How Can Surveys Help a Business: 7 Proven Ways & Benefits!

Surveys are affordable and easy-to-access tools for small businesses.

Even then, 62% of small businesses never surveyed their customers.

Getting feedback from your employee, customers, and target market help in understanding how well you are performing.

Surveys have many benefits that can help you run a business successfully.

Here is what you need to know to understand how to use it most efficiently.

Contents

Why Are Surveys Important For The Business?

Customer feedback is a vital and traditional part of the marketing kit.

The surveys are based on questions like –

The Goal
Where To Apply It?
Where Results are Going To Use?

The business should be conducting surveys in their regular feedback so the problems can be identified much more quickly or can be avoided.

Here are the reasons why the surveys become important to consider –

The Expectation Of Customers Are Higher

The customers have expectations but it is growing more and more.

In the research conducted by Mycustomer, 24% of people said that they will likely switch if they are receiving a negative experience with the brand.

The best judge who can tell you how amazing or bad your customer experiences are your customers.

Using surveys in regular feedback helps you in identifying problems that your customers might be facing.

Pro Tip: some problems are not big at the start but ignoring it for a long time can cause damage on a larger scale.

Use surveys to find the experiences even after doing little changes.

The Customer Experience Become Influential

The customer requires close monitoring, for small businesses to understand how much their customer is satisfied and what parts are not up to the standard.

The danger here is not following the request and falling behind the competitions.

Customer experience can save you from falling into the pitfall. Also, it can boost in improving the overall business results.

The Preferences Are Changing

Finding the pulse of your customers is difficult. But doing it every time can turn into the biggest challenge for small businesses.

The preferences of your customer keep changing. They might like your product now but it can’t work next time as your customer needs something else from you.

The pace of change is getting quicker than ever. It can be seen as more brands are approaching differently just to match the pace.

Customer Shares Their Opinion

The platforms are open for customers, making it easier to share their opinions.

If you are providing good services and experiences, they will share it. Or if it’s bad, they will share it too.

Customers voice their opinion no matter whether you like it or not. Surveys help in gathering the feedback to use it for improving as well as offering a way to share the opinion but for your profit.

Pro Tip: Use review sites that promote individuals reviewers. Look for negative reviews, it can help in undertaking loopholes.

The Lack Of Human Touch

The buying process doesn’t include human touch. It’s mostly programmed and people don’t really know the business either instead of products.

Surveys work by providing the human touch and making that connection with them.

The world’s top best companies have their services based on customers. And surveys are helpful in improving the overall communication too.

Brand Loyalty Is Not That Loyal

It’s not customers’ fault not to stick with one brand if others are proving what they need.

If some other brands have recognized the needs and are also connecting with them on a personal level, they feel their loyalty toward them.

For a small business, it’s crucial to hold on to their brand loyalty to have the best customers and sales.

Customers have more than a few choices, there is a whole market for one particular thing. It’s crucial for a business to understand the attention of their customers.

Surveys help in knowing if anything is bothering the customers. And you can fix it much easier before it turns out to be a big hassle for both of you.

Best Ways Surveys Can Help Your Business

With today’s situation, The market becomes more competitive and optimism becomes the key.

For a small business, it becomes important to use every little bit of data they get from the market.

With the help of surveys, small businesses can get insight into the market along with feedback.

Here are the best 7 ways to use surveys for business profit.

1. Use For Collecting Important Feedback

With the help of surveys, you can get feedback that is valuable to any business.

It also helps in getting the refined interest of the community. You can make the product better and reliable for your audience.

Just like Indie Developer Epic Games who also created the Fortnite Battle Royale are using the surveys alongside their digital data gathering.

The other digital techniques they are using are social analysis, community sentimental, user analytics, etc. They are using the surveys to find out how their audience feels about the product and company.

Image source:surveyanyplace

The surveys are also used as part of a strategy to manage the users and how they are handling the game. The game is still on its early access which gives a lot more space to do development and balancing.

With the help of a feedback loop, communication becomes important between users and the company.

Fortnite developers are dependent on first-hand feedback to understand the quality and improve it.

The core focus is to listen to what their consumer wants. And they do the adapting and implanting to develop the online battle royale genre.

2. Use For Researching Method

Surveys are ideal when it comes to gathering feedback in large volumes. It becomes a useful tool for market research.

Also compared to other tools, surveys are less expensive with better results.

The company Bowlcut Grams who is basically a UK-based clothing line regularly uses surveys for getting insights from the market.

The company shares the surveys to find the customer preference first hand and how they came to know about the brand.

