The ultimate guide to running a customer feedback programme

Jon Gitlin
Content Strategist

Table of contents
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Ensuring that your customers are happy and engaged is critical to the success of your business.

There are countless statistics that back this claim:

The question is how to help your customers to be successful so that they continue to use your product/service and buy more from you.

The answer: Build a customer feedback programme – a centralised, systematic way to collect the voices and opinions of customers throughout the customer journey (in our case, using surveys), which, if acted on, delivers clients products and services that truly meet customer needs.

Having a team focused on customer feedback may seem like a luxury, but you can build a Voice of the Customer strategy using limited resources. Moreover, practically any company can benefit from a centralised, systematised method of listening to customers. Why?

You know that each of your customers is unique, whether that's to do with the types of products/services they use, how they use them or who within the company uses them. Couple these differences with the fact that your customers are made up of a diverse group of people and you’ll find that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that supports each of their preferences and needs.

Think about your own customers. Do you know the following with absolute confidence?

According to McKinsey, measuring customer sentiment throughout the customer lifecycle is 30% more predictive of clients’ overall satisfaction than evaluating how they feel at a single point in time. Surveys are perfect for this because they give customers a quick, convenient way to provide candid and thoughtful feedback, and require little effort to send multiple times to even very large groups of people (more about this in the “Sending” section).

Once you understand the customer experience in more detail, you’ll be able to take steps that deliver more value for clients. For example, you’ll be able to train customer-facing employees in the areas they need to improve on most; and you’ll be in a position to adjust your product roadmap to better meet the needs and wants of your customers.

And eventually, you’ll experience big business improvements:

We’ll walk you through each step of building your own customer feedback programme (using surveys), with expert guidance from SurveyMonkey’s Voice of the Customer team – a team that runs the customer feedback programme for a platform that supports 95% of Fortune 500 companies, in addition to thousands of smaller organisations around the world. That experience has given them an understanding of how to develop and run customer feedback programmes.

To help make our tips more relatable to your company’s situation, we’ll review, throughout the guide, how two types of organisations approach each step of building their own customer feedback programme:

Choose the version that makes the most sense for your organisation and we’ll walk you through the process step by step.

Let’s begin with the most fundamental step: planning your customer feedback programme.

Quick note: We’ll be talking about the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) in the coming section. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s considered the world’s leading metric for measuring customer happiness and loyalty. And since it’s a foundational element of a customer feedback programme, you’ll see it mentioned throughout this guide. If you want more context on the NPS, you can find an in-depth breakdown about it in the Design section.

If you’re interested in measuring customer satisfaction using another question, such as the customer effort score, you’ll still be able to apply this guide’s framework for building your customer feedback programme. Also, this guide serves as a great starting point for building an automated customer feedback programme.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Building an effective, centralised and systematic customer feedback programme from scratch isn’t a simple task. In order for your programme to be effective, it must hold a central role in your company and wield enough influence to deliver insights and recommendations to teams that can put them to use.

That means you need goals, a strategy, partnership with key teams in your organisation and the blessing of your company’s leadership to build a truly effective customer feedback programme.

In this chapter, we’ll walk you through how to plan a customer feedback programme that:

If you’re going to justify the need for a customer feedback programme, you should come up with a goal for your programme that aligns with the goals of your company. It’s best to come up with a clear, attainable goal for your programme before you do anything else. That way, it’s easier to zero in on focused questions delivering actionable insights that will inform your goals.

To achieve the right goal, you’ll need to assess the current challenges your organisation faces and then reverse-engineer those challenges into a clear-cut, realistic goal for your programme. Here are some example scenarios, along with goals that match them:

Goal: Understand why customers are churning so you can take steps that will reduce the churn rate by 3% per quarter.

Goal: Achieve a relatively high NPS in your industry. This involves either using a competitive NPS survey to know what your rivals’ scores are or using an industry-wide benchmark (if it’s available) to see where you stand.

Goal: To consistently improve your customers’ experience, you aim to increase the NPS of customers who’ve been with you for over six months by three points per quarter.

Bear in mind that if your goal is too generic, it’s likely to be less attainable and not provide enough direction. And if it’s too specific? It may not make enough of an impact to justify a centralised customer feedback programme.

