Diving into the Business Survey for Building Success

If you own or operate a business, you need a business survey. Although you might know plenty about the intricacies of how your business operates from the inside, that knowledge alone might not be enough to propel your company into its next round of success.

Customer feedback, customer satisfaction, employee morale, upcoming market trends — knowing all this separates thriving companies from businesses that are just one bad decision away from a crisis. 

And a business survey is a shortcut to this knowledge. 

In this article, we cover how companies use business surveys to operate effectively and without hesitation, and how said surveys inform critical business decisions in today’s fast-paced and uncertain environment. 

Defining a Business Survey

A business survey is a survey that allows you to gather data and insights that can be used to enhance various aspects of your business. 

Using business surveys, companies can either acquire new knowledge about markets and target audiences while exploring fresh opportunities for growth. At the same, time business surveys can be used to fill the gaps in the existing knowledge of company operations, boost employee performance, and optimize expenses. 

Although the data gathered during such research can be used in myriad ways, we recommend setting a specific goal for every business survey to keep your insights focused and actionable. 

Applications Of Business Surveys

Due to the high level of customization that surveys provide, business surveys offer a wide range of applications and can be optimized for producing all kinds of value for businesses. 

Here are some of the common applications for business surveys:

• Enhancing customer personas. Business surveys allow you to learn more about your customers, their habits, and what they think about your company and products. Studies show that 82% of marketers improved their value proposition using well-developed customer personas.
• Learning more about the new markets. Expanding into new markets and platforms is one of the surest ways to grow your business, but it comes with lots of uncertainty. Business surveys help step into the new territory with more confidence and hard-proof data.
• Increasing customer retention levels. Knowing when your customers are happy with your product is as important as knowing when they are not. Use business surveys to keep track of what your customers think about your products and brand before they start turning to your competition. In addition to that, the mere act of conducting surveys may increase customer retention levels as clients feel more taken care of.
• Improve employee performance. Business surveys can be used to inspect the state of your workforce on several levels via employee feedback: employee motivation, team trust, and management efficiency. With business surveys, you can reveal issues that certain departments experience and address them before the problems affect the rest of the company.

5 Types Of Business Surveys

You can use the following types of business surveys to gain a 360-view of your business, inform your growth strategy, and enhance customer satisfaction levels. 

Customer Satisfaction Survey

There are five types of customer satisfaction surveys that allow you to gauge customers’ opinions about your products and company. One of the most commonly used is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, which that checks measures how much your audience is willing to recommend your products to their inner circle. 

The NPS survey allows you to segment your audience into three major groups known as detractors, passives, and promoters. The more promoters your business has, the higher will be your organic growth. It’s the other way around with detractors. 

Regular customer satisfaction surveys are extremely important in case your business relies on organic growth as they allow you to keep track of how happy your customers are over time and correct your course in case recent decisions stagnated your expansion. 

Example question: On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?

Market Research Survey

Market research surveys are a wide group of surveys designed to learn more about the market you currently operate in or gain additional knowledge in case you want to expand into new niches. 

These surveys may include demographic surveys designed to gather more data about your current and potential customers, platform-specific surveys such as e-commerce market research, technology market research, market trends research, and surveys designed to enhance various marketing-related activities, e.g. advertising market research

Example question: What are your main social media channels that you use to learn about new products? 

Employee Satisfaction Survey

Employee satisfaction surveys are designed to collect information about the general feelings of your employees, their level of motivation, and any roadblocks that might be preventing them from doing their job more effectively. 

These types of business surveys are often conducted in companies that want to enhance the performance of their employees or address issues during a transitional period (e.g. company-wide switch to remote work, company buy-out, or a new HR policy). 

One of the variations of these surveys is an employee exit survey that aims to determine employee’s reasons for applying for a job or their reasons for leaving the company.

Example question: Are there any roadblocks that currently prevent you from operating at your maximum level of efficiency?

Brand Awareness Survey

Brand awareness surveys aim to elicit customer’s opinions and feelings about your brand. 

Brand perception is an encompassing term and may be affected by many factors such as PR-relationships of your company, public stance on local and global issues, and the general representation of your brand in media. 

Brand surveys help companies to reveal the current brand perception by their customers and track whether it has been recently affected.

A brand awareness survey can also reveal whether your target market is able to identify your brand, i.e., know of its existence. This is especially important when it comes to differentiating your brand from competitors.  

Example question: Which of the following brands have you heard of? (Include your business)

A well-established branding policy has many benefits such as a higher number of positive online reviews, an increase in customers’ trust, and revenue growth. 

Example question: Where have you seen or heard about our brand in the last several months?

Product Satisfaction Survey

The product satisfaction survey is closely related to customer satisfaction surveys, but with a focus on your product. 

Business surveys that are focused on your product may help you to check whether customers know about your product, if they find your product appealing, discover how your product compares to the competition, and gather quality insights on how it can be improved in the future. 

Example question:  How long have you used [your product]? Or
What would you like to be improved in [your product]

The Role of Business Surveys In Growing Your Company

There’s no lack of data in our digital age, and often companies are confused and disoriented with the amount of information they gather through various analytical tools and 3rd party data providers.

But business surveys don’t add to this chaos. Instead, they allow businesses to gain a birds-eye view of their whole organization while referring to the most relevant and reliable source of truth: their customers and employees. 

Insights gathered through business surveys often allow organizations to organize and enliven previously disjointed sources of data into more coherent and actionable formats. 

If you want to see for yourself how business surveys can fuel your company’s growth and obtain trustful and impartial data directly from your target audience, try our market research platform, which makes it easy to create and deploy all kinds of surveys, along with analyzing them in different formats.