Survey Emails After Every Job

The email after the appointment

Booking systems, invoicing tools and email services all make it easy to send a satisfaction survey automatically after each job. Switch it on once and it runs for ever.

For a customer who comes once, one survey is reasonable. For a customer who comes every three weeks, it becomes background noise, then an irritation.

The answers suffer as well. Someone asked for the tenth time answers quickly or not at all, and the survey stops telling you anything.

Done well, though, it is the cheapest way to hear about a problem before it turns into a review.

Why customers stop answering

• Frequency: one after every visit, for people who visit often.
• Length: ten questions where one would do.
• Timing: sent before the result can be judged.
• Offers inside: a discount code that turns feedback into marketing.
• Silence: answers that vanish without anyone replying.
• Phone trouble: tiny rating buttons and a long form.

The first is the one automatic settings get wrong most often. The software counts appointments rather than people, so your most loyal customers receive the most surveys.

One question, perhaps two

The useful version is short: one question about how it went, with a scale or a few choices, and a box for anything else.

Put the answers in the email itself as links, so one tap records a score and opens the comment box. Most email is read on phones, and a form that needs a computer will not be filled in.

Say honestly how long it takes. Ten seconds is a promise people will keep.

Use the same question every time, so this month's answers can be compared with last month's.

What to ask

Ask about the visit, not the business in general: how did today go, rather than how satisfied are you with us.

A specific question gets a specific answer, the kind you can act on. A general one gets a polite number.

Leave the comment box optional, and read every comment. The few people who write something are telling you what the scores cannot.

Send it when the work can be judged

Sent while the customer is still in the parking lot, the survey asks them to judge work they have not lived with yet.

The right moment depends on the job: the next day for most appointments, a week after a repair, a month after an installation, the day after delivery for anything shipped.

Waiting too long has its own cost. After a week or two the visit has blurred into every other, and the answers get vaguer.

Send it at a civil hour, from a named person at the business rather than a no-reply address, so a reply reaches someone.

A different rule for regulars

For anyone who visits often, ask after the first visit, then no more than once a quarter, or after something changes: a new technician, a new service, a complaint put right.

Many booking and email systems can set a minimum gap between surveys to the same address. Where yours cannot, ask a sample of customers each month instead of everyone.

Fewer requests also means each one gets a considered answer.

A worked example

An eyelash studio with three technicians books most clients for a full set, then a fill every two or three weeks. Its booking system sent a five-question survey two hours after every appointment.

A regular client could receive well over a dozen in a year, each asking the same five questions.

Answers dried up after the first few, and some regulars unsubscribed. The booking system used one email setting for everything, so unsubscribing also stopped their appointment reminders, and a few began missing fills.

The causes were all in the settings: counting appointments, sending before the lashes had settled, and treating reminders and surveys as the same kind of message.

The studio now sends one question the day after a client's first full set, then at most once every three months. Reminders went back on for everyone, on their own setting, and the owner reads the comments each morning.

Keep offers out of it

It is tempting to add a discount for the next visit at the bottom. Leave it out.

An offer settles any doubt about what the email is. Once it carries a promotion, the survey is plainly a commercial message under CASL, with everything that brings: consent, identification and an unsubscribe that works.

It also bends the answers. Customers expecting a reward answer kindly, and kindness is not what the survey is for.

Whether surveys with no offer count as commercial is a closer question, though recent customers have usually given implied consent anyway. How CASL treats yours is one for a lawyer; this post is not legal advice.

Reviews are a separate request

Some businesses use the survey to steer happy customers to a review site. If you ask for reviews, ask everyone the same way, not only the customers who scored you highly.

Sending the review link only to the satisfied builds a public picture that is not quite honest. Keeping the two requests apart keeps the survey about the work.

Someone has to read them

Answers nobody reads are worse than no survey at all, because a customer who complains expects a reply.

Send the answers to a person, not to a report nobody opens. Reply to every low score within a day, by phone if you can.

Keep a simple log of low scores and what was done about each. Over a year it shows which problems keep coming back.

Once a month, read the comments together and fix one thing.

The counter-case

A business that sees each customer once, such as a mover or an installer, can reasonably ask after every job. The every-visit problem belongs to businesses with regulars.

A very small business that talks to every customer face to face may hear more by asking at the counter than by email.

For everyone else: one or two questions, sent once at the right moment, with no offer attached.

Before the next survey

1. Find every automatic survey your systems send.
2. Cut each one to one or two questions.
3. Move the send time to when work can be judged.
4. Set a minimum gap for regular customers.
5. Remove any offers from the survey.
6. Keep reminders on a separate setting.
7. Name the person who reads the answers.

Step four matters most for any business with regulars. Without it, the people who like you most are the ones the survey wears out first.

Keeping reminders and receipts flowing when someone opts out of everything else is covered in unsubscribes that should not stop order emails.

Frequently asked questions

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