Here are some goals that don’t work, with the first goal being too general and the second too specific:

Maybe running a customer feedback programme is your full-time job; for most, including SurveyMonkey’s own Voice of the Customer team, it’s only one of several things you do. Either way, you’ve got to be realistic about the time and resources you have available and what effect you can actually have. The impact you can make depends entirely on the size of your company, your customer base and the resources you can put towards the programme.

If you’re at a scrappy startup, there’s a good chance you’ve got several responsibilities in addition to your customer feedback programme. And even if you don’t, there’s a good chance you don’t have a lot of time, which means you need to be super strategic with how you use it. You’re going to need to identify a goal and develop a strategy that’s lightweight enough for you to handle on your own. A scrappy startup should prioritise a single, attainable goal that’s absolutely vital to its success.

If you’re at a more established company, you’ll most probably have accumulated a larger customer base and built up a more diverse and specialised set of teams. In a nutshell: things aren’t necessarily going to be easier. You’re going to want a more holistic customer feedback strategy that focuses on more than one area or challenge of your business.

The best thing about customer feedback programmes is that the information you get from them can benefit practically every team in your organisation. Here are just a few examples of the ways in which a well-run customer feedback programme can help lift your entire organisation up.

If your executives don’t consider your programme to be mission-critical, you won’t get the resourcing you need to ensure its success.

To help leadership understand why your programme matters, you’ll need to speak their language. You should already have an attainable goal that’s tied to your organisation’s priorities and a plan for how your programme can benefit teams across your company.

Here are some customer feedback proof points that align with common programme goals. Share these as part of your pitch to leadership, but if possible, complement them with research that’s specific to your industry. The more relevant your data is, the better it will resonate with colleagues.

When our Voice of the Customer team first began creating a customer feedback programme, the team knew that doing so would allow us to better understand our customers and take steps to improve the customer experience. To get buy-in, they presented leadership with an NPS programme that used persuasive research by Bain, including the fact that an NPS industry leader outgrows competitors by more than two times. Although leadership was already keen to run a more robust NPS programme, the research created urgency in getting the programme up and running faster.

Over time, our Voice of the Customer team has been able to use our own survey data to show that happier customers do, in fact, churn at a lower rate than unhappy customers. This has given the programme even more credibility with executives and has allowed it to become an increasingly visible and important part of employees’ day-to-day work.

Now that you have your team together and the executives are bought in, you can choose the type of NPS survey to use.

But first, some background on the Net Promoter Score: The score is derived from the Net Promoter Score question, which asks, “How likely would you be to recommend [Company name] to a friend or colleague?” The respondent is then asked to give a rating on a scale between 0 (least likely to recommend) and 10 (most likely to recommend).

Your customers are grouped into cohorts based on their scores:

To calculate your NPS, take your percentage of Promoters and subtract your percentage of Detractors from it. To put it in its equation form:

Calculate your NPS in a matter of clicks with our free NPS calculator.

NPS surveys can be divided into three groups: relational, transactional and competitive. They each have distinct purposes, designs and sending styles. Here’s a look at each of them:

Transactional NPS surveys are sent to customers following a defined action and ask them to evaluate a specific experience. You can use this survey for anything, from following up on a phone call with a support representative to getting feedback from a webinar your team hosted.

A transactional NPS survey aims to understand a specific part of the customer experience and pinpoint how, exactly, that experience is performing over time.

SurveyMonkey uses transactional surveys at different stages of the customer engagement. For example, when the customer is using the product, they can click a button to provide feedback via a survey. The survey they receive depends on whether they’re in the process of creating a survey, setting up their collector (how they’ll gather their responses) or analysing their feedback.

Try a transactional NPS survey if you…

But don’t use it when you…

Relational NPS surveys consistently collect feedback from a sample of customers (who can be chosen at random but shouldn’t include any one customer more than once per quarter) to get a holistic understanding of the experience. They can be sent to a fraction of customers on a weekly, monthly or less frequent cadence. While relational surveys themselves may be low effort, bear in mind that certain parts of your programme, such as follow-ups with individual customers and the quality of your reporting, can demand the most time and resources from your team.

A relational NPS survey aims to understand the overall customer experience. So it tends to focus on broader topics, such as the customer’s level of satisfaction and the general quality of your product/service.

