Filling out paper quality surveys, which are not visually stimulating and have generally with many questions is a tedious task hardly anyone agrees to do unless they are very angry!. Traditional methods of collecting feedback through surveys on service quality are based on pursuing the client to answer.

Can you imagine an interactive survey system that is so easy and attractive that the same final customers approach it and pro-actively use it to provide their evaluations

Well, such a system exists: digital and physical RateNow.

interactive surveys. In RateNow believe that people enjoy giving their opinion as long as it is very easy to do so! For this reason, we created the easiest, fastest and friendliest system to capture customers’ spontaneous feedback, which encourages them to interact with the company or institution in a direct and non-intrusive way, through interactive and very visual touchscreen-based surveys. It’s all about creating modern surveys to help your customers to give their opinion honestly and as quickly as possible.

That said, you may be wondering ... how a good service quality survey should really be? In this post we will give you some tip on what an effective survey should includeand how to create the best interactive survey with RateNow.

So ... What are the key points of a survey to assess the quality of a service rendered

We should give particular consideration to the following aspects:

Cover page

The most important thing is to draw attentionwith a good cover as it creates the first impression that the customer will get of the survey. It will help to attract the user, who will answer the questions spontaneously. In RateNow this cover is represented by our three smiley faces (happy, neutral and unhappy), it is the friendliest and most immediate way to encourage people to extend their arm and value their experience.

Design

Our goal is tokeep the interest high. How? Designing a quality of service survey with a very visuallook & feel and completing the questions with images that also help to identify the answers easily.

The survey should be structured following an order of importance. What information are we looking for and what is more relevant? If we include the important questions at the beginning, we make sure that we obtain the most relevant information from the respondents even in case they abandon the survey halfway.

The interactive survey should also be structured following the axis of ease/complexity: the easiest/fastest questions to answer go first and while the more complex/entertaining ones will follow. Such structure we will not only capture users’ attention but will also keep them engaged. Once the respondent has invested some time in answering the first questions, it is likely they will finish the survey

Questions

In a survey to assess the quality of a service rendered, you can use 3 types of questions and answers:

1. To obtain information on personal interests or to know consumer’s profile... pre-defined options:they should be concise and include all possibilities, don’t forget the option "none of the above", "others" (which can also be left open for open suggestions) or N/A. If you want the user to be able to select more than one option, we can enable multiple selection, limiting the maximum number of options that can be selected in order to narrow the focus on the most important ones. Responses should be understood the first time the respondent reads them
   
   
2. To obtain ratings, use the numerical scale:clearly define both extremes, visually (color scale, numbers) or explicitly (what do the lowest and highest scores mean? Tags them to explain it). The most commonly used valuation standards are the NPS (Net Promoter Score) for an overall evaluation or recommendation, and the Likert 1-5 scale for a Top2 boxes analysis (what percentage of voters have chosen the two highest marks on a scale of 1 to 5, useful for measuring excellence in service).
   
   
3. To obtain suggestions and personal data, open fields: they are the most time-consuming questions in a satisfaction survey and expect to see users who prefer not to answer. If the open question can also include pre-defined answers, the user will definitely appreciate it (it takes less time to answer) and the information will also be structured for an improved subsequent analysis. We recommend not to abuse of open fields in a questionnaire: more than an open question can make the user experience significantly longer.


Not everyone is willing to leave personal information (postal code, email, phone number, etc.), so we grant the option to skip such questions and move on with the survey. Additionally, we tend to locate such questions towards the end of the questionnaire as they also require more time to answer.

The time of those customers who are willing to give you feedback is important! You should try to get all the information with as few questions as possible and make sure that they are brief and easy to understand.

To get closer to customers, try to understand them and communicate your message. To this aim, the customization of the quality survey will be your best weapon. Every company is different, so each satisfaction survey should reflect values, style and customers’ profile.

Language and vocabulary

You should askquestions that are easy to read and to understand, and specify all the information without using complex or conditional structures. Rather than asking: "If you could change the customer service, what would you improve?", it’s preferable to ask: "Please tell us how we can improve." If you ask “What service did you use?”, instead of including pre-defined answers repeating part of the question (like “I have used the Emergency Service”), include just a word that clearly defines the concept (“Emergency”), and reinforce it with an image of the space in question.

Then, avoid technical slang in the interactive survey: your audience may not use the same vocabulary that your company experts do.

Customers don’t want to waste their time. The quality survey is also part of their shopping experience and their interaction with the company cannot be forced or intrusive, it can only be proactive. Let's make that easy with a quick, direct and friendly survey which is truly interactive from the beginning to the end!