Client Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices for Marketing Agencies

While moving down the checklist, you’ve successfully completed each task from onboarding your client, understanding their demands, assigning a team of experts, to boosting their brand growth, fulfilling their target and winding up their project even before the deadlines to satisfy your client to the best of your abilities. But even after offering your best, how do you know whether you’ve fulfilled the client’s expectations at each step??

Did they tell you in person? Did they whisper sweet nothings of marketing magic in your ear? Did a sonnet of praise appear in your inbox?? (Spoiler alert: probably not!)?

Maybe they’ve dropped some words of feedback and gratitude when winding up the project, but how will you know the pain points of your company from your client’s point of view? Client satisfaction surveys are the answer. They'll help you understand what worked like a charm and where you might need to polish your marketing superpowers in just a few minutes!

Best Client Satisfaction Survey Practices for Marketing Agencies

Retaining and growing your best clients is the easiest way to improve your bottom line. Some may leave with great success and return to you in the future, while others might not consider you ahead. Even though marketing agencies know the importance of offering quality services, many ignore implementing a program that measures client satisfaction. Client feedback service helps businesses pinpoint opportunities and relationship issues to enhance service delivery, spot trends and needs and identify new service opportunities. Acknowledge some of the best client satisfaction survey practices discussed below:

1. Commit To the Process

Discussing insights with your client is one thing. Working on those insights is another. When your client completes your survey, and you fail to respond to their feedback, you won’t play well. Stay honest with yourself. Are you actually willing to work on the information you receive through the survey? The answer should be yes. What you perform post-survey signifies whether your clients care about both their and your business's well-being or not.

2. Connect With the Third Party to Gain Insight

Clients are more outspoken, open, and honest on surveys, which is not possible when speaking with your business directly. Once the emotional attachment is removed, they are clearer when providing reviews and feedback. It is almost impossible to get a clear answer when you are the one asking them questions.

Connect with a third-party business to help you in creating and forwarding your client satisfaction surveys. A third party implements consistency and objectivity into the mix.

3. Solicit Client Feedback Via the Customer Management Lifecycle

Conducting client satisfaction surveys does not only include mid or top-of-funnel value. They hold value at each stage of your relationship with the client. Even clients with whom you have worked for a long time must receive surveys to give the right feedback about the performance and offerings of your business. Frequently, they hold in-depth knowledge that your company can use to understand the process to improve client satisfaction. In addition, if they prefer switching agencies, they may discuss with you their concerns, and you can work on the issues to stop them before they leave.

A client satisfaction survey provides you with a scoop directly from the client instead of just wondering about what the client thinks about your business.

4. Must-Have Questions in Your Client Satisfaction Survey

Survey questions are basically personalized to align with the kind of agency services offered. However, there might be some variations that you can make in the final statement listed below:

• Does your agency display creativity in the proposed solution?
• Can your agency align with the provided deadlines?
• If your agency clearly understands the requirements of the client and offers just what the client demands?
• On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it for you to recommend our offerings or business to others?
• In what ways did you benefit from collaborating with our agency?

You can make it easy for your clients to answer these questions by providing a scale that mentions ‘strongly agree to disagree’ or ‘0 to 10’ options. It is also a good option to leave some space for additional review and feedback below each question for the clients so that they can elaborate on their answers.

5. Keep It Short and Simple

Keep your service under 10 minutes. It includes not only the overall word count but also the way in which you structure your questions. Your questions must be straightforward, clear, and on point, without any extra wording. By keeping your questions short and simple, it is easier to answer and understand for the clients as well rather than creating complex questions. The aim of your survey is to collect the maximum responses possible so that it makes it easier for you to understand the major issues your clients are facing.

6. Include Open-Ended Questions

Scale and multiple-choice questions are extremely easy for your clients to answer, but they don’t offer you enough context to bring a real change. That is where open-ended questions come in. Clients have more to say, and for this, they can use open-ended questions. It is the best way to begin your survey with quick and brief questions to craft a sense of progress and then move towards open-ended questions.

7. Customize Your Survey According to the Clients

Different clients come with different requirements, projects, and demands, and hence leave with different experiences. Ensure that your service is customized according to your specific clients and the work for which they have collaborated with your business.

8. Implement a Logical Question Order

Begin your client satisfaction survey with close-ended questions and slowly move toward the more specific ones. This makes the clients familiar with your survey and ensures that they find it engaging and interesting to offer a clear review.

9. Include Multiple Survey Channels

Forward surveys to your clients through a variety of channels, including email and chat. Instead of only using real-time service, focus on delayed response channels such as text or email to make it more interactive for clients to be a part of your service whenever they find it best. Through this, you have higher chances of getting maximum responses and gaining their engagement.

10. Offer a Participation Reward or a Message of Gratitude

Even though rewards are not a strange idea, they are rare to be used in client satisfaction surveys. Therefore, you must be particular when offering a gratitude message or reward for completing the survey. For instance, when your client completes the survey, bid them goodbye with a thank you or see you soon message, or leave them with some small rewards or coupon codes for discounts on certain purchases.

How Can You Boost Client Satisfaction?

In addition to offering good services and well-structured client satisfaction service. You can also add some nice things for your clients to boost their satisfaction levels, such as sending them complementary gifts, offering them some perks, or other such efforts. Implementing such things makes it likely that your clients will feel valuable, respected and familiar.

Always keep an eye out for good opportunities to show your clients how much you care. If you find something that they would appreciate, consider gifting it to them as a surprise. At several agencies, the owner might not be able to put forward such activities but can empower the team to spend within the budget to gift clients.

Even such acts of gratitude might go in vain if you fail to satisfy the clients with your services and leave them unheard. But these extra efforts go a long way to boost retention at your agency, as well as client satisfaction.

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