Use a relational NPS survey when you want to…

And avoid it when you’re looking to…

Pro tip: Don’t try to launch transactional and relational NPS survey projects at the same time. Instead, choose one to get started with. Once the first survey is running smoothly, you can carry what you have learned over to the next NPS survey.

Competitive NPS surveys involve getting feedback, anonymously, on you and your competitors from people in your target market (individuals who match the criteria of your ideal customers). Collecting the feedback anonymously limits bias in your responses, allowing you to accurately evaluate how you stack up against the competition. Similarly, surveying the wider market, and not just your own customers, helps you get a fair assessment on where you stand.

Note: This survey template only allows the respondent to evaluate a single competitor. If you’d like the respondent to potentially evaluate an additional competitor, copy page 2 of the survey and edit that page’s copy with the brand’s name. (You can repeat this process for however many brands you want to add.) Finally, to ensure that respondents only evaluate the competitors they use, incorporate skip logic on question 3.

Use this type of NPS survey to…

But bear in mind that…

With these three types of NPS surveys in mind, which would our scrappy startup and established business choose? Let’s find out!

The scrappy startup is focused on improving customer retention. Since the factors that influence retention vary from client to client, they use a relational NPS survey to see which clients (especially their Fortune 500 accounts) are at risk of churn.

The more established business knows that once clients reach a certain milestone in their level of engagement, they’re more likely to buy more from the business. As a result, the business uses a transactional NPS survey for clients who reach that milestone. The survey helps them see which clients are, in fact, ready to spend more and which aren’t.

The process of creating your survey isn’t always straightforward and should be a team effort. In this section, we’ll break down how you can work on the survey with colleagues, the types of questions you can ask and how to ask your questions so that you get honest and thoughtful responses.

Imagine that you’ve finished your survey and feel prepared to send it, only to have colleagues request last-minute edits! This can really throw you off your timeline. Before we even get into how to create your survey, it's worth mentioning that it’s a good idea to involve your colleagues in its design.

It not only stops them from giving feedback at the final hour, but can also help you improve the quality of your survey and ensure that you’re asking all the critical questions.

As a side benefit, your colleagues can spot and fix the small things. Whether it’s related to grammar, the wording of your questions or missing answer choices, a fresh pair of eyes can be all it takes to fine-tune your questionnaire.

When considering who to partner with, bear the following in mind for each team:

Once you’ve decided who to collaborate with, here are some different options for sharing your survey:

Once you know who you’ll work on the survey with and how to collaborate on it, you can begin to brainstorm its format.

So how long do you want your customer feedback survey to be?

In general, your NPS survey should be relatively short (think five questions or fewer). You’ll only want to ask what you really need to know and are prepared to take action on.

Anything that’s non-essential isn’t worth taking up your customers' time, or your own when you review the responses.

Furthermore, because your survey is likely to go out multiple times a year (more to come on how to send your survey later in this guide), making it any longer than it needs to be increases the likelihood that customers burn out from taking them in the future.

Here are the different lengths that your relational and transactional NPS surveys can have:

The two-question (transactional or relational) NPS survey: This survey keeps you ultra-focused on the NPS, and it can be used as a relational or as a transactional touchpoint. It just includes your NPS question and a follow-up open-ended question that asks why they chose that rating. Here’s an example of how it can look:

Transactional NPS survey: This type of NPS survey builds on the two-question version by asking the respondent a few more questions (up to five questions in total). These additional questions should be straightforward to answer and should centre on the event that triggered the survey to be sent.

Pro tip: Keep your survey focused on your primary goal. If you need additional data, you can get it by sending an additional survey. Alternatively, you can try collecting the data through more personal means, whether it’s interviewing customers directly or receiving feedback from your customer-facing colleagues.

Relational NPS survey: This type of survey also includes a few follow-up questions. However, unlike the transactional NPS survey, these questions include a brand attributes question and a “key drivers question” – a matrix question that’s a bit more complex for respondents but effective in identifying the factors that drive your NPS either up or down. Because of the value key drivers bring to your analysis, the relational NPS survey is the gold standard option for tracking changes in your NPS.

Need help deciding which NPS survey length to use? Let’s find out what our startup and established business would do.

