Customer survey – how to turn your online shop into a customer magnet

Do you know where you can gain the most important and elementary insights about your customers? Exactly, directly from your customers. In order to gather comprehensive information about whether and why your target group is satisfied, to promote customer loyalty, to place your offers in a customer-oriented way in the long term and much more, there is no more efficient method than the customer survey.

What a customer survey is, why it is so important and how it works, you will learn in this article.

What is a customer survey?

A customer survey is a powerful tool that you can use to get to know and understand your target group better, with the aim of optimising your products, services or online shop based on the results. With a customer survey, you receive valuable information about purchase motivation and customer satisfaction, but also about wishes and challenges – and not from just anyone, but directly from those people who are ultimately responsible for your turnover.

Why conduct a customer survey?

In a nutshell: A customer survey is one of the keys to your success. Why? To understand customer needs, to identify customer expectations and to find out the motives for buying is the basis for improving products and services in such a way that your customers get a real added value, a real solution.

You can identify any obstacles and eliminate them. A qualitative and quantitative customer survey should become an essential part of your customer management, which you should conduct at least once, better twice a year.

What are the advantages of a customer survey for an online shop?

The customer survey in an online shop has several advantages. The easiest way is to remember the following formula:

Customer Expectation + Customer Need Fulfilment = Customer Satisfaction.

And your tool to identify customer expectations and customer needs is the customer survey. Always keep in mind that customer satisfaction is sometimes the most important factor in your online shop. It is decisive for success or failure.

However, you can only achieve customer satisfaction if you can respond to the wishes and ideas of your target group. If you don’t and plan “in the blue”, your offer can quickly miss the target. As an element of target group analysis, a customer survey provides you with tangible data and facts with which you can make really well-founded decisions.

With a customer survey

you avoid wrong measures,
can make concrete decisions about product optimisation or special discount campaigns,
positively influence customer satisfaction,
get to know your target customers for future developments of products or services,
gain knowledge about what you have done well so far and what you have done less well,
recognise market trends more quickly,
get new ideas,
reduce the risk of shopping cart abandonment and
position yourself strongly in the market with competitive advantages.

What are the objectives of a customer survey?

You conduct a customer survey for two reasons:

1. You want to ask for a customer reviews of a specific product or service in order to improve it based on customer needs.
2. You want to collect data on general customer satisfaction in order to increase customer loyalty.

Important tip: A customer survey has only one clear objective.

A customer survey therefore requires thorough planning of the approach, the posing of the right questions and the evaluation in advance. You can obtain answers to the following questions, among others, in a customer survey:

• What are my customers’ expectations and needs?
• What do my customers think about the products and services?
• Why did customers buy my products and services?
• How do they feel about my products and services compared to before?
• What do my customers want from me that I cannot currently fulfil?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the online shop?
• What does the typical customer who buys from me actually look like?

With a customer survey, you have the best opportunity to specifically address the real needs of your new and existing customers so that they feel understood and in good hands with you – and are happy to buy.

How is a customer survey conducted?

You can start a customer survey in different ways. The important thing is that it fits your online shop. No matter how you collect the data, always inform your customers transparently in advance and emphasise that it is a voluntary participation. Furthermore, communicate all important parameters such as time, effort and anonymity at the beginning of the customer survey.

At the same time, make sure that the customer gets the feeling that you are asking for their personal support. If customers feel that their opinion is valued, they are more inclined to participate in a customer survey.
To initiate a customer survey, you can

• Send out an invitation email,
• implement a pop-up on your website,
• embed questions in your app,
• run a campaign in your brick-and-mortar shop and/or
• send out a questionnaire by post.

Before each customer survey, set up a comprehensive plan. Determine a customer group you want to survey early on. This way you can choose the approach accordingly.

A central aspect of the customer survey is, of course, the questions themselves. Here, a distinction is made between general questions about product satisfaction, the services or even the likelihood of a recommendation and specific questions about certain services, products or conditions such as shipping or payment methods.

Ask 1 to 2 simple multiple-choice questions at the beginning of a customer survey and a maximum of 4 to 6 open questions afterwards. Avoid suggestive questions at all costs, i.e. those that already put the answer in the respondent’s mouth. After all, you want the honest opinion of your target group. Collect at least 20, but no more than 200 answers.
Always decide on a form for a customer survey. Conduct a customer survey either by telephone OR in writing OR online to make the answers comparable with each other.

Afterwards, think about the evaluation, which will ultimately show you what your customers really want and what you can improve. Useful tools for the creation and evaluation are Typeform or Google Forms (free of charge).

What contents can a customer survey have?

In the following, we would like to show you which topics you can cover with a customer survey:

• Customer survey on support: friendliness, competence, accessibility
• Customer survey on the product: product benefits, design, quality
• Customer survey on recommendation: willingness to recommend, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction
• Customer survey on price-performance ratio

You can make a customer survey more attractive and increase the participation rate by including a competition, integrating exciting content such as videos or pictures, addressing your customers personally and choosing the right time such as Friday evening.

What does the GDPR say about customer surveys?

Regardless of whether you conduct a customer survey nationally or internationally, always observe the guidelines of the GDPR to stay on the safe side. In principle, you may only collect data for a customer survey that is really relevant for the evaluation. Per se, this means: Limit yourself to the essentials. If in doubt, conduct several customer surveys rather than one that is too extensive.

Very important: Always obtain consent to send a survey email as part of a GDPR-compliant newsletter. According to a court ruling, these count as advertising emails, which means that Section 7 (3) of the UWG (Unfair Competition Act) applies. Although you can send a customer survey to existing customers without consent, provided that the criteria of § 7 para. 3 UWG are met, it is always better to obtain the “Ok”.

Furthermore, such consent in a customer survey must be easy to understand and must not be hidden as in the general terms and conditions or the privacy policy, which means:

• Obtain consent through an invitation email or on the first page of the survey.
• Avoid pre-filled answer boxes or default settings for consent.
• Always actively ask for participation.

It is equally important under data protection laws that you inform your customers what will happen to the data afterwards, how long it will be stored and what purpose it will serve. This can be done in the privacy policy.

Make use of the advantages of the customer survey

With a customer survey, you gain unique insights into the minds of your customers. You gain important insights that open up great potential for improvement.

Creating and evaluating a customer survey is not witchcraft with the right planning in advance. The benefits of a customer survey, on the other hand, are worth their weight in gold.