people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

While this quote talks about how you can impact people during your everyday life, her words hold equal power around the customer experience when you’re running a business. 

The digital age has increased the need for businesses to access fast, accurate feedback that tells a comprehensive story to their audience. Nowadays, rather than relying on lengthy paper-based customer feedback surveys that require customers to take time out of their day to complete and often return questionnaires, they can now do so with a few clicks of a button via email, SMS, or mobile app. 

The statistics tell their own story. Newvoicemedia.com found that US companies lose over $62 billion annually due to substandard customer service. Meanwhile, an Amex survey found that 78% of customers have backed out of purchasing because of a poor customer experience. 

This article explains how customer survey software has become more critical than ever as businesses seek to understand their customers’ needs, behaviors, and ways to best retain them in the modern world. 

Evolution and Development of Customer Survey Software 

Since the day we learned about surveying, market research has been a tedious job involving people standing on street corners with clipboards stopping consumers in the street to gather their thoughts on brands, products, and services, or banks of cold callers would undertake telemarketing surveys over the telephone.

It was time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive since businesses hired market researchers for hours to collect enough data to be statistically insightful. It’s always been important to understand customer needs, but the methods have changed a lot.

Now that markets are changing so fast, businesses need instant insight into what their customers think. Businesses can gain a distinct edge over the competition by incorporating new tech like AI, machine learning, and sentiment analysis into their customer feedback surveys.

Essential Features of Top-Tier Customer Survey Software 

There are various software out there that can cater to your needs, but is it enough? How do you know if the platform you’re thinking of getting works and fits your needs?

Feel free to jump to the next topic should you wish to go straight to the platforms we compared side-by-side. However, if you want to find out the essential features when selecting a top-tier customer survey software, here are a few of what we believe is important before you decide what’s best: 

Customization and Flexibility 

As mentioned, your customers don’t come in a one-size-fits-all mold. Each has their preferences, opinions, and needs. Therefore, it’s essential to choose customer survey software that allows your business to be flexible in who they approach and what questions they ask. For instance, Huel adapts its

customer surveys depending on how many orders a customer has made. By asking different questions as customers make orders number 1, 3, 5, and 10, they can monitor their net promoter score (NPS) throughout each customer’s journey with the business. 

The overall NPS score has increased by around 10 points, which is huge, considering it wasn’t low before, and our responses globally have increased by 164%, and that is so impactful, since every key market now has an NPS score attached to it and enough data to make it significant.

Olivia Chambers, Customer Insights Manager

In addition, finding ways to customize your surveys personally is an excellent way to maximize your response rate. Since the first point of contact with customers after a transaction is often through a survey, using the customer’s name is an excellent way to make them feel engaged with your brand. The more engaged customers are, the more likely they are to answer surveys and offer valuable insight into their needs. 

Real-Time Analytics and Reporting 

While gathering feedback is part of the process, your business needs to understand what the feedback is telling you. This is where analyzing the data into results and turning the results into impactful actions through reporting matters. Finding a customer survey tool that has real-time analytics and reporting offers businesses instant insights to inform their customer experience activities. 

Good customer survey software tools offer these real-time analytics,  

Increasingly, AI plays a role in the analytical process. For example, automated AI algorithms allow increasingly big data sets to be analyzed quickly, while machine learning provides reporting and insights to mature as more data is processed. This evolutionary approach allows your business to adapt as results change. 

Meanwhile, sentiment analysis provides greater context around the emotional draw to your brand with customers than previously possible. Its free text analytics can assess the emotional undertone of comments, helping you get a more rounded picture of how your customers feel about your products and services. 

Integration Capabilities 

Another critical feature of excellent customer survey software is integrating it with other tools to help you gain actionable insights. For instance, embedding your customer survey software with CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot helps link feedback to customer profiles. This allows you to better understand each customer’s behaviors, needs, and feelings toward your brand, allowing you to build targeted, actionable insights tailored to their needs. 

Similarly, finding a customer survey software package that seamlessly integrates with business intelligence (BI) tools allows you to gain maximum insight into your questionnaire results. Flexible BI analytic tools, such as Power BI and Tableau, will enable you to draw the results from your customer survey software and create powerful business dashboards to measure KPIs. 

