Anpar Research
Sep 25, 20204 min
Updated: Mar 24
Great insights can be gained from knowing what customer feedback questions to ask. Essentially customer satisfaction surveys can be customised around a business but they hold a basic structure that you can follow and the amount of customer service questions should not be too long before people start dropping out of the survey. Note it can vary based on your needs with a very short survey of 6 to 9 questions of your customers most recent experience or slightly longer survey that you can analyse in more detail.
The table above illustrates the top 5 customer feedback question to ask.
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The basic structure in knowing what customer feedback questions to ask in a customer satisfaction survey tends to be the following:
To capture basic demographic information such as gender, age and the region they live in as well as whether they are the main or joint decision maker in the household and to establish if they are a regular customer or they buy your product/service type. This is an example for a consumer survey but for a business to business survey this can be position in the company, the turnover of the company, number of staff, the industry sector they are in and so on. Obviously, some of this information maybe already available on your customer database.
For this part you can ask questions around the awareness of brands in your field, consideration, preference and the level of purchase intent if you want to see how your brand stands against your competitors. This is also dependent on who you want to survey, so if it’s more than just your customers but also potential customers as well as those that have lapsed or left.
To set the scene you can find out what made the customers come to you in the first instance and buy your services or products. In doing so you can establish the source, their needs and expectations of your customers. Basically, you can check what elements are important to them and which of them they associate with your brand like ease of doing business or brand reputation.
EXAMPLE
ASK ALL
Q3. How important are the following factors to you when you are deciding which XXXX companies to use? Please use a scale of 1 to 5 where “1” means it is “not at all important” and “5” means it is “very important.” RANDOMISE ORDER
This is the main core of the questionnaire to establish how satisfied they are with your brand overall and for different elements of your business such as knowledge of staff, customer service, responsiveness, availability and after sales service. This should not be an exhaustive list especially as this is around service, up to 10 elements should do. The satisfaction questions run on a scale, which tend to be 1 to 10 with higher the number representing level of satisfaction with your brand, see example below.
ASK ALL
Q5. Thinking about all your experiences with BRAND A in the last 12 months, how satisfied are you with BRAND A overall?
Please use the scale below where 1 is extremely dissatisfied and 10 is extremely satisfied.
PLEASE SELECT ONE
Open ended questions are good to find out in more detail why they are not satisfied, where the participant can express their frustrations and may mention some improvements that can be made often referring back to another brand as an example. Note not to include more than 2 or 3 open ended questions in the survey as it adds a lot of time to the survey length, where participants are likely to get fatigued and drop out.
EXAMPLE
ASK ALL WHO GAVE A SCORE OF 1-4 AT Q5, OTHERWISE SKIP TO Q8
Q7. Earlier in the survey you rated your overall experience with BRAND A as unsatisfactory. What are you not happy with BRAND A? (Please be as detailed as possible)
OPEN ENDED
Another great question to include is the recommendation question to how likely would they be to recommend your website or business to friends, family, colleagues or clients. You will be able to gage whether or not your business has a positive Net Promoter Score (NPS). This will give you an indication of the number of people that are possible advocates of your brand.
EXAMPLE
Q10. How likely are you to recommend BRAND A to friends and family on a scale of 0-10 where 10 is extremely likely and 0 is not at all?
Gaining insights from customers in how to improve your service are invaluable source of information that you can tap into to enhance customer experience (CX) of your brand and get an edge over your competitors.
EXAMPLE
Q12. What can we do to improve your experience with us?
(Please be as detailed as possible)
OPEN ENDED
Final part of the survey is likely to be background information not covered in the screening section and asking sensitive type of information such as household income. This just finishes off the survey and allows you along with the screening data to be able to analyse the results by splitting the data into different comparable groups dependent on the sample size.
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