A pulse survey works exactly as its name suggests—it’s a quick check-in method to know how employees or customers feel about a number of things including customer and job satisfaction, communication, service delivery and the work environment. 

Pulse surveys give organizations a feel of what their customers and employees think about their policies. These surveys are your best bet if you just implemented a policy change and you want to know how effective it has been over a period. 

What is a Pulse Survey? 

A pulse survey is a fast and easy method of collecting data from the same audience at regular intervals. Using 3–10 close-ended and/or open-ended questions, pulse surveys help individuals and organizations to gather frequent feedback from the respondents about important issues. 

You can send out pulse surveys monthly, quarterly or even twice a year. In fact, many employees do not mind completing pulse surveys up to 4 times in a year, as long as they can see how their feedback is driving organizational growth. 

Pulse surveys help you to track employee satisfaction and customer experience. Instead of sending out one complex survey at the end of the year, pulse surveys enable organizations to engage with customers and employees frequently, and to address issues as they arise.   

Types of Pulse Survey 

Here are the types of pulse surveys you can use to gather insightful feedback;

Employee Pulse Survey 

An employee pulse survey is a short staff questionnaire shared with employees on a regular basis. You can think of these surveys as quick check-ins that organizations use to monitor job satisfaction, employee engagement, work culture, and a bunch of other things. 

Employee pulse surveys allow you to constantly engage with your employees to know their experiences with your company. It starts with asking unique quick-fire questions and then, using the responses to make quick changes that improve the workplace.

Advantages of Employee Pulse Survey

1. It offers useful insights on the needs and expectations of employees. 
2. Employee pulse surveys improve workplace communication. 

Disadvantages of Employee Pulse Surveys

1. It can trigger lack of trust in the workplace when the organization fails to act on the feedback from the survey. 
2. Employee pulse surveys can cause information overload; especially in large companies. 

Employee Pulse Survey Questions 

1. How happy are you at work?

• Very happy
• Somewhat Happy
• Somewhat unhappy
• Very unhappy

2. I enjoy my job.

• Strongly agree
• Agree
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly disagree

3. To what extent do you receive feedback on your job?

• To a large extent
• Sometimes
• Not at all

4. On a scale of 1–5, how happy are you in this job? 

5. On a scale of 1–5, how would you rate your work life balance? 

6. How has this job helped your career goals?

7. What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced in this role so far? 

8. Would you say you’re opinions count at work? 

• Yes
• No

9. How would you rate your performance in this role? 

• Excellent
• Good
• Average
• Below average
• Poor 

10. How likely are you to recommend this organization to others? 

• Very likely
• Somewhat likely
• Neither likely nor unlikely
• Unlikely
• Very likely

11. What’s one thing you’ve learned in this role so far? 

Employee Pulse Survey Templates

• Company Culture Survey

Your company culture is what your organization stands for. If you want to know how well your employees align with your core values, you can ask them to complete the Formplus company culture survey.

In this survey, you can include unique questions that prompt employees to share their thoughts on your work culture. 

• Employee Compensation Survey

Do you want to find out how satisfied your employees are with their remuneration? Our employee compensation survey will help you gather meaningful data to improve your company’s remuneration policy. It’s a great tool for measuring your policy against industry standards.  

• Employee Exit Survey

As part of the sendforth for an employee, you can ask them to fill this employee exit survey. Here, the employee can respond to in-depth questions like why she is leaving your organization, career highpoints in your company, and how you can improve your overall work culture. 

• Employee Motivation Survey

Find out what spurs employees to hit their KPIs and be more productive at work using our employee motivation survey.

In this form, employees can highlight instances where they felt unmotivated at work and share suggestions on how to improve staff motivation. 

Read: Motivation Assessment: Definitions, Types, Tools + [Questionnaire Examples]

• Wage Gap Evaluation Survey

Use this survey to discover what employees think about your organization’s remuneration policy. This wage gap evaluation survey allows employees to anonymously share their opinions and evaluate the company’s payment policy. You can tweak it in our form builder to suit your needs. 

• Workplace Benefit Survey

 More than earning wage or salaries every month, employees should also enjoy certain workplace benefits. This survey prompts employees to share what they think about different workplace benefits like health insurance, sick leave and paid time off, among other things.  

Customer Pulse Survey

A customer pulse survey is a great way to measure your customers’ experiences with your brand and your product across different touch points.

When done in the right way, customer surveys can reveal ticking bombs and red flags in your service delivery that negatively affect customers as they interact with your product. 

Advantages of Customer Pulse Surveys

1. It helps you to measure customer satisfaction and make improvements along the way. 
2. Customer pulse surveys allow organizations to quickly gather feedback from customers on specific interest areas. 

Disadvantages of Customer Pulse Surveys

1. It can easily become a bother for customers; especially when these surveys are too frequent. 
2. Organizations may find it difficult to manage large volumes of data from customer pulse surveys. 