The scrappy startup is keen to understand why customers are dissatisfied (and eventually churning), so they’re set on using a relational NPS survey to find out. They’re particularly interested in asking a key drivers question and a brand attributes question to understand the root causes of their NPS, but given their limited resources in managing the responses they collect, they refrain from asking additional follow-up questions.

The more established business wants to decide which customers are targets for sales upsells and discover any that should be spending more on a given product/service. Since they have a team that can manage responses to several questions throughout the customer journey, they decide to run a series of transactional NPS surveys at different customer touchpoints to find out. But they’re also interested in tracking customer sentiment about their company and comparing it to their competitors. Since they’ve got more resources available, they can run all three NPS surveys.

Regardless of your NPS survey’s length, always ask the NPS question at the very beginning; otherwise, your NPS data can be influenced by the format of the survey.

Why? Because your customers might get grumpy when they realise how long your survey is taking them, or an earlier question may jog their memory of a specific experience with your team. In either situation (and in whatever other ones might arise), the respondent might be influenced to answer your NPS question in a certain way.

In case you need more convincing, including it at the beginning will lead to more completed NPS responses than asking it later on, as some respondents may drop out of the survey early.

On one of our long-standing transactional NPS surveys, our Voice of the Customer team realised that the NPS question was in the middle. After moving it to the very beginning to be consistent with other surveys, our average score on this survey increased by 10 points!

It’s worth noting that since a slight difference can make one survey incomparable to another, we needed to restart our trend analysis once we had reordered the NPS question.

As you write your questions, you’ll want to keep them straightforward and unbiased; otherwise, the integrity and value of your customer feedback gets compromised. Here are five tips and tricks to ensure that you can collect the responses you need:

The NPS question is crucial to evaluating customer satisfaction and engagement, but without direct context explaining the rating, it can easily be misunderstood. To avoid any confusion, ask a neutral, follow-up question that looks something like the following:

Or…

Once the responses come back, you’ll be able to understand how your Promoters, Passives and Detractors really feel (more to come on this soon).

Even better, ask five questions. An NPS survey should be less time-consuming than other customer surveys that are sent one time and focus on areas such as customer research.

Keeping your NPS survey short and to the point forces your team to prioritise the questions you want to ask most, based on the response data you hope to track and act on over time. And for customers, it allows them to put more thought into answering the questions you include.

Also, consider that customers don’t have to respond. Any feedback they offer is a gift to your team. A short, simple survey honours that gift and allows the lines of communication to remain open in the future.

That way, you can use skip logic (a feature that determines the question or page a respondent sees next based on how they answer the current question) to personalise your open-ended follow-up question based on their score.

For example, if the respondent is a Promoter, your skip logic can take them to an open-ended question that asks, “Please help us understand why you chose the score above.” And if the respondent is a Detractor, your skip logic can take them to the question, “How can we improve the rating you gave us?”

Also, once a respondent goes on to the next page of your survey, their responses from the previous page get saved automatically. This means that if a respondent doesn’t feel like explaining the reasons behind their rating and leaves your survey, you’ll still know their NPS.

Note: Since this tip involves asking different questions to respondents (based on their NPS rating), you’ll need to separate your analysis of the open-ended feedback by Promoters, Passives and Detractors as opposed to looking at all of the responses together.

To clarify, the only one we recommend that you include is the one that follows your NPS question. Here are some reasons why:

Typing in answers to free-response questions on a mobile device is extra time-consuming, so it can easily lead to more people leaving your survey or providing shorter responses.

If each survey is time-consuming to respond to, your customers can eventually burn out from taking them all together.

Pro tip: Make your free-response question (and all of the follow-ups to your NPS) optional. This helps you respect your customers’ time and it also makes them less likely to leave your survey.

These include details about the customer’s personal background, their company and your engagement with them. However, only ask a demographic question if you can’t easily retrieve the data ahead of time and only ask questions that are critical for your organisation. If you already have access to the data, you should include it as custom data associated with your contacts in SurveyMonkey. Either of these options let you include demographic information in your survey results and allow you to filter by them to see how specific groups of respondents answered your other questions.

