Customer surveys help organizations collect feedback about their products and services. They help gauge customer engagement and satisfaction, collect data for market research, and, in the long term, create efficient sales, marketing, and other strategies. Creating these surveys is easy. Many software and online tools are available for this purpose, and businesses choose based on their requirements. Before discussing their advantages and the top options, let us quickly look at the types of customer surveys.

Types of customer surveys
Although there are several types, the most common ones are listed here:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
An NPS survey asks customers how likely they are to recommend a product to their friends or family by choosing a rating from 1 to 10. A 0-6 rating means the customer is a detractor and will not recommend a particular product. A 7-8 implies the customer is passive and moderately satisfied with the product and may or may not recommend it. A rating of 9-10 classifies a customer as a promoter, implying they are the likeliest to promote the product further. After a set number of responses are collected, the overall NPS rating = (% of promoter scores) – (% of detractor scores).

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT is an on-the-spot method of gauging customer satisfaction and experience with a given product, service, feature, or team interaction. The ratings are usually taken at various touchpoints in the user journey to gauge customers’ satisfaction levels. CSAT-related surveys usually include questions like “How satisfied were you with the customer service?” and “How helpful was the tech support team?”

Customer Effort Score (CES)
A CES score measures how much effort customers need to put in to complete specific actions. Essentially, these surveys break apart the end result (in terms of customer satisfaction) with the process of getting the result (the effort). CES helps an organization understand how effortless a particular flow or process is in a given product or service. For example, it assesses whether onboarding, check-in, or check-outs have been effortless or filled with various roadblocks for customers.

Benefits of customer survey solutions
Online and software-based customer survey solutions come with many benefits. Some examples include:

Actively tracking customer satisfaction
With survey methods like NPS or CSAT, an organization can actively track customer experience trends for its products and services. These figures can then be compared with industry benchmarks. Using the data, companies can detect and resolve likely issues with their product, marketing strategy, or customer service before they become major problems.

Advertising through customers
Digitized and automated customer survey solutions help improve user experiences in a streamlined manner. Satisfied customers can bring in more customers through positive word-of-mouth reviews. This means such tools help businesses advertise to their customers without spending much. Companies not using software and customer survey solutions could inadvertently give their customers a poor experience, which may result in negative publicity and bad word-of-mouth marketing, something organizations want to avoid.

Understanding customer needs
Many intelligent customer survey tools analyze data from several sources to help identify unhappy customers. Companies can use the information to prevent negative reviews and reduce churn rates of their products and services. Besides avoiding negative reviews and a loss in subscribers, such solutions help companies understand their customers’ pulse, likes, dislikes, and requirements.

Popular customer survey solutions
There are several incredibly efficient and multi-utility customer survey software solutions in the market. Some of the most popular ones are:

SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is among the most renowned and used online customer survey solutions out there. It provides users with 15 diverse types of survey questions to gauge consumer opinion accurately, including Likert scales and open comments. Businesses can collect customer opinions through surveys online and offline through mobile devices. Most importantly, SurveyMonkey enables subscribers to generate reports and assess survey data through advanced analytics.

Typeform
Typeform is a thoughtfully-designed, zero-code online customer survey solution that contains quizzes, surveys, user-friendly forms, and asynchronous video solutions. Businesses can build a unique brand identity, transform customer experiences, and, eventually, accelerate growth and sales using this tool. Typeform is highly linkable as it has over 120 existing integrations and can seamlessly be plugged into any company’s workflows. Moreover, this system comes with enterprise-level security to keep customer data ultra-safe and GDPR compliance to build a safe, secure, and efficient customer-company bond for the long term.

HubSpot
HubSpot is primarily an activity center for customer support and marketing. However, it also has online survey tools, which businesses can use to collect feedback in multiple formats across multiple touchpoints. Organizations can create different types of surveys, such as NPS, CSAT, CES, and others. Moreover, they can customize this tool to reach their survey target and growth objective as soon as possible. HubSpot also includes several analytic and reporting tools to streamline the feedback collection process and consumer grievance redressal.