Client surveys that actually work.

CRE Success Principle: If you're not already putting in the minimum effort required to be responsive and serve your clients well, a satisfaction survey could do more harm than good.

If you're going to ask clients for feedback, make sure you're already committed to great service, ready to hear the truth, and prepared to act on it.

In episode 229 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership, I share a personal story that highlights why timing, authenticity and service quality matter when sending out client satisfaction surveys.

It all started with a feedback request from my own residential property manager – the same one I’d already expressed dissatisfaction to, more than once in the past three months.

The message was automated, impersonal and out of touch. That experience inspired me to explore what effective surveys actually look like.

In this episode I break down:

🔹 The three types of survey scales (numerical, satisfaction, agreement)

🔹 10 smart questions to include in your next client survey

🔹 How to get higher response rates and more useful feedback

You’ll also learn how to choose the right tools and turn feedback into meaningful action.

And if you’d like a free survey template tailored for commercial real estate principals, just email [email protected] with the subject line ‘Survey’ – I’ll send it your way.

Episode transcript:

On the Commercial Real Estate Leadership podcast, we often talk about scaling a commercial real estate business.

But there's another type of scaling that I want commercial real estate principals to be right across, and that is scaling in a survey. Let's talk about it.

This is episode 229 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm Darren Krakowiak, I help commercial real estate principals to lead their people better, grow their business faster and have less stress in their lives.

And one way to have less stress in your life is to have clients that you are doing your best to serve capably, responsibly and diligently.

And I feel like, as a client where I've got a residential real estate firm, a property management and agency company taking care of some properties for me, and they're not doing a very good job.

So, I feel like I am causing them stress because when I received an email from them asking if I was happy with my service – when clearly, I wasn't because I had expressed my dissatisfaction and it had been ignored – I responded in a way that was probably not what they were expecting when they made the discretionary effort to send out this client satisfaction.

It wasn't a survey…it was a client satisfaction email check-in. They sent it out to all of their clients.

I know that it was automated because one, it had the unsubscribe button on the bottom, even though it was written as “I'm personally reaching out to you.” And two, I received the same email four times where I've got three properties managed by this firm and I guess I'm in there as a contact for some other reason.

So, they sent it to me four times. And you know, I was just surprised that they would go to that level of effort to send out that email because I know what it sort of requires to take that initiative when they weren't doing the basics so well.

So, I want to talk to you about client satisfaction surveys, and this is for you if you are already being responsive.

So, I think you should be at a level of responsiveness. And ensuring that you are reacting to things that are going on before you decide to be proactive.

Being proactive would be issuing this type of client satisfaction survey that I'm going to take you through today.

So, I guess that little rant of mine about my residential property management company that I'm a little bit miffed with right now is that if you're going to send out a client satisfaction survey, make sure that you are already putting in the minimum effort to be responsive and to serve your clients well.

Because if you're not doing that, and then you receive an email as a client where a service provider is saying, “Hey, we really care about providing great service,” but it doesn't feel like they care at all, you're probably going to get some responses that might cause you some stress.

So, I said at the top that we are going to talk about scaling. And scaling in the sense of a survey.

So, you've probably filled out a survey that asks you to rate something on a scale before. Maybe it asks you to rank something from, you know, a score of 1 to 10. Or maybe it's got options like ‘highly satisfied’, ‘satisfied’, ‘neutral’, ‘dissatisfied’, and ‘very dissatisfied’.

That's what we call scaling in a survey. It's the method that we use to help people express how strongly they feel about something, not just what they think, but how much, or to what extent they think it.

So, an example might be, how satisfied were you with the outcome? And then you could go from, like I said before, ‘very satisfied’ all the way through to ‘very dissatisfied’.

You could also ask something like, how likely are you to recommend us to others? And the client might give you a score between 0 and 10. Zero being not at all, 10 being absolutely, I would recommend you.

And we use these scales because they give structure to the feedback that we're seeking. It takes something that's subjective, like a feeling or an opinion, and it makes it more measurable.

And it also means it's something that we can improve on in the future because we can track it, we can compare it with past results, and it gives us, you know, something that we can actually do something with.

So, if you're wondering about the theory, there are three types of scales that you would typically use in a client satisfaction survey.

The first one is the numerical scale. So, on a scale of one to 10, that's the numerical scale.

There's the like/hurt scale, which is a agree or disagree. So, I receive good value for the fees charged. You ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘neutral’, ‘disagree’, or ‘strongly disagree’.

And then there's the satisfaction scale, which we've talked about already, which is how satisfied were you with the experience? From ‘very satisfied’, ‘satisfied’, ‘neutral’, ‘dissatisfied’, ‘very dissatisfied’.