When it comes to best practices in writing surveys, our survey experts have a lot more helpful advice. If you’re still curious, check out these five features that can help make your next survey a success.

The system you set up for sending your surveys can be one of the trickiest aspects of running a customer feedback programme.

You need enough responses to be sure that you’re getting a clear signal and that the patterns you’re seeing in your results are actually real. On the other hand, the worst thing you can do is over-survey your customer base. Sending too many surveys can easily lower your response rate, impacting the validity of your results.

In this section, we’ll cover how to walk this fine line by strategically planning:

Deciding the precise number of customers to survey and the exact number of times to survey them depends, in part, on the type of NPS survey you’re planning.

Transactional surveys: Since these surveys are triggered by customer actions, you have less control over how many each customer receives.

That means that you have to be thoughtful about which customer touchpoints trigger a transactional survey, so you can space them out throughout a customer’s journey. If you notice that your transactional touchpoints lean heavily towards a certain stage in the customer journey, try to replace a few of them with high-value touchpoints at other stages.

Relational surveys: Unlike transactional surveys, the number of customers who receive relational surveys is completely within your control and requires some reflection.

Start by looking at the size of your customer base, since relational surveys repeatedly sample portions of that customer base over time.

You want to make sure you get enough responses for you to be able to trust your results, while at the same time ensuring that you don’t send a customer your relational survey more than once per quarter. That means that you have to calculate the number of responses it would take for your results to be statistically significant (or at least meaningful enough to draw conclusions from) with the confidence level and margin of error you want. In other words, you need to find your ideal sample size.

Note: Margin of error represents the range that your population’s responses may diverge from your sample’s, while confidence level is the likelihood that your sample accurately reflects the opinions of your population.

To review “margin of error” and “statistical significance” further, and to quickly calculate your sample size, check out our sample size calculator or margin of error calculator.

Once you’ve decided on a sample size that matches your priorities, you can decide how often you’ll send your surveys. We recommend sending your relational survey no more than once a quarter, per customer, to prevent overwhelming them.

Let’s imagine two different scenarios for your organisation and see how you’d approach surveying customers in each:

Using the numbers above, your minimum sample size is 379 customers. (We used the sample size calculator to arrive at this number.)

Let’s say your response rates from previous surveys are around 20%. This mean you’ll need to email at least 1,895 customers (379 x 5 = 1,895) to get the sample size you need.

Since you’ve got a relatively large customer base, you’ll be able to run your relational NPS survey many times throughout the year without surveying any one customer more than once per quarter.

Using the numbers above, your minimum sample size is 278 customers.

Like before, let’s say that your response rates from previous surveys are roughly 20%. So you’ll need to email at least 1,390 customers (278 x 5 = 1,390) to get the sample size you need.

Since 1,390 is greater than the size of your customer base, you’ll need to raise your margin of error to decide on a more realistic sample size. It also means that you’ll have to send your relational NPS survey fewer times over the course of the year, perhaps only two or three times per year.

In short:

The takeaway from these scenarios is that, all else equal:

The more customers you have to survey, the more times you can send your relational NPS survey without reaching each customer more than once per quarter.

Here’s how SurveyMonkey’s Voice of the Customer team runs their relational NPS survey:

Since SurveyMonkey works with hundreds of thousands of customers, our relational NPS survey goes out monthly to a small fraction of those who have been active on SurveyMonkey over the past 365 days. This lets us evenly space out when each customer receives the survey (no more than once per quarter) and gives our team a steady and manageable level of feedback to address.

Competitive NPS: For competitive NPS, you’ll use a survey panel (a collection of pre-screened individuals who are willing to provide feedback via a survey) to anonymously reach individuals who match your target audience criteria. Surveying your target market as yourself can bias your responses, as would surveying your personal contacts or customers who are likely to be more familiar with you than with your competitors.

It is ideal to collect responses from 1,000+ individuals. That way, you can segment your respondents based on demographics and still have a statistically significant sample size. And as respondents probably won’t be familiar with each brand you include, surveying more individuals lets you reach a statistically significant sample size for each brand.

If responses from 1,000+ individuals ends up being too expensive for you, start with at least 400 respondents.

