Measuring Your Website’s Voice of Customer

Simple Digital Survey Questions to get you Started

Are you collecting feedback from your site visitors? Understanding how well your website is satisfying visitors is important because it can lead to increased sales for your business. Finding out what you can do to make it better is the logical next step. A no brainer. But just getting started is often the tough part.

There are many free and inexpensive digital survey tools on the market, e.g., Survey Monkey, Typeform, and Others. Googling ‘Free Digital Survey Tools’ brings up several ads and links to blog posts. Take some time to choose a digital survey tool. Then work with your website vendor to make sure the code for the tool you pick can be easily added to your website. In most cases the code only needs to go on one page of the site, within the ‘header.’ A simple task for an IT professional.

The challenge comes with coming up with useful survey questions in which results can lead to actionable changes. Below I recommend some ‘Rules of Thumb’ and some basic questions to get started.

‘Rules of Thumb’ in Digital Survey Creation

• Keep the survey short and to one page if possible. No more than ten questions.
• Look for a survey software tool that allows you to survey on both mobile and desktop (and tablet if possible.) Mobile surveys are usually very short so keep this in mind if you believe most of your site visitors are coming to your site via a mobile device.
• Ask demographic questions at the end of the survey. They are easy for a survey taker to answer and may help them finish the survey when they are at the end.
• Open ended questions (where visitors need to type in an answer) should never be ‘required’ questions. Keep these questions ‘optional.’

Basic questions all surveys should include to get you started

Questions are in recommended order.

• Who is visiting?
  • “Which of the following best describes your role in coming to this site today?”
    Then list out your visitor categories.
• Why are you visiting?
  • “What is your primary reason for visiting the site today?”
    Then list out the tasks your visitors can do on your website or the content they might want to see. Include an ‘Other’ with an option to write in an answer if desired.
• Find?
  • Did you find what you were looking for? Yes/No
• Did not find.
  • If no, what were you looking for? This is an open ended question and can often bring in great information.
• Satisfaction
  • “Overall, how satisfied were you with your website experience?”
    Using a 5 point scale is helpful with this type of question. (1=Very Dissatisfied…….5=Very Satisfied)
• Demographics
  • These questions are optional and can allow you to do further sorting of data. The basic demographic questions are age, gender and geographical location. Give visitors a ‘Prefer not to answer’ option with each question too. For example:
    “Please indicate your gender:
    Female
    Male
    Prefer not to answer”
• Improvements
  • “What improvements would you suggest for this site? (Please be specific.)”
    Optional open ended question. This is a chance to get great feedback.

Surveys should usually run at least a month before you have a statistically reliable sample. But this all depends on your sample sizes. There are ‘statistical calculators’ online to help with estimated sampling percentages and statistical significance. This is where the services of a market research professional come in handy as many of us do not remember what we learned in our college statistics class!

Once you are armed with ‘Voice of Customer’ feedback you are ready to make informed updates to your website. Decisions and changes which will hopefully lead to increased sales and website engagement.

Contributed by Mary Kay Boitano-Nelson, AMA Houston Communications group. Works in Digital Marketing and Communications at Houston Methodist Hospital.