So, this is the difference between someone saying, “yeah, it was good, it was okay”, and someone saying, “I'd rate it a nine out of 10.”

When you use scaling, it gives you more clarity, and over time, it gives you those benchmarks. So, when you're asking for feedback from clients, don't just ask open-ended or binary questions, include some scaled questions because they'll help you see trends, it'll help you identify gaps, and you'll make better decisions about your service.

And today's episode is about surveys, but I just want to let you know that scaling is a great thing that you can use in coaching conversations as well.

So, when you're asking people about how much effort are you putting into your prospecting on a scale of 1 to 10, you might find that people become a little bit more transparent about why it is that they're not getting results when you ask them to rank how much effort they're actually putting into something.

So, let's just go through some of the questions that you might like to ask in a client satisfaction survey. I've compiled 10 and I'm going to give you the scale that you can use as well.

You might like to ask about overall satisfaction. So how satisfied are you with the overall experience of working with your agency? You can go on a satisfaction scale for that one.

You can ask about communication and responsiveness. I think it's so important, the level of communication and my story about, you know, why I was unhappy with this residential property manager is basically about communication, or lack of it.

So, the question might be something like, how would you rate the communication and responsiveness of your agent or property manager? From ‘excellent’, ‘good’, ‘fair’, ‘poor’, or ‘very poor’?

Another question you could ask would be about expertise and market knowledge. Did you feel that the team demonstrated a strong understanding of the market relevant to your needs? And the scale here might be something like ‘yes’, ‘absolutely’, ‘mostly’, ‘somewhat’, ‘not really’, ‘not at all’.

Another question about professionalism and service quality. How would you rate the professionalism and service quality of our team? Again, you can go from ‘excellent’ to ‘very poor’.

Value for money. Do you believe you received good value for money for the fees charged? You could go on an ‘agree’ to ‘disagree’ type scale.

For outcome satisfaction, how satisfied are you with the outcome that we helped you achieve? Whether that's on the sales price, the lease terms, the property management outcomes. That could be on a satisfaction scale from ‘very satisfied’ to ‘very dissatisfied’.

You might want to ask about expectations versus reality, so to what extent did our service meet your expectations? That could be just as simple as a three-choice answer of ‘exceeded expectations’, ‘met expectations’, or ‘fell short of expectations’.

You might ask how likely they are to recommend you on a scale of zero, ‘not likely’ to 10, ‘extremely likely’. How likely are you to recommend our agency to others?

And you might also like to include a couple of open-ended o general responses that people can write what they like, and make that optional.

So, one of those questions might be, what did we do particularly well during your engagement with us? And another one might be what's one thing that we could do to improve our service?

If you want to grab those 10 questions along with the scale, just send an email to [email protected]

And in the subject line, put “Survey”. And that'll let us know that you want receive that survey template.

I'll send you all of the questions and the scale to use for each of those questions. If you send an email to [email protected], put “Survey” in the subject line and we'll send that to you for free.

So, just a couple of other little tips about client satisfaction surveys. I recommend that you use a proper online survey tool.

So, in my business, I use SurveyMonkey. Your CRM might have a template that you could use for this, but if not, you could also use Typeform or Google Forms.

I really recommend that you make it mobile-friendly and short. So, aim for three minutes – it shouldn't take any longer than three minutes for a person to complete this survey.

Any longer than that, and you're going to see a massive drop-off in the rates of completion.

I recommend personalising the invitation so they know who it's from. So, put the agents or the property manager that they deal with – put their name in the survey that you send it to the person.

I recommend that you send it probably one to two weeks after you've completed a transaction or some milestone has been done or on a semi-regular basis for clients with recurring needs. So, for our property management clients, we might send that out every six months.

You can consider making the survey confidential. That'll give people more confidence that they can give true and honest feedback, but you can also give respondents the option to enter their details if they would like to receive a callback about a specific matter.

I think when you use a professional survey tool, people are more likely to believe that their responses are going to be confidential.

And if you decide to implement a client satisfaction survey, and then you're not seeing very high response rates, consider one of these little tactics:

1. Before the survey is sent, give people a heads up that the survey is coming.
2. Send a follow-up email after the survey is sent to remind people that their feedback is important and attach another link to the same survey.
3. Offer a small incentive or perhaps a charitable donation for every survey that is received. So, you might say, everyone who completes a survey, we are going to contribute $5 to X charity just to encourage people to complete the survey, and that's a little bit of goodwill as well.

So, remember, if you want to grab this survey that I've just taken you through, along with the scales that I recommend using for each of the questions, just send an email to [email protected] and put “Survey” in the subject line and we will send that to you for free.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.