Customer experience is the No.1 priority of businesses today. And it's no wonder: Companies that invest in their customer experience program outperform those that don't by nearly 80%, according to a 2019 Forrester study.

That's s a paradigm shift from the old way of doing business. It's no longer enough to just provide a product or service that customers want to buy. You also have to make sure your customers have the best experience while buying it. It's what sets you apart from your competitors and ensures you draw in new customers as well as retain them.

Companies that have outstanding customer experience programs begin by analyzing customer feedback, according to research by Gartner. That feedback can be collected in multiple ways including Web forms, surveys, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) programs.

What Is a Customer Survey?

A customer survey, as the name suggests, is a set of questions you can ask your customers and prospects to obtain their feedback. It could be related to the product or service you are selling, the sales medium, or your own website.

A good digital customer experience is facilitated by giving customers what they need and simplifying their journey through the sales funnel. Surveys take the guesswork out of what works and what doesn't.

The purpose of surveys is to find the reasons behind customers' decisions. That's why customer surveys don't ask questions regarding location, or the customer's age or gender. You want to find out only what issues a prospect is facing and how your product or service can help solve that particular issue.

How can customer surveys affect business by boosting lead conversion? Read on to find out.

Four Ways to Boost Lead Conversion With Customer Surveys

1. Identify what you want to find out

This may seem like an obvious first step to writing a customer survey, but businesses often get so preoccupied with the technical nitty-gritty of process that they lose sight of problem-solving. To get the most value from surveys, you need to set clear goals about what it is that you want to achieve—for example, why customers are choosing your product over your competitors'.

It's also important that you keep questions as short and simple as possible to avoid confusing customers, and that you ask one question at a time. For example, instead of asking, "Why did you choose this product, and how does it solve your problem?" break the question up into two separate questions. That way the customer can focus on one issue at a time and provide more focused feedback.

Focused feedback makes it more likely that you'll identify potential pain points and improve your conversion rate optimization (CRO).

2. Set a sample size

The effectiveness of surveys depends in large part on how they are rolled out, and for how long. It's good practice to get around 200 responses to a survey before changing the questions or removing it altogether. That's important because you need a certain mass of data before you can accurately derive trends from it through analysis.

However, sometimes a business can't get 200 responses because it has low traffic or it's new on the market.

What's more, some businesses are skeptical about surveys because they're either worried about seeming too intrusive or they're afraid of getting answers they won't like. However, getting brutally honest feedback is incredibly important, and negative reviews tell you exactly which areas need to be fixed.