In addition to tracking progress against your customer experience objectives, integrating your survey software with BI tools helps you discover other trends and powerful insights by combining survey data with other data sources. 

Choosing the Platform

Okay, we’ve only discussed the real value of customer survey tools so far. But the real question of this article is ‘What customer survey platform should I use?’ So before you say we’re being biased here, well, we are. Sort of. But we’ll try our best to make sure you get the most answers starting with who, and what we do. 

Since launching its first customer feedback survey software in 2005, Netigate has gathered over 150 million responses from 1500 customers in 30 countries, measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), customer service, customer churn, and dozens of other valuable customer feedback insights. 

The acquisition of Lumoa made Netigate even stronger with more CX Insights capabilities thanks to its generative AI feature that tells you what to do next to grow your business.

But what sets Netigate’s customer survey software apart from other solutions and other competitors? Let’s take a deeper look at Netigate’s capabilities. 

User Experience 

Netigate prides itself on providing users with a user-friendly experience through its easy-to-use and intuitive interface. 

It’s easy to use, offering newcomers access to excellent video tutorials and an excellent Netigate Academy. It allows everyone, from IT wizards to technophobes, to create targeted, insightful, and impactful customer surveys. 

You can choose a survey template from the well-stocked library or create your own templates that speak for your brand. In addition, Netigate allows you to target multiple markets by translating the survey into multiple languages. 

Negitate also makes survey delivery easy. The tool allows you to choose several delivery options to maximize your response rate, such as creating personalized or generic links, QR codes, SMS, or email distribution. 

Once you’ve received your responses, it integrates seamlessly with existing CMS and BI software to help you understand individual customer behavior and gain even more in-depth insights. 

Comprehensive support 

As you’d expect from a customer-centric business focused on helping others deliver an excellent customer experience, their customer support is what you’re looking for. Several online user reviews emphasize the quality of their customer service. Why? 

They offer a comprehensive online support center that offers guides and solutions on a range of services: 

• Getting started – Helping you create an account, log in, and other various onboarding queries 
• Create – Taking you step-by-step through the survey creation process. From explaining the different types of questions to how to design and structure your survey. More advanced tutorials on adding survey logic, adding timers, and QA tags are among the many other guides on offer. 
• Distribute – Helping you distribute your survey across multiple channels and capture details of respondents to gather tailored insights. 
• Report – How to set up analytics and your report preferences to deliver the insights 
• Settings – Creating your preferred user settings 
• Security and data retention – Understanding how to secure your data, privacy, and how the data is used. 

They offer comprehensive support in English, German, and Swedish, making it possible for other regions to take advantage of the various solutions.

Customer Success Stories 

Netigate has helped thousands of businesses gain a deeper insight into their CX activities for almost 20 years, boasting dozens of success stories. 

In 2009, Swedish company MediaAnalys began collaborating with Netigate to better understand their customers. This involved measuring customer satisfaction through customer satisfaction index (CSI) studies. By undertaking the studies throughout the year, MediaAnalys can identify positive and negative aspects of its customer relations. 

This allows them to take fast, remedial action where needed with targeted adjustments. Partner Manager & Educational Coordinator Simon Sandberg explains,

With Netigate, we get a deeper insight into what our customers think of us, which helps us to prevent dissatisfaction and strengthen our customer relations.

Simon Sandberg, Partner Manager & Educational Coordinator

Based in northeast England, Northumbrian Water Group turned to Netigate to resolve many challenges in its customer feedback cycle. Among the hurdles it aimed to overcome were the costly execution and slow implementation of surveys, slow communication with third-party suppliers, and difficulty managing insights from its surveys. 

Netigate helped deliver the following results: 

• Reduced survey costs by 85% 
• Reduced research time by 50% 
• Increased volume of research by 90% 

This led to:

• Increased self-sufficiency as a business 
• Real-time insights on customer satisfaction to help drive customer-focused activities

Best Practices for Using Customer Survey Software 

We’ve given you the comparison and a couple of success stories that may help you in your decision-making. But remember, your chosen platform can only work to its fullest potential if you know how to strategize, design, distribute, and analyze the results. 

