Excel template customer satisfaction survey
Excel template customer satisfaction survey
This article provides details of Excel template customer satisfaction survey that you can download now.
Microsoft Excel software under a Windows environment is required to use this template
These Excel template customer satisfaction survey work on all versions of Excel since 2007.
Examples of a ready-to-use spreadsheet: Download this table in Excel (.xls) format, and complete it with your specific information.
To be able to use these models correctly, you must first activate the macros at startup.
The file to download presents three Excel template customer satisfaction survey
- Customer Satisfaction Survey Template Excel
- Dataset customer satisfaction survey results agencies
- The survey feature - exclusively
The survey feature - exclusively in Excel- makes it simple to create and share surveys and collect results right in your OneDrive.
This template is an example of a simple customer satisfaction survey that you can use as-is or customize to fit your needs.
When you create an Excel Online survey, the questions you create are automatically added to a table in your active workbook. (See the Survey tab in this workbook for an example.) Excel Online saves this file to your OneDrive automatically. When you share the survey, it automatically collects responses in the survey table, where you can see the compiled results anytime.
To create and share your survey:
- On the Survey sheet, check out the current table of questions.
- To view, edit, or share the survey, on the Home tab, tap Survey.
- Choose Share Survey to get a link that you can send to intended survey recipients. If this is your first time sharing the survey, tap Create Link.
Tip: If a link is unavailable when you tap Share, you may need to reactivate the survey in your workbook. On the Survey menu, just tap Edit, and then in the dialog box that opens, tap Share.
When recipients submit the survey, their responses are automatically recorded in this file, whether or not the file is open in Excel Online at the time.
- Open this file from your OneDrive at any time to view the latest responses in the survey table.
Why Customer Satisfaction Is So Important
Why is it that we can think of more examples of companies failing to satisfy us rather than when we have been satisfied? There could be a number of reasons for this. When we buy a product or service, we expect it to be right. We don’t jump up and down with glee saying “isn’t it wonderful, it actually worked”. That is what we paid our money for. Add to this our world of ever exacting standards. We now have products available to us that would astound our great grandparents and yet we quickly become used to them. The bar is getting higher and higher. At the same time our lives are ever more complicated with higher stress levels. Delighting customers and achieving high customer satisfaction scores in this environment is ever more difficult. And even if your customers are completely satisfied with your product or service, significant chunks of them could leave you and start doing business with your competition.
A market trader has a continuous finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction. Direct contact with customers indicates what he is doing right or where he is going wrong. Such informal feedback is valuable in any company but hard to formalise and control in anything much larger than a corner shop. For this reason surveys are necessary to measure and track customer satisfaction.
Developing a customer satisfaction programme is not just about carrying out a survey. Surveys provide the reading that shows where attention is required but in many respects, this is the easy part. Very often, major long lasting improvements need a fundamental transformation in the company, probably involving training of the staff, possibly involving cultural change. The result should be financially beneficial with less customer churn, higher market shares, premium prices, stronger brands and reputation, and happier staff. However, there is a price to pay for these improvements. Costs will be incurred in the market research survey. Time will be spent working out an action plan. Training may well be required to improve the customer service. The implications of customer satisfaction surveys go far beyond the survey itself and will only be successful if fully supported by the echelons of senior management.
There are six parts to any customer satisfaction programme:
- Who should be interviewed?
- What should be measured?
- How should the interview be carried out?
- How should satisfaction be measured?
- What do the measurements mean?
- How to use customer satisfaction surveys to greatest effect?
Who Should Be Interviewed?
Some products and services are chosen and consumed by individuals with little influence from others. The choice of a brand of cigarettes is very personal and it is clear who should be interviewed to find out satisfaction with those cigarettes. But who should we interview to determine the satisfaction with breakfast cereal? Is it the person that buys the cereal (usually a parent) or the person that consumes it (often a child)? And what of a complicated buying decision in a business to business situation. Who should be interviewed in a customer satisfaction survey for a truck manufacturer – the driver, the transport manager, the general management of the company? In other business to business markets there may well be influences on the buying decision from engineering, production, purchasing, quality assurance, plus research and development. Because each department evaluates suppliers differently, the customer satisfaction programme will need to cover the multiple views.
The adage in market research that we turn to again and again is the need to ask the right question of the right person. Finding that person in customer satisfaction research may require a compromise with a focus on one person - the key decision maker; perhaps the transport manager in the example of the trucks. If money and time permit, different people could be interviewed and this may involve different interviewing methods and different questions.
The traditional first in line customer is an obvious candidate for measuring customer satisfaction. But what about other people in the channel to market? If the products are sold through intermediaries, we are even further from our customers. A good customer satisfaction program will include at least the most important of these types of channel customers, perhaps the wholesalers as well as the final consumers.
