Customer surveys are the most direct way to gather feedback about particular areas of your products and services, but you need to make sure the questions you ask will yield actionable insights.
The best questions include a number of key factors all dependent on the goals of your team.
They are targeted and precise, both internally and externally. This means that your team has to be on the same page as to what question they are asking, and clear ‘externally’ as to which customer demographics they are targeting.
Industry leaders like Apple and Uber apply varying customer feedback techniques to draw out the best possible information from their customer bases.
In this article, we’ll guide you through 28 examples of customer feedback questions, and the how and why of when to apply them.
We’ve identified four key groups of feedback questions – jump around based on your needs.
To unlock clear, quantitative feedback data to improve satisfaction.
To unearth deeper insight by listening to your VoC and meeting their needs.
To identify the ‘who’ and ‘why’. Who are your customers and why do they choose you? Also, who are your potential customers and why do they choose other solutions over you?
To help your support, customer experience (CX), and marketing teams be the best they can be.
“On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”
We start with the ubiquitous metric for customer loyalty, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question.
For customer experience management teams that value feedback, calculating your Net Promoter Score, then analyzing NPS is a great place to start as well as an excellent benchmark to measure your progress from one quarter to the next.
NPS questions are holistic and loyalty-focused, so when checked regularly they plot your business’s progress when it comes to building a loyal customer base.
“How satisfied are you with our product/service?”
The second of the three most prominent customer satisfaction metrics, CSAT scores dial in on measuring customer happiness at specific touchpoints.
CSAT scores, as opposed to NPS scores, can dial into customer satisfaction in the shorter term when it comes to products and brands by asking a simpler question. Gaining a flashpoint perspective can help address issues quickly and push sentiment in the right direction.
“How easy was it to solve your problem?”
Rounding out the big three satisfaction metrics, Customer Effort Scores (CES) measure the level of difficulty that customers experience when dealing with your company.
Let’s crack on to more close-ended question options.
The question is also close-ended, asking whether respondents are ‘Likely’ or ‘Not likely’. Its goal is to look to figure out the level of interest customers have in repeatedly purchasing a given product. By posing this in an open-ended manner, and by analyzing it using machine learning-backed text analysis engines, CX and product teams might draw out even more information, say what product features customers like or don’t like, leading them to repurchase or not.
Very difficult aka ‘high effort’ interactions can quickly lead to customer churn. So, by harnessing the quantifiable CES feedback from the question above, your teams can get to work on fixing friction points and reducing customer churn.
This is CSAT-adjacent in that it is a simple question asked at a specific touchpoint of the customer journey: the end. Knowledge of success or failure rates are great on their own, but real feedback value can be added by adding on a prompt for an open-ended question following your close-ended ones asking how, why, or in what manner their success or failure came.
Time is money and you want your products to deliver the best results the fastest. If certain parts of the journey are slowing down, but not stopping, customers, these are still a problem and should become a focus. Ask your customers how long resolutions to their problems are taking (e.g. a week, longer than a week, longer than a month, etc), then pinpoint sticking points to smooth out.
Here, we are going to dial in on how to ask open-ended questions about the customer experience.
The advantage of open-ended questions is that they can further unlock the minds of your customers to inform your future strategy.
They are qualitative and contain both more information and more nuance than close-ended numeric surveys, yielding extra, invaluable results that your customer experience (CX) team might not have even considered.
Correctly analyzing open-ended responses ultimately helps you gain insight on how to reduce customer churn.
Knowing what your products are being used for can help clarify future product strategies.
On the flipside, identifying friction points along the customer journey is key to successful omnichannel CX and customer satisfaction.
Getting specific is key. Zeroing in on what exact features are and are not working is key to future product experience improvement.
Just as time to resolution is crucial for support teams, understanding learning curves is for product teams.
Allowing customers to guide the hand of the future of your products is key to improving future customer experience.
Here, marketing teams can pick up great data points. If your products overpromise and underdeliver, the product needs to be tweaked. If you are underpromising, then it is time for a beefed up marketing campaign.
We twist on the classic NPS question here and ask about the afterlife of our product. What changes did it affect? Logging these can help future conversion campaigns and also might be a great source for success stories.
This bears similarities to the above questions in that it asks what benefits customers and teams derived from your service, except it drills even deeper. Discerning what problems your base is using your product to solve can point you towards further refinement, or even push strategic development down new avenues aimed at solving adjacent problems.
This query is a classic approach to gathering customer data. Analysis of who is using your product/service, even within a given company gives you information about the composition of your base, and through further customer data analysis, you can group said base into demographic cohorts to develop specialized products and services to meet cohort needs.
Word of mouth is great, but finding the source and analyzing the effectiveness of each technique (friend, advertisement, colleague, fellow business) opens up the opportunity to address and improve areas of weakness and lean on bulwarks of advocate strength.
Business software is at its best when it works synergistically. In layman’s terms, this means all your tools should work together. This question can answer whether your business software is successfully integrated or if they are running into a few snags
Having a solid grasp on what your competitors are offering versus what you are is key to gaining a marketing advantage going forward. Your marketing teams can then harness sentiment analysis to keep your strengths ahead of the game and improve on your weaknesses.
This is a more direct way of asking the previous question – it targets the pros and cons of your product compared to competitors.
Your loyal customers deserve as much, if not more attention than your new additions. Going above and beyond to please them creates vocal advocates and ensures lifetime spending. Identifying these loyal customers is the first step.
Repeat customers bring in more revenue. Toeing the line between a temporary solution and a service that fixes issues and keeps them fixed is one businesses have to walk carefully – you don’t want customers to think you are purposefully solving things temporarily as they will turn to a competitor who doesn’t. Subscription-based fee models solve this problem and create trust between company and consumer. Identifying a model that works best for your customers will help you win more customers, retain existing ones, and increase loyalty overall.
You may discover that your product is being applied in ways that your design and marketing teams haven’t even dreamed of. By asking this question, respondents could help you open untapped markets.
This is a common final question in any open-ended response survey. Making sure your pricing model is fitting your customer cohort is key for attraction and retention. The deeper you can delve into price-point customer feedback the better you can target demographics, match prices, and drive satisfaction.
If customers have been in contact with support teams this is significant and possibly highly useful data. Collecting and acting on support logs is a fundamental of good customer experience management.
Responsiveness, in this instance, can have two meanings. The first being ‘time to resolution’. However, it can also mean demeanor i.e. how friendly and capable your support staff were. Ensuring you provide the best possible support experience is dependent on the brand voice, and capabilities of your support staff.
This is the support equivalent of question #17. It allows you to focus on the reasons behind the success/failure of a support interaction.
With those many options, it might seem hard to choose. Thank goodness there is no cap on the number of customer feedback surveys that your company can run.
Just make sure that your surveys are planned. The worst thing would be to overload your customers with survey after survey, driving down response numbers. Also, make sure they are well-timed – immediately following a purchase may work well for some models, but waiting some time for the buyer to reflect on the good your products have done could be the better option in others.
Collecting all this powerful, and ideally useful, data is the critical first step. But now you have to analyze them. Quantitative responses (typically close-ended) are easy to tabulate with basic software such as Excel, but the real paydirt lies with the deep, detailed insights within open-ended responses.
Introducing MonkeyLearn – industry-leading data analysis AI.
Our comprehensive platform, complete with an all-in-one data visualization dashboard, can help you analyze heaps of open-ended survey feedback, and deliver invaluable insights.
Let us show you how to analyze your open-ended survey responses, from NPS to CSAT and in between, with a free demo run by one of our data experts. Or, jump right in with a free trial using our NPS template.
January 7th, 2022