Note: If you or a competitor are new to the industry, you’ll need to take the results with a pinch of salt, as your respondents may have nothing to base their opinion on. Consider running a brand awareness survey on yourself or on competitors using SurveyMonkey Audience instead. It can give you a more accurate sense of how popular you or your rivals are, and with our customisable template, you can create your survey quickly.

As we mentioned before, it’s a tricky balance between surveying too often and too infrequently, but getting the balance right makes a world of difference.

To help you decide on the right number of times to send your survey, see the guidelines in the chart below.

Deciding how you send your survey depends on the type of NPS survey you’re running:

Relational NPS survey: Send the survey using our email collector or include a link to it in an email you send on your existing email platform (e.g. Responsys or Mailchimp).

Sending your survey on another channel (e.g. embedding a survey on your site) can bias your responses based on the customer’s experience on that channel.

If you use our email collector, bear the following tips in mind:

Transactional NPS survey: When possible, send it on the channel the customer interacts with you on; otherwise, send it via email. Here are some common triggers:

Take your customer feedback programme to the next level by integrating SurveyMonkey with your customer relationship management (CRM) tool. The integration lets you automatically send your transactional or relational NPS survey, put the responses back into your CRM and notify the appropriate colleagues of the responses immediately.

Competitive NPS survey: Survey your target market using a survey panel.

Here’s where SurveyMonkey Audience can help. It allows you to specify your audience (e.g. job title, location, age, etc.) and define the number of people you want to reach out to. It then collects survey responses for you in just a matter of days.

With all of the great customer feedback you’ve collected, it’s time to make sense of it.

Regardless of which type of customer feedback survey you run, the first thing you’re going to want to do is check your NPS.

Your NPS is your highest-level indicator of whether things are going well or poorly. It’s also the starting point for what you do with your results next.

See something alarming that requires immediate action? You can address it straight away. Want to start digging deeper into your results? Your NPS will provide the first clue about where to start.

Once the responses start coming in, your NPS should be the first thing you see when you click the Analyse Results tab of your survey.

After viewing your overall NPS, check out the number of Promoters, Passives and Detractors you have. This breakdown drives your score and helps you understand the distribution of customers who are loyal, content (but unenthusiastic) and at risk of churn.

Pro tip: NPS is just a number, and it’s not always clear if your score is good or bad. If you used the NPS question from our Question Bank, you can access our Benchmarks feature to compare your score to other companies like you. To access it, click on “Show Benchmark”, above the question prompt.

Once you’ve seen your NPS and the breakdown of Promoters, Passives and Detractors, you should have a pretty good idea of whether anything is amiss in your results. Not every minor change in your NPS warrants immediate action, but here are a few things that do:

Alternatively, you can take a more granular, systematic approach by basing your red-flag strategy on the individual responses. This means defining the range of scores that require an immediate response and who should address them.

For example, one global demand generation company escalates every score that’s below a 5 to their VP of client success, while a 5 or 6 rating is immediately shared with the client success manager.

Whichever emergency plan you decide on, skip immediately to chapter 6 of this guide when you’re ready to take action.

You can think of the open-ended responses you put after your NPS question as an opportunity to spot what’s driving your NPS up or down. One convenient way to look at these responses is to use a word cloud in the Text Analysis feature. This feature picks up on the key words or phrases that appear most often in the responses and shows how often they each appear by their relative size.

Word clouds are mainly useful for presenting your results, but they can also give you ideas for where to focus your analysis.

The words and phrases from your word cloud can carry different meaning, depending on the type of NPS survey you ran:

Assuming you didn’t use the two-question NPS survey, you’ll want to see how customers answered your additional closed-ended questions (questions that include answer choices, such as multiple choice questions). The answers to these questions can help explain why customers answered the NPS question the way they did, so it’s critical to match them up with your Net Promoter Scores to see whether they’re related.

Charts can help you visualise the results. They summarise the data in an easily digestible way and help you pick up on key patterns more quickly.

Let's suppose you use a multi-select question to ask respondents what they like about using your product. A bar chart, such as the following, could help you make subtle comparisons across your answer choices:

Although close, you can see that value beats the other options as your top differentiator.

Let's now suppose that you want to know the top thing that customers like about your product. You can use a pie chart. This type of chart works really well to accentuate the differences in popularity among choices:

This time around, it’s clear that value beats the other options.