Survey Design Tips 

Successful customer feedback surveys begin with the design and structure. Here are some best practices when designing your survey to ensure your survey delivers outstanding response rates:  

1. Identify what you’re looking to understand 

Before designing your survey, identify your end goal. What are you aiming to learn from it? This will help you understand how to structure the study, who to target, and how to keep it focused on delivering the insights you want. 

2. Simplify for maximum response rates 

Once you’ve identified your objective, keep things simple. Asking too many questions can lead to survey fatigue among respondents while making your questions too complex can confuse participants. 

Ask yourself whether each question relates to your end goal. If not, ditch it. 

3. Avoid priming or introducing bias 

Avoiding priming your audience or introducing bias to your questions is critical to gathering clean and accurate data. 

Don’t prime your audience into giving a preferred opinion with their answer or introduce bias by offering more positive than negative options for participants to select when answering. Keep your questions neutral (e.g., “How would you describe your experience with…” rather than “How good was your experience with…”) and offer the same number of positive and negative responses along with a neutral. 

4. Relate your questions to your KPIs 

Each survey question should relate to a measurable KPI with which you can track CSAT, NPS, or another metric. You probably don’t need to ask a question if it doesn’t relate to a metric. 

Distribution Strategies 

Maximizing the distribution of your customer surveys is essential to getting a high response rate and delivering high-quality insights. Here are some ways to improve your chances of engaging with customers and help them help you by answering your survey: 

1. Timing 

The timing of your survey distribution is crucial. The optimum time to discover their feelings about your business is immediately after a transaction. Asking them for feedback while their experience remains fresh in their minds is more likely to engage them than asking them a week later. 

2. Multi-channel distribution 

Reaching out to your customers across multiple channels is equally critical to maximizing your reach. Not every customer has access to a smartphone, so distributing your surveys across as many sources as possible increases the likelihood of capturing more customers. 

Email, SMS, social media, QR codes, websites, and in-app surveys are all great ways of reaching the broadest possible audience. Meanwhile, if you’re holding an in-person event, you might want to use a kiosk or touch-screen survey to gather customer feedback. 

3. Incentives 

Offering recipients incentives to engage with customer surveys has multiple benefits. From providing users with a compelling reason to answer the questionnaire to helping build brand loyalty, embedding special offers into your survey distribution strategy can help deliver high-quality insights. 

Data Analysis and Action 

Using customer survey software that automatically analyzes results in real time as responses are received can help you gather ongoing insights into how your customers feel about your brand. 

As a result, you can better measure exactly how your business is performing, track progress against your objectives, and understand the impact of your actions.  

For example, if your business has just released a new product, understanding how satisfied your customers are with it helps you understand what actions you need to deliver.

If they’re dissatisfied, why? What actions do you need to take to rectify issues? Rather than having to wait weeks or months to gather enough data from manually administered customer surveys, automated data analytics offer businesses excellent and fast insights.   

This insight helps your business take action that adds value to the customer, potentially turning a negative experience into a positive by making them feel engaged and listened to. If a customer receives a faulty product, offering them a free return and exchange goes a long way to building trust and loyalty. 

Addressing Common Pain Points in Customer Survey Software 

This article has already touched on some of the common challenges businesses face when using customer survey software to gather data on customer feedback. Yet, how can tools like Netigate offer solutions? 

Low response rates 

Data integration challenges 

Time-consuming analysis 

Final Words

You now have a wide range of ideas of what makes a good customer survey platform. Making the right choice helps you get inside the mind of your company’s lifeblood, your customers. 

Understanding their needs and how they feel about your brand, products, and services offers an outstanding opportunity to boost your business. Whether increasing sales from existing customers or attracting newcomers through their advocacy for your brand, taking the time to structure your surveys, ask the right questions, and perform the analysis will help your business succeed where others fail. 

Netigate is one of the leading customer survey software tools on the market, offering quick and easy survey design, shareable links via a massive range of channels, and automated, dynamic analytic tools that provide fantastic actionable insights quickly. 

So, why not sign up for a free trial today and unlock the power of customer feedback with Netigate’s customer survey software today?