11 Customer Pulse Survey Questions 

1. How would you describe your experience with our product? 

2. How would you rate your experience with our brand? 

• Excellent
• Average
• Poor

3. What challenges have you faced with using our product? 

4. How likely are you to recommend our brand to others? 

• Very likely
• Likely
• Unlikely
• Very unlikely

5. How well did our customer facing team handle your complaints? 

• Excellently
• Average
• Poorly

6. Are you satisfied with our service delivery? 

• Definitely
• Not at all

7. Do you enjoy using our product?

• Yes
• No

8. If you could change 1 thing about our product or organization, what would it be? 

9. How valuable are you finding our product at this time? 

• Extremely valuable
• Valuable
• Neither valuable nor non-valuable
• Non-valuable
• Extremely non-valuable

10. What 3 things have changed since you started using our product?

11. Have you ever referred someone to our business? 

• Yes
• No

Customer Pulse Survey Templates 

• Brand Awareness Survey

Use this survey to find out how much people know about your brand. Our brand awareness survey is a great way to gather data from your target audience on brand perception and identity.

With numerous form features, you can collaborate with team members on form responses. 

• Brand Feedback Survey 

Do you want to find out what people think about your brand? The Formplus brand feedback survey gives you spot-on feedback on how your customers feel about your company plus products. It’s a smart way to gauge customer satisfaction. 

• Brand Performance Survey 

How well is your brand performing in the market? Use our brand performance survey to gather accurate feedback on how your customers perceive your brand. Here, you’ll find out how well your brand is performing and if your product is solving the right problems for users. 

• Customer Cancellation Survey

When customers cancel their orders or subscriptions, you don’t have to let them go like that. You can ask them to complete this customer cancellation survey so you know why they cancelled in the first place.

With this data, you can work on improving your service delivery across different touch points. 

• Customer Grievance Form 

This works just like a customer complaint form. It allows customers to share any challenges they have with the product, service or a staff in a company or business. With our customer grievance form, you can improve customer experience and resolve grievances at the right time. 

• Customer Satisfaction Survey 

Use this customer satisfaction survey to measure how customers feel about their experience with your product. You can tweak the look and feel of this survey in our drag-and-drop form builder or create a new one from scratch. You can also create a PDF customer satisfaction survey. 

• Logo Testing Survey 

Before launching the logo for your product, you can get the opinion of the market with this logo testing survey. This survey helps you to find out what people are thinking about your new logo and to make any changes as suggested.

It allows you to refine your logo before adding it to your branding materials. 

• Packaging Testing Survey

Like the logo testing survey, our product testing survey template allows businesses to find the right packaging for their products based on customers’ feedback. With this form, you can discover meaningful insights on your new product packaging.  

Tips for Conducting Pulse Surveys 

To get useful insights from your surveys, here are a few things you can do: 

1. Create a clear plan
2. Understand your target audience
3. Loop everyone in
4. Analyze responses
5. Take Action

• Create a Clear Plan 

You need to define the purpose of your pulse survey in terms of what you want to achieve with it. This could be anything—maybe you want to learn more about how your product helps customers or you want to identify any gaps in your service delivery. 

Once you have done this, you can generate questions to help gather the data you need. It’s best to limit the number of questions you have to 5 or even less than 4. Your survey questions should be concise and direct, avoid questions that are vague, ambiguous or leading. 

• Understand Your Target Audience

Who are the prospective survey participants and how do you intend to reach them? The kind of results you want influences how you choose participants for your survey. For example, if you are looking to implement a company-wide change, it pays to hear from everyone. On the flip side, if you want to implement high-level changes, can focus on discussing with members of your leadership. 

• Loop Everyone In

You can send an email to target groups or put out an official announcement to let people know about your survey. Be sure to show how their feedback would help you improve your organization’s processes plus its product and service. It also helps to send out reminders emails to nudge survey participants. 

• Analyze Responses

This is one of the most important aspects of pulse surveys. Now that you’ve gathered multiple data sets, you need to organize them for meaningful insights. Formplus has a data analytics dashboard where you can view important survey insights and generate casual visual reports. 

• Take Action

It’s not enough to gather and interpret data, you also need to take action for results. Data wouldn’t work by itself so once you have all the information you require, translate it into meaningful action that drives results. 

• When to Conduct Pulse Survey 

Organizations use pulse surveys to quickly collect feedback from employees or customers on a specific issue. Pulse surveys also help you to track reactions to a change you’ve implemented in your organization. Pulse surveys do not replace other data collection methods like employee engagement surveys and customer satisfaction questionnaires. 

Advantages of Pulse Survey 

1. A pulse survey is a fast way to learn about what your employees and customers think about your organization. 
2. It saves time for both employees and organizations. In a pulse survey, you only have to list a few questions and this means you can pretty much send it out as soon as possible. Employees can also get through the survey in a shorter time frame. 
3. Because pulse surveys are fast and easy to complete, they record better survey response rates than other types of questionnaires. 
4. Pulse surveys, especially in the workplace, improve communication between C-level executives and the other staff. It helps employees to see themselves as an important part of the decision-making process. 
5. It helps organizations to track their policies and identify what’s working and what’s not. 
6. Pulse Surveys support streamlined data-collection and timely analysis of results, so organizations can respond to feedback quickly. 
7. A pulse survey is a cost-effective method of data collection. It is typically organized in-house and requires less expertise than other data gathering processes. 

Conclusion

Pulse surveys do not replace other types of employee engagement surveys in the workplace. You’ll still need to conduct these types of surveys in specific contexts. For example, after onboarding a new employee, you can ask them to fill an employee onboarding survey to know how they felt about the entire process.  

Pulse surveys can help you track a metric over time, whether you want to know if customers are willing to refer your business to the people they know, or if you want to quickly get feedback on a specific subject like your new logo. With Formplus, you can collect responses in different formats for your pulse surveys.