How to Make Your Post-Sales Survey a Success

The after-sales survey gives you invaluable insight into how customers feel about your company — and shows you the most profitable areas for improvement. In this post we take a look at how you can ensure your post-sales surveys are always on the money.

Surveying your customers just after they have made a purchase is a critical step in gauging satisfaction and continuing to build an engaging brand relationship. The customer insights you get from such surveys are priceless in terms of satisfaction, customer loyalty and future sales.

But the value of the customer insight derived, depends of course, on the quality of the survey.

So, here are some insider tips for creating a sales surveys that gets you the insights you need to make a difference.

Sales Surveys recipe

1. Ask critical questions only

Don’t just stick with a set of standardized questions. Think through the purpose of your sales survey. What do you need to learn in order to improve customer experience? What do you need to know in order to make better products or improve your services?

Critical sales survey questions:

• Where the customer found you
• Why they bought from you
• If they are satisfied with their product
• If they are satisfied with their sales experience
• What other products/services they might be interested in
• How they would improve the product/service they purchased
• What their preferred method of communication is

2. Shorter sales surveys is better

Your customers are busy people. Make it easy for them to give you their feedback. Keep the survey as brief as possible.

• Eliminate unnecessary wordiness from the questions.
• Be judicious with the questions you ask. Only ask questions that serve the purpose of your survey.
• Try to keep the survey length short enough that the customer can complete it in under 10 minutes.

3. Mix it up – strategically

Though multiple-choice questions and sliding scales are easier for customers to complete, open-ended questions can actually get you some of the most helpful insight.

Start the survey with easy, uncomplicated questions to warm up your customer.

Then ease into the open-ended questions and other questions that require more thought and time.

Finally, cool down the customer with demographic questions and requests for additional comments.

4. Don’t leave the customer hanging

Customers that take the time to fill out your survey deserve to know that their efforts are appreciated. And every customer response holds the promise of further insight.

At a minimum, thank the customer for their feedback. Don’t just send them to a thank-you page – thank them in a personalized way. Send an email personally thanking them, and consider offering the customer a discount code, coupon, or other small bonus. In mailing, it is important to keep your domain reputation and integrate a Sender Policy Framework, SPF flattening, for this reason.

If the customer had a negative experience, this is your opportunity to make things right. Start with an apology, but then really make an effort to fix the problem. You might also consider offering them an incentive to buy from your company again in the future.

Once a customer has purchased from your company, take the opportunity to ask them about their experience. Their feedback will help you make the customer experience better, improve internal processes, and enhance your products and services. In the end, use the answers as testimonials. Make a logo to feature on the testimonials and place them together on your website.

Post sales surveys – conclusion

In this post, we’ve explored how you can improve your customer sales surveys to get more actionable, relevant insight. We’ve covered question types, question lengths, and following-up.

As you can see, it’s a number of small things, done right, that make the difference. Try some or – preferably all of these tips and see how well they work for you.

What have you experienced when it comes to surveying your customers right after-sales?

Meet us over on LinkedIn to comment or share any sales surveys power tips you may have. We love to hear from you!

Read more about Customer Satisfaction Surveys.