A customer satisfaction survey is an important tool for gauging what your business is doing right and where there’s room for improvement. You can’t assume you know how your customers feel, you’ve got to get solid data to work with. However, surveys are only as effective as they are well designed. Here are the major mistakes to avoid when creating a customer survey.

1. Failing to Answer Negative Feedback 

When your call center submits your survey data, it’s critical to respond to negative feedback in a positive manner, and to do so quickly. Allowing time to pass without responding to customers who are frustrated makes it seem to them like you really don’t care, which reinforces their negative viewpoint about your company. Have special representatives reach out to these people, listen to their concerns, and most importantly, address their issues as much as possible.

2. Creating Difficult and Time-Consuming Surveys 

Customers are usually willing to participate in brief, non-intrusive surveys, because most customers realize this is an effort on your part to satisfy their wishes. Making a survey long and cumbersome, however, greatly reduces the number of people willing to start or complete the survey. Many long surveys are abandoned by the majority of customers when they get bored or need to move on to something else.

3. Asking Questions That Have Nothing to Do With the Purpose of the Survey 

Don’t include questions that are irrelevant to the survey, especially if they can seem like intrusive questions, such as age, sex, race, or more sensitive information. If these questions are necessary to ask, have your call center make it plainly clear on the survey that they are optional, so that people who choose to opt out of those questions might still be willing to finish the rest of the survey.

A well-designed survey will give your business an edge when it comes to customer service, which is the hallmark trait of any successful company.