In agile software development, feedback plays a central role throughout the entire process. However, agility doesn’t just play an important role in project work; it also has a positive impact on nearly all areas of the business, particularly customer relationships. Regular feedback loops—not just at the project level—help foster stronger customer loyalty, for example.
Even when there is a trusting relationship with project partners, it can sometimes be helpful to conduct a customer survey. Regular feedback meetings about the collaboration often do not provide the necessary anonymity and distance for candid or open feedback. In addition, a customer survey helps provide a comprehensive overview and supports the identification of a company’s own strengths and weaknesses. Particularly for agile companies, where all project work is aligned with these principles, an agile approach to work promotes business success.
Feedback—and knowing how to handle it properly—is an important part of long-term project partnerships. A customer survey not only helps measure satisfaction and, by extension, strengthen customer loyalty, but can also help improve products and services and adapt them to future needs.
But first, you have to gather that feedback. We recently conducted a customer survey ourselves, drawing on our many years of experience with both internal and external surveys. In this blog post, our Xperts walk you through the process of conducting a customer survey step by step.
Method
To learn more about our customers’ satisfaction with our performance and collaboration, we simply asked them. An interdisciplinary team consisting of sales, project management, a Scrum Master, and usability engineers was formed, and they worked together to conduct the customer survey. Just as we do in our projects, we also work across disciplines at the corporate level to achieve the best possible results. The team decided relatively quickly to use an online survey. This survey method offers significant advantages for both us and the respondents.
Automating mailings and data collection saves time and resources compared to traditional methods. In addition, electronic processing allows for faster analysis of the results, leading to more timely and accurate insights.
For respondents, the online survey offers convenience and flexibility. The ability to complete the questionnaire at any time minimizes time-related barriers. Participants can carefully consider their answers and respond at their own pace. In addition, the digital format of the survey facilitates anonymous participation, which increases the likelihood of more honest and unbiased responses.
Overall, this survey method creates a win-win situation. While it enables us to collect data efficiently, it also offers our respondents a convenient and accessible way to participate. Of course, it is also important to comply with applicable data protection regulations and, if necessary, to supplement or update the relevant sections on our own website.
Questionnaire
During an initial kick-off meeting, we finally defined the objectives and the target audience. It was particularly important to clarify what we actually wanted to achieve or find out through the customer survey. To ensure that we ultimately received feedback that was truly relevant to us, we continuously refined our objectives and aligned them with the stakeholders. The preliminary concept, including the estimated costs, was presented to our management and approved following a thorough evaluation.
Once we had a general idea of our objectives, we set about creating the questionnaire. It was important to us to use as many standardized questions as possible. These have been scientifically tested, validated, and are more easily replicable. They also demonstrate high discriminatory power. For our survey, we used the NPS and CSAT questionnaires, among others.
However, to gain as accurate a picture as possible of our customers, it was necessary to develop our own questions as well. The long-standing experience and expertise of our usability engineers, in particular, were a great help to us in this process.
There is virtually no questionnaire that is completed in its entirety by all participants. Individual factors in particular—such as time constraints, a lack of interest in the questions asked, or unclear instructions—can lead to participants dropping out early. However, there are ways to minimize the dropout rate. The fewer the number of questions, the lower the likelihood that respondents will drop out. Above all, constantly refining our objectives has helped us keep the questionnaire as short as possible. Another factor that significantly affects the dropout rate is the design of the questions themselves. If the questions are varied, the likelihood that the questionnaire will be completed in full increases.
In addition, when drafting our own questions, we took care to ensure that the way we phrased them would not influence the respondents. For the response options, we opted to use the Likert scale. It allows us to collect precise and quantifiable data that is relatively straightforward to analyze. For our customers, it offers a simple and familiar method for expressing their views in a nuanced way. Since we cannot assume that all respondents have the same level of technical knowledge, we have also included info boxes and examples in parentheses to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings.
It is important to test the questionnaire repeatedly and review it with stakeholders in order to align it as closely as possible with the defined objectives. Here, too, it is the iterative approach that ultimately leads to success. Based on an existing license and our previous experience, we chose LimeSurvey as our survey tool.
Analysis
LimeSurvey already offers a wide range of powerful tools for analyzing surveys. These include pre-built reports that present survey results in clear charts and tables, as well as the ability to filter and segment data as needed. In addition, LimeSurvey allows you to export data in various formats, supports statistical analysis, and offers conditional logic.
Above all, extracting the information relevant to us is essential for further analysis. To better compare the values, we analyzed them on a project-by-project basis. With an eye toward future surveys, we were particularly interested in the average values. This makes it easier to determine over time whether, for example, improvement measures were successful.
Conclusion
The insights gained from the customer survey are crucial for continuously improving our processes and products. Agile principles help us quickly gather feedback, respond to it, and develop efficient measures for optimization. We do not view this customer survey as a one-time event, but rather as part of our continuous improvement process. Various departments within the company (Sales, Executive Management, Project Management) are already working on next steps to make the best possible use of our customers’ valuable feedback.
The combination of agile software development and an agile approach at the enterprise level enables us to respond flexibly to customer needs, drive innovation, and build and maintain long-term customer relationships. Agility is more than just a buzzword—it is an integral part of our corporate culture and plays a key role in helping us and our expertise continue to grow.
