What to Include in Your Customer Training Survey

A customer training survey is important despite its controversy. They’re a great avenue to get learner feedback to improve your customer training. Our tips below outline what you should be including and why you should make one:

Determine the Goals of the Customer Training Survey

The most common form of learning evaluation is customer training surveys. So, it’s important to make sure you determine what you want to measure before you build out your survey. This makes sure that the questions you ask give you the feedback that you’re looking for.

Additionally, you should know how your customer training survey will fit into your overall measurement strategy. Is it the only method by which you will measure customer feedback? Or, will you be tracking metrics such as product usage or customer service calls? Determining how much you will weigh the responses of your survey will help you create one that achieves your goals.

What do you want to learn from your customer training survey?

According to Will Thalheimer’s research, most surveys ask questions for individuals to answer on a numeric scale. For example, “on a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the ease of onboarding?” Thalheimer finds these problematic for many reasons, such as providing “indistinct” results.

Thus, deciding how to collect a respondent’s answers is as important to your data as the questions you will ask.

Important Topics to Ask on Your Customer Training Survey

No matter what your goals for your customer training survey are, you should ask questions that follow these two topics:

1. Was it a good brand experience?

Your training is an extension of your brand, so it’s important to make sure you provide a good experience. Include basic questions such as overall and physical experience. Questions about the effectiveness of the training instructor are also important.

These questions are typically asking about first impressions of your training. They’re often broad questions to start your survey with. Having your respondents think broadly about your customer training is often a great starting point.

2. Did you meet learning objectives?

Your learning objectives are what behavior and/or skills you want your customers to have. If your goal involves saving a document or accessing a file, your questions should ask them about their comfort level completing those tasks.

Questions about how likely they will implement what they learned also fall into this category. This helps determine the effectiveness of your training. Questions about how likely they will be to use a concept they learned in the future helps you determine which concepts pertain to your customers and which don’t. The ones that are most useful are what your facilitators should spend more time on, and vice versa.

This is also a great space to ask what they found more useful/less useful about your training concepts. This will help you know what your facilitators should stress and what they should spend less time on as you improve your customer training.

Customer Training Survey Design

Design impacts brand perception and the quality of the experience almost as much as the material itself. A better design and UI will, on average, attract more users and give a better brand impression.

Survey Delivery

Customer training surveys can be given either online or through print. Choosing the medium to deliver your survey is important and alters how your customers react with your content.

Paper customer training surveys rank high when it comes to readability and presentation. Paper thickness, color, and print quality all present a higher-quality survey experience than digital.

However, online surveys don’t have to worry about space limitations or design limitations. Your survey page can have a variety of follow-up questions based on the answers that were chosen and ample space for open-ended questions.

Survey Question Design

Design also encompasses how you phrase your questions. Will your questions be opinion statements that your respondents reply to by stating if they agree or disagree, or will your respondents answer through a numerical system?

Questions can also be answered in a yes-or-no fashion with qualifying information after. For example, if asking about what a customer learned making a “significant improvement” in their work, answers can range from “No, and I doubt I will use what I learned” to “Yes, I have already done so.”

No matter how you format your responding-type, your questions should make sure that your respondents provide concrete answers about the learning objectives that they’ve achieved. This will enable you to achieve the best results from your customer training survey.

Survey Design and Question Bias

Your design will also include the order that you place your questions and how many you include. Your order of questions will impact your results. For some respondents, there will be different biases toward questions that come earlier in the survey. Randomizing your questions for each respondent is a great way to combat bias.

This bias extends to how long your survey is. Survey Monkey found that the more questions you have, the less time your respondents will spend on each question. Balancing achieving your goals of your customer training survey and keeping your respondents’ attention is key to getting high-quality results.

There’s lots of controversy surrounding customer training surveys, but their creation is important for customer feedback. In fact, each aspect of a customer training survey is important to get the most concrete and actionable results. For more tips on how to measure your training check out our learn more below.

Learn More: Spotlight Report on Training Measurement