There’s nuance in creating different kinds of charts. For example, a line/area graph can be created from any closed-ended question, whereas pie/doughnut charts can only be used from a closed-ended question that requires a single answer. To learn more about each type of chart, check out this blog post.

A filter is a survey analysis tool that lets you focus on particular subsets of your data to see how specific groups respond to your questions.

For example, you could filter by your Promoters. Once you look at their responses to your other survey questions, you might find something unique about their experience that can help you improve it for Passives and Detractors.

It’s generally a good idea to try out multiple different filters so you can see various cuts of how people answer.

Here are some ideas:

Pro tip: To effectively filter your open-ended responses, begin by creating tags that are critical to your product and/or your business. Then tag each open-ended response as appropriate. Afterwards, you’ll be able to filter by your custom tags to more easily find the responses you’re looking for and to identify the key themes in your feedback faster.

Bear in mind that filtering by your NPS and demographics benefits your relational, transactional, and competitive NPS surveys in slightly different ways:

Compare Rules allow you to evaluate one group of customers against another (or several others), side by side. Like filters, you’ll want to check off different demographics, depending on the segments you want to compare.

Let's suppose you want to see how customers who have worked with you for different periods of time might have answered your questions differently.

If you check off the answer options “More than a year” and “Less than a year”, and then compare the two groups with the question “How would you rate the quality of the product?”, the chart can look as follows:

The bars on the left side represent customers who’ve worked with you for more than a year, while the bars on the right belong to customers who’ve worked with you for less than a year. The colours of each bar are associated with a specific answer choice.

In this example, it appears that customers who have been around for more than a year have a slightly more favourable impression of your product’s quality.

Note: You can’t use Compare Rules on your NPS question.

Still curious about our Compare feature? Learn more by reading our help centre article.

Finally, wondering how our startup and established business would use filters and Compare Rules?

Remember that the scrappy startup is determined to improve customer retention, particularly among their Fortune 500 accounts. This leads them to filter by their Fortune 500 accounts first. They take a look at the NPS, the individual responses, and see how the respondents at these accounts answer the key drivers and the brand attributes question. Then, to better understand how the Fortune 500 accounts’ experiences differ from smaller clients, they compare clients by company size and see how each group answers the key drivers and the brand attributes question.

At the same time, the established business’ focus on upselling and cross-selling motivates them to filter by Promoters first. They pay especially close attention to responses that explicitly request buying another product/service and/or adopting a more advanced version of what they already use. Their secondary focus is on Promoters who’ve generally experienced a lot of value (and are therefore strong candidates to sell more to).

Data Trends let you see how the answers to your NPS question and other closed-ended questions in your survey change over days, weeks and months.

Trends in your NPS help you determine whether your customer experience is improving, keeping consistent or worsening over time; while the trends in your closed-ended follow-ups help you understand why your NPS is changing the way that it is.

Your data trends may lead to different types of insights and action items, depending on the type of NPS survey you use:

Want to access and use Data Trends? Learn how.

From global NPS maps to key driver analysis, our turn-key NPS solution, SurveyMonkey CX, can take your analysis to the next level.

Regardless of how thoroughly you analyse your survey results, they won’t drive any value for your organisation if they aren’t shared with the teams who can act on them. Which teams care about which types of survey data? This chart will give you an idea.

Don’t worry if this looks overwhelming right now. It’s up to you to prioritise who gets customer feedback, when they get it and how.

You don’t need an advanced system for sharing customer feedback in order to be successful. Here are seven common ways to share your results with different types of colleagues:

Now that you know the options for how to share your survey data, you’ll need to make sure that your various teams receive the response data quickly.

Customer-facing employees are one of the teams you’ll almost certainly share the responses with. After all, they’re the ones who can make the best sense of the responses for each customer and respond to them directly.

Choosing the best way to share your customer feedback with these employees depends a lot on the size of their team. Here’s how the customer-facing employees at our scrappy startup and established business access the feedback:

At the startup, only one person interacts with customers regularly. For them, it may be easiest to simply give them full access to the responses on SurveyMonkey.

Meanwhile, the established business has customer success managers (CSMs) who manage the customer relationships. To filter the customers’ responses by each CSM, they add a column to their contact list CSV file (before uploading it into SurveyMonkey) that includes the relevant CSM for each customer.

