Research method
Customer Survey
A customer survey sent out via email to your customers (ideally segmented by customer type, e.g. new customers, recently lapsed customers, VIPs, etc). Typically the goal of a customer survey is to understand customers perception of your product/service, to understand what problem/s your product/service solves for them and any improvement areas based on their experiences.
When to reach for it
To understand customers motivations, FUDs (fears, uncertainties, and doubts) perception of your product/service, to understand what problem/s your product/service solves for them and any improvement areas based on their experiences.
Customer surveys can also be used to investigate specific topics or areas of opportunity.
Strengths and limits
Pros
A customer survey allows you to gather large samples of data, which isn't possible when running customer interviews. Customer surveys can also be used alongside customer interviews to increase the depth of insight.
Customer surveys can be used to gather valuable insight into wider business strategy, as well as what is important to users in general when considering products/services like yours.
Customer surveys allow you to gather both qualitative and quantitative data, depending on the types of questions you ask.
Cons
An insightful customer survey is determined by the questions you ask. you need to avoid leading questions, and also ensure questions are not multifaceted as this can cause difficulty in analysis.
Customer surveys should not be used to gather feedback into website user experiences. Asking users to recall their experiences of your website is likely to gather invalid data.
It can be a challenge to code and analyse large sets of qualitative data.
Gathering data from existing (or lapsed) customers will always have an element of bias, since these people have pre-conceptions of your brand / product / service based on their experiences. This is okay as long as you are aware of this and mitigate it accordingly, e.g. by also running research with people who have never heard of or used your brand / product / service before. For more focused research, in some cases using existing customers will be more relevant, whereas in others, using new users will be more appropriate.
Practical considerations
Tool
The survey could be built in a range of tools, including Google Forms, TypeForm, Survey Monkey, etc. There are plenty of free tools available for this activity, so there's not really any need to pay for a tool, unless you have more bespoke needs, e.g. large data sets, custom question logic, etc.
Incentive
An incentive can be used to help boost the response rate. This could be in the form of a discount code or gift card. The amount and type of incentive should be determined by the type of people you are trying to reach, e.g. B2B vs. B2C, age, household income, job title / position, etc.
Sample Size
You need approximately 200 open-ended responses to be confident in the strength of signal within the analysis (have a 95% confidence that the answer strength of the signal is valid within ~5-10% of what is reported).
Common tools
Go deeper
Recipes that use this method
A method earns its value when its signal corroborates others. Here is where this one does its work.
Last updated
.svg)