One of the greatest headaches in the organisation of a business to business customer satisfaction survey is the compilation of the sample frame – the list from which the sample of respondents is selected. Building an accurate, up-to-date list of customers, with telephone numbers and contact details is nearly always a challenge. The list held by the accounts department may not have the contact details of the people making the purchasing decision. Large businesses may have regionally autonomous units and there may be some fiefdom that says it doesn’t want its customers pestered by market researchers. The sales teams’ Christmas card lists may well be the best lists of all but they are kept close to the chest of each sales person and not held on a central server. Building a good sample frame nearly always takes longer than was planned but it is the foundation of a good customer satisfaction survey.
Customer satisfaction surveys are often just that – surveys of customers without consideration of the views of lost or potential customers. Lapsed customers may have stories to tell about service issues while potential customers are a good source of benchmark data on the competition. If a survey is to embrace non-customers, the compilation of the sample frame is even more difficult. The quality of these sample frames influences the results more than any other factor since they are usually outside the researchers’ control. The questionnaire design and interpretation are within the control of the researchers and these are subjects where they will have considerable experience.
What Should Be Measured?
In customer satisfaction research we seek the views of respondents on a variety of issues that will show how the company is performing and how it can improve. This understanding is obtained at a high level (“how satisfied are you the ABC Ltd overall?”) and at a very specific level (“how satisfied are you with the clarity of invoices?”).
High level issues are included in most customer satisfaction surveys and they could be captured by questions such as:
- What is your overall satisfaction with ABC Ltd?
- How likely or unlikely are you to buy from ABC Ltd again?
- How likely or unlikely would you be to recommend ABC Ltd to a friend or colleague?
It is at the more specific level of questioning that things become more difficult. Some issues are of obvious importance and every supplier is expected to perform to a minimum acceptable level on them. These are the hygiene factors. If a company fails on any of these issues they would quickly lose market share or go out of business. An airline must offer safety but the level of in-flight service is a variable. These variables such as in-flight service are often the issues that differentiate companies and create the satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
How Should Satisfaction Be Measured?
Customers express their satisfaction in many ways. When they are satisfied, they mostly say nothing but return again and again to buy or use more. When asked how they feel about a company or its products in open-ended questioning they respond with anecdotes and may use terminology such as delighted, extremely satisfied, very dissatisfied etc. Collecting the motleys variety of adjectives together from open ended responses would be problematical in a large survey. To overcome this problem market researchers ask people to describe a company using verbal or numeric scales with words that measure attitudes.
People are used to the concept of rating things with numerical scores and these can work well in surveys. Once the respondent has been given the anchors of the scale, they can readily give a number to express their level of satisfaction. Typically, scales of 5, 7 or 10 are used where the lowest figure indicates extreme dissatisfaction and the highest shows extreme satisfaction. The stem of the scale is usually quite short since a scale of up to 100 would prove too demanding for rating the dozens of specific issues that are often on the questionnaire.
Measuring satisfaction is only half the story. It is also necessary to determine customers’ expectations or the importance they attach to the different attributes, otherwise resources could be spent raising satisfaction levels of things that do not matter. The measurement of expectations or importance is more difficult than the measurement of satisfaction. Many people do not know or cannot admit, even to themselves, what is important. Can I believe someone who says they bought a Porsche for its “engineering excellence”? Consumers do not spend their time rationalising why they do things, their views change and they may not be able to easily communicate or admit to the complex issues in the buying argument.
The same interval scales of words or numbers are often used to measure importance – 5, 7 or 10 being very important and 1 being not at all important. However, most of the issues being researched are of some importance for otherwise they would not be considered in the study. As a result, the mean scores on importance may show little differentiation between the vital issues such as product quality, price and delivery and the nice to have factors such as knowledgeable representatives and long opening hours. Ranking can indicate the importance of a small list of up to six or seven factors but respondents struggle to place things in rank order once the first four or five are out of the way. It would not work for determining the importance of 30 attributes.
As a check against factors that are given a “stated importance” score, researchers can statistically calculate (or “derive”) the importance of the same issues. Derived importance is calculated by correlating the satisfaction levels of each attribute with the overall level of satisfaction. Where there is a high link or correlation with an attribute, it can be inferred that the attribute is driving customer satisfaction. Deriving the importance of attributes can show the greater influence of softer issues such as the friendliness of the staff or the power of the brand – things that people somehow cannot rationalise or admit to in a “stated” answer.
What Do The Measurements Mean?
The scores that are achieved in customer satisfaction surveys are used to create a customer satisfaction index or CSI. There is no single definition of what comprises a customer satisfaction index. Some use only the rating given to overall performance. Some use an average of the two key measurements - overall performance and the intention to re-buy (an indication of loyalty). Yet others may bring together a wider basket of issues to form a CSI.