Once the responses return, the feedback is shared with each CSM in the following way:
1. They filter by a CSM and save the view.
2. They share a password-restricted view of the responses with the CSM.

Now each CSM knows how their customers responded to every question and can address the feedback appropriately.

Several other teams may also need to see the responses quickly, but before you decide what to share with each of them, consider what they’re looking for.

Replying to survey responses in a thoughtful way is often a huge untapped opportunity. As SurveyMonkey’s leader for our Voice of the Customer team, Brooke Landon, explains:

It might be appropriate to personally respond to every customer if you’re a B2B company with a very small, strategic customer base, or if you’re a small new company that wants to learn from every single customer interaction.

But for the rest of us, you have to be selective with who you choose to personally respond to, based on how closely the customer and their feedback match your programme’s goals.

Pro tip: Let every customer know how much you value their feedback in your survey’s end page (the page they see after submitting the survey). You can use the page to detail how you manage their responses and provide examples of what you’ve done with customer feedback in the past.

In some cases, the main goal of your response is to spur a conversation with your client. This is exactly what the SurveyMonkey Enterprise team’s feedback survey aims to accomplish:

The survey is sent weekly to a rotating group of customers, and every customer success manager replies to each of their clients who have completed the survey. It often leads to a call, which, over time, has revealed important insights that can lead to a customer testimonial or even to saving a relationship they didn’t realise was in trouble, well in advance of renewal.

How you decide to respond to clients can change based on your goals, customer base and business size. Here’s how our fictional companies respond to their customers:

With the startup focused on retention (particularly with their biggest accounts) and limited in resources, they prioritise responding to Detractors who work at one of their Fortune 500 accounts.

Since the established business hopes to lift sales from existing customers, the customer success team prioritises responding to Promoters, particularly those who explicitly express interest in trying another one of the businesses’ offerings or mention a challenge that matches something else the business can offer.

Building a customer-centric company starts with ensuring that your employees are hearing from your customers. And what better way to connect the wider team with customers than by consistently sharing your survey responses with them? This can help employees understand how their work helps customers, which may keep them more engaged. It can also inspire employees to search for new ways to deliver more value for clients.

Here are two options to consider for sharing your responses along with their respective advantages and disadvantages:

Our Voice of the Customer team puts the results from all of the NPS surveys into SurveyMonkey’s internal information hub, Treehouse. On each NPS survey page, you can find sections that summarise what that NPS measures, why it matters and who in the organisation manages it.

For each NPS survey page, our team also…

You’re left with one final step in building your customer feedback programme: assessing its performance. Let’s break it down.

To ensure that your programme is effective over time, you’ll need to consistently reevaluate it.

Begin by checking its performance against the goal you set at the very beginning. Then review why you were (or weren’t) able to meet your goal. What were the top obstacles to running the programme effectively, and what’s helped the programme perform well?

As you review your programme, see if you can tie its performance to any type of financial success. It can be as simple as correlating an X% lift in revenue with an improvement of Y points in your NPS, on average. The more value you can associate with the programme, the more support you’ll get from your leadership team.

Then, ask yourself if the responses you shared with colleagues led them to take action. If they did, what kind of impact did these actions deliver? And if they didn't, what stopped them from using the feedback?

Ask colleagues directly to find out how your programme performed. A survey works really well in that it can guide colleagues into giving the type of feedback you’re looking for while giving them time to reflect on their responses. Plus, you can use the opportunity to gauge how close they feel to your customers, which is something our customer centricity survey template can help you measure.

But before you ask colleagues for feedback, review the long-term benefits that different teams get by acting on the customers’ responses. You’ll be better positioned when you ask for their input.

Once you’ve reflected on your programme, you’ll know how to improve it going forward. Plus, you’ll be able to give a more thoughtful and insightful explanation of the programme’s value to leadership (and to anyone else) when they ask about it.

And with that, you’ve built a complete customer feedback programme! By following the best practices throughout this guide, you’ll be positioned to deliver a consistently improving customer experience and receive tangible financial returns for your organisation in the years to come.

The old saying “The customer is king” may be true, but great customer feedback lets both of you share the throne.