Getting customer feedback is essential if you want to improve your business. Having satisfied customers will not only make them come back, but it will also make them spread the word about you. Whether you use a customer survey tool like Responster, or collect feedback from your customers through more traditional means like paper surveys, you have to know what customer feedback questions you should ask in order to get the most valuable feedback possible. In this post, we’ll give you our advice on what customer feedback questions you should ask, and what customer feedback questions you shouldn’t ask. Read on to find out!
Customer Feedback Questions Worth Asking
An essential question is what customer feedback questions you should ask. The easy answer to this question is that you should ask questions that your customers care about answering.
However, knowing what customer feedback questions your customers actually care about answering can be a little bit trickier. This requires you to put yourself in the shoes of the customers and ask yourself: when you are the customer, what questions would you answer?
In general are questions that are easy to answer and relate to your experience with the company the best customer feedback questions. Compare this to questions that are hard for you to answer since they don’t relate to your experience. Not so good customer feedback questions, right?
Here are some examples of good customer feedback questions that you can use:
How satisfied are you with the personnel’s service?
This question can easily tell you if your customers are happy with your employees and the service they provide. If you collect feedback in real-time it will even be possible for you to time-track at what hours your customer satisfaction level differs.
Did you find what you were looking for?
Understanding the needs of the customers is really important. One way of doing this is by asking this particular question, since it will provide you with information if your offering includes what your customers are looking for. Extend the question with a follow-up question for the answer option “no” where you ask what the customers were looking for, and you get even more useful data.
How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?
This is a typical Net Promoter Question. Although it may look like a question that is only important to you, your customers can actually relate it to their experience and needs. Having a good reputation among friends is very important for people, so your customers will only answer positively to this question if they feel satisfied with your product or service.
Customer Feedback Questions That You Shouldn’t Use
You probably already know the answer to this question by now: don’t ask questions that are difficult for your customers to answer. Any customer feedback question that requires the customer to think is mostly a waste of time asking.
An example could be:
How many times have you been here in the last year?
Who would actually stop and recap the last year in order to answer the question? Not that many, really.
Pick your three favorite products out of our 10 products
Grading all of your products can be difficult, especially if the customer hasn’t bought all of them yet.
Did any of our salesmen greet you within one minute after you entered our store?
This question is too long to be read and understood directly. It is also difficult for a customer to know exactly the time it took your sales rep to greet him or her (if the sales rep did it at all).
Are You Looking for More Complicated Customer Feedback Questions?
Here’s the thing, if you think that the recommended sample questions above are too simple you are on the wrong track. If you want to ask more complicated customer feedback question you are actually trying to do market research. This is an equally important business activity, but a completely different one.
Remember that when you collect customer feedback you are doing so to check how happy your customers are, and finding and fixing the things that make them unhappy. Especially if you are collecting on-site customer feedback you are going to want to ask questions that your customers can answer on the fly.
There you go, you now know what we think are good examples of customer feedback questions, and what are bad examples. If you remember to ask your customers questions that are easy to answer and relate to their experience with your company you will see that collecting customer feedback is very rewarding!
Take care,
Ludvig