What our customer marketing expert has to say about survey tools

As we get ready to relaunch our GatorSurvey tool with a whole new host of features and functionality, we sat down with our customer marketing Gator Guru, Kia, to ask why survey tools are so important to marketing. As one of our product specialists who frequently uses our tools to their full potential, Kia knows exactly what it takes to get the most out of our products and the best practices to promote to fellow B2B marketers.

Kia, why are survey tools so important to marketing?

As service providers, we know that customers are at the heart of our business. After all, without the end user we wouldn’t have a product. That’s not the only reason customers are important, though. If engaged with effectively, they provide us with valuable feedback that can help shape not only our platform’s offerings but also share an insight into how it is used and challenges they may face. That’s why surveys are so important. They give us that chance to get the valuable feedback we need to improve as marketers.

So how do you, as a marketer, use surveys?

Well, take our event marketing as a key example. At each of our customer seminars and workshops I make sure to send out a follow-up campaign to ask them:

• What do you like about our platform?
• What don’t you like?
• What would you like to see improved?
• What would you like to see added?

I might also ask them questions around the event specifically to get a better idea of the topics they like us to talk about that relate most to our products, and any feedback we can use to improve our marketing communications moving forward. The most important thing is not to take the feedback for granted. We use this feedback to improve what we’re offering and how.

Can you give us an example of how survey feedback has influenced us as a business?

Sure. Recently our developers have been hard at work improving our survey building tool, GatorSurvey. We’d received feedback that what was in place was so hard to use. So we decided to provide a stronger offering by improving our survey software and making it user-friendly and intuitive.

In fact, our new survey tool took inspiration from our drag and drop email builder, GatorCreator (which was also influenced by user feedback, but that’s a story for another day). The beta version of GatorSurvey has a similar drag and drop interface. Now we’re testing the beta version internally before we look to release it in stages to customers.

If a customer was asking you for some survey ideas, what would you come up with?

Well, similar to ours I would suggest a post-event feedback survey. This is also useful for new business events as it gives people who are interested in more information a chance to interact with you if they’re not ready to go direct to a salesperson at the event.

I’d ask them questions such as:

• What did you find useful?
• What did you expect to be included?
• Which part was your favourite part of the seminar?
• Rate the speakers in preference…etc.

Another survey idea I would highly recommend is service monitoring. For example, after they’ve raised a query or support ticket, they’ve had a meeting with their account manager or just completed a training session/certificate. Ask them what they liked/disliked about the process, how they feel it could be improved and for additional feedback.

Finally, I think the most important survey should centre around your product because that’s obviously the backbone of any business. You could stagger product feedback surveys every time there is an update, or for the first 3, 6 and 12 months a new customer joins the business. I’d ask them questions such as:

• Is the platform easy to navigate?
• Does the product meet your requirements?
• Is there anything the platform doesn’t let you achieve that you expected it to…etc.

Any final words of advice for our readers?

Overall, I’d say it’s important to time your surveys for when you’re going to get the best responses (i.e. directly after an event) and to make sure they aren’t too long and convoluted. Get to the point, because you’re asking your customers and prospects for their precious time that you don’t want to waste. Mix up the question types too, to keep them thinking and providing you with the most valuable insights you can use.

Thanks Kia! If you’d like more on the do’s and don’ts of surveys, take a look at our complete guide here. Alternatively, see how survey software could work for your marketing.