The feedbacks are helpful and used to provide a better understanding of data to plan the future strategy.

You can use multiple channels to connect with the customers and do the surveys.

3. To Understand What Customers want

One of the methods for improving the customer relationship is to ask about things that they want for example their references, problems, challenges, etc.

The data collected from such surveys can help in understanding how to approach and make your plans more customer satisfaction.

Surveys are much cheaper and it can help you in receiving accurate data that can be reliable and trusted to use.

4. Boost Engagement & Lead Generation

For every business, they need customer engagement and lead generation.

However, some of the most underrated tools that can be considered are Quizzes.

It’s an effective form when it comes to marketing content that every small business can try right away.

Famous brands like Buzzfeed have invested a lot of their efforts in creating surveys that can be entertaining as well as effective.

Image source: keyhole

It helped them to get more visitors and manage the engagement for a longer period of time.

They have articles in quiz formats asking people to share their interests, likes or dislikes, etc.

Also, personality quizzes are helpful for collecting the extra data of the customer. It helps in taking better steps in marketing.

Whereas knowledge-based quizzes help in gaining more understanding about your audience and subjects that they like.

It helps in making education and training based services good.

5. Collect Customer Data For Marketing

The survey can be helpful for collecting customer data and it can be used for planning the marketing strategies, approach, etc in the future.

It also helps in understanding how to close the deals in an efficient way so you can get most of the sales without any risk.

A company like Weish Automotive Dealership, The Sinclair Group asked their staff to get more demographic data, contact of customers, and car’s age.

They targeted the people who visited the showrooms for participating in a contest to win a holiday package in return.

The salesman had the URL of the survey loaded in their phone and primarily distributed within the showroom.

They also promoted the competition on social media, targeting only a 10 km radius.

It helped them to get more audience who never tried them before.

The survey helped the market to manage their services and future strategies.

Whereas the competition helps in creating more interaction with customers and targeting more people.

6. Second Opinion On Taking Final Decisions

For business, the importance of public opinion matters as the surveys and products are based on them.

Before launching a new product or flavor or any other changes, surveys can be helpful to understand if it’s required or not.

Surveys can also help in knowing what kind of changes that customers are expecting but not receiving,

7.Use For Monitoring Customer Satisfaction

For a small business, surveys can be helpful to understand their customer satisfaction.

It can be used to prompt customers to give valuable feedback for the experiences they had after the sales.

It can be used as a post-sale survey which can also add survey links in the receipt or email to customers.

Customers’ surveys are useful for businesses to improve their customer services.

It can be helpful to identify the loopholes that make their customer feel disappointed and the root reason for customer service failure.

Image source: hotjar

One of the profits that you get, the automatic survey invitations can cut the cost for not investing too much in research or in-staff for distributing surveys.

The Rules Of Effective Surveys – Do & Don’ts

When you are looking forward to the result after applying the surveys but not getting what you want can be disappointing.

Also, it wastes time, effort, and resources along with the whole purpose of having the surveys.

There are some rules that you must follow when you are conducting the surveys. Well, it includes –

Do Keep It Short

The timespan of the audience is extremely limited. The longer your

Surveys the less they will show the interest.

It can also cause survey fatigue and they can quit before completing the surveys,

It’s important to keep it short with a structured question that can be understanding and easy to answer.

Don’t Survey Too Much

People don’t mind taking surveys, but they do mind if you ask it every single day.

It’s crucial to determine the timeframe and days for conducting surveys.

Pro Tip: Use CRM for tracking the customer who has been surveyed and to keep organized

Do Use Feedbacks

Instead of just collecting data, use it for something. It will waste time if you are not going to use it anyway.

Put the information for doing changes and getting what the result you are expecting from it.

Don’t Get Bias

The surveys are used for gathering information to know something you don’t know. It will tell you about what the customer wants.

If you are using a survey for collecting data then make sure to keep a clear objective. Avoid getting multi-purpose and understand why you need it and for what.

Frequently Asked Question ( FAQs)

Will Surveys help my small business?

Surveys help in providing first-hand data directly from your audience. Whether using it for a new product line or understanding the trends.

Surveys are helpful to take decisions directly based on what your customer needs and wants from you.

How should I draft my surveys?

The effective steps include researching who is going to be your target. Then drafting the questions based on the results you want.

Set up the incentive that customers will get after the survey and publicize it to the people once you check everything.

Why should I take a survey as an important tool?

Surveys are important as it’s affordable, effective, and gives you direct information from your people targeting for selling purposes.

It’s also helpful to understand what is working and what is not in your customer satisfaction services.