why they have to offer free food to get you to do it.

They are so long! People don't want to spend a long time filling out pages and pages of questions. They want to get straight to the point. And when you have these long surveys, customer typically just click through randomly, hoping to get through it faster. Meaning the feedback you get isn't even accurate!

With our text message feedback software, we've found between 3 to 10 questions to be the sweet spot. Business that use us have a a 90% completion rate, and it's because their customers don't get fatigued half way through the survey.

They also don't have to incentivize customers to fill the surveys out, which not only saves money but it also means the feedback is unbiased as it can be!

2. Focus On The Right Things

Have you ever tried telling a story, but your friends keep interrupting with mundane questions? You're trying to explain your feelings, but all they want are more details. It's very annoying.

Too many surveys ask the wrong questions. What did the customer buy? What store did they visit? How many times have they visited before?

Customers don't want to answer your questions. They want to talk about their experiences, and how it pertains to them! Your questions should be based around the customer leading the conversation, and what was important to them. You'll not only get a lot more feedback, you're also more likely to end the process with a happy customer!

For many Benchmark users, customers report that just have a place to easily give their feedback stopped them from posting a negative review online. So not only did you get valuable feedback, but you stopped a negative review that might have driven another potential customer away from your business!

3. Have A Conversation

So you've created your survey. You've gotten it to your customer, and the customer has actually filled it out! What's the next step? Is that the end of it? Hopefully not.

Too many businesses treat the survey as the final step in the customer satisfaction experience. The customer's responses go into some database somewhere to be reviewed later so that changes can possibly be made even later than that!

The problem is if you've got customers with problems, you need to deal with them now if you want them to stay customers. If a customer goes too long without their issue being addressed, they are likely to just stop coming back and take their business elsewhere. In the worse case, they could even go online and trash your business, hurting your relationship with potential new customers!

With our feedback solution, customers who want to be followed up with can be texted directly to their phone. You can have a conversation with them, work on their issues, and turn them from a problem customer into a loyal one!