Sending surveys to the right customers

Sending everyone the same survey wastes the opportunity. A first-time customer and a regular of three years have completely different useful things to tell you, and asking them the same questions gets you the average of two answers you needed separately.

Response groups are how you segment in FeedbackRobot.

What a response group is

A response group is a named set of customers you can target as a unit. Once a group exists, you can send a survey to just that group, and report on responses by group.

Segments worth creating

Don’t segment for the sake of it — each group is only worth creating if you’d genuinely ask it something different. The ones that usually earn their keep:

New vs returning. New customers can tell you whether your onboarding, signage, or first impression works. Returning customers can’t — they’ve long since stopped noticing. Returning customers can tell you whether quality is holding up, which new customers have no baseline for.

By service or product line. If you do several quite different things, feedback averaged across all of them tells you nothing actionable.

By location. For multi-site businesses, this is usually the most valuable split of all — it’s how you find out that one branch is dragging the average down.

By value. Your highest-value customers’ opinions carry more weight in decisions. Worth being able to isolate them.

How to use groups well

Ask each group something only they can answer. That’s the whole point. If two groups get the same questions, merge them.

Keep groups few. Five well-chosen groups beat twenty precise ones you never send to. Segmentation has a maintenance cost.

Re-check membership periodically. A “new customers” group that isn’t refreshed becomes a “customers who were new eighteen months ago” group.

Getting customers into groups

Add customers to a group when you import them, or organise your existing customer list into groups afterwards.

→ Importing your customers

Reporting by group

Because responses stay attributed to their group, you can compare sentiment between segments — which is where the interesting findings usually are. “Satisfaction is 4.2” is a number. “Satisfaction is 4.6 for returning customers and 3.1 for first-timers” is a decision.