June 24, 2022
How to Optimize Your Customer Feedback Surveys (with Examples)
Let's go over how customer satisfaction surveys can help you and the best type of questions to ask to get valuable feedback.
Let's go over how customer satisfaction surveys can help you and the best type of questions to ask to get valuable feedback.
Customer feedback surveys (especially customer satisfaction surveys) are great ways to boost engagement with your audience and figure out how best to improve your product going forward. But they can also be tricky to get right. Let's go over how customer satisfaction surveys can help you and the best type of questions to ask to get valuable feedback.
Customer satisfaction surveys help you understand your users’ satisfaction with your product and company. These surveys are great for keeping an eye on your customers’ needs, tackling potential problems or issues with your product, and better understanding your target audience in general.
Customer satisfaction surveys often use rating scales and are repeated at regular intervals, allowing you to get an idea of how your product is received over time and to get a better understanding of how your users feel as well. Having a solid customer satisfaction survey template can help you do this.
Customer satisfaction surveys have many different benefits. First and foremost, good customer experiences help bring in new customers and help you retain your existing customer base. Happy customers are loyal customers, and if you’re consistently providing a good experience for your users and improving based on what they have to say, they’ll notice. Customer retention is important for any successful business, and the information you get within feedback from customers can help you boost this.
Likewise, satisfied customers are also more willing to promote your product and mention it to others. Word-of-mouth is one of the most trustworthy types of recommendations you can get and a great way to help scale your company and boost your public image.
Lastly, mapping out your customer journey via customer satisfaction surveys can help you better understand how users use your product and what stages of your product you may need to work more on. How they feel throughout the customer lifecycle is important no matter where along their journey they might be. Keeping an eye on where customers experience issues or drop off can alert you to potential issues or areas of improvement, especially if you collect this information and measure it against customer satisfaction metrics.
Let's discuss some of the types of questions you should include in your surveys.
Likert scale questions allow customers to place their level of satisfaction on a four- or five-point scale. Even Likert scales remove the neutral option, while the five-point scales often include it.
For instance, if the question is how satisfied are you with our service?, a Likert scale would rank options from very satisfied to very dissatisfied.
Binary questions are simple questions that give you quick yes or no responses. While they can’t provide you with a lot of details or context, they’re still good to include in your surveys for easy feedback.
For example, if you were to ask Would you recommend our product to a friend? The available responses would be Yes or No.
Multiple choice questions are great for figuring out next steps or comparing different features. While they are more leading than some of the previous types of questions on this list, they can provide a little more insight without requiring too much effort
For example, if you wanted to ask what feature do you use the most? Customers would then be able to choose from a pre-set list of options (such as roadmap templates, integrations, custom widgets, or whatever else).
Open-ended questions are great for getting more detailed feedback from your users. While they’re great ways to gather information, they’re also a lot higher effort for your customers—and as such should be used sparingly in your surveys than other types of questions.
Good open-ended questions to ask are What could we have improved on today? And What features would you like to see us add in the future?
Product usage questions give you specific insights into how your customers use your product. This can help you figure out how to approach customers and better understand their thoughts and concerns in order to improve their experience and boost customer loyalty.
Some good product usage questions to ask include:
Demographic questions help you better understand who your user base is. This includes questions on age range, gender, education, average income and location.
While it’s also a good idea to pull some of this information from your customer database or CRM, including some demographic questions on your customer satisfaction surveys can help you get a better picture of who’s using your product and their backgrounds.
Example demographic questions include things like What age range do you fall under? And where are you located?
Psychographic survey questions focus on the psychology of your users in order to give you a more rounded idea of who your audience is. This includes activities, interests, and opinions, such as attitudes towards a product, reasons behind purchases and other background info on religious and political beliefs.
For example, you might want to ask why customers chose your product over others or what they think of it versus other competitors on the market.
These questions can help you get more targeted information on key satisfaction drivers such as quality, value, purchase experience, ease of installation and onboarding and support experience. This allows you to have a better idea of where you can improve your product and to better align your priorities with your customers’.
Good satisfaction category questions can include:
Now that we've gone over the types of questions you should include in your customer feedback surveys, here are some of our best tips for getting the most out of your feedback.
Good customer surveys need to balance getting enough information with asking the least possible from your customers. If your surveys are too long or too complicated (or both), customers won’t want to answer them. But you still need to get as much information as possible without overwhelming your customers, and that can be difficult.
In order to make sure your surveys work for both you and your customers, you’ll need to have a plan for what you want your survey to cover. That’s why defining your survey’s goals and key objectives are critical. You need to have a clear idea of what your survey will achieve and stick to it.
For example, your goal might be to improve a specific feature of your product, or to figure out what features your customers use most.
Well-written surveys flow naturally and ease customers in. Going from questions on product usage to demographics and back again can be jarring for customers and give them a less-than-pleasant experience. Grouping like questions together can help your survey feel more put together and pleasant.
Likewise, it’s important to not front-load your surveys with hard and heavy questions. Many companies use the funnel technique for their surveys by starting off with broader, more general questions that are easier to answer and then slowly filtering down to more specific questions that require more thought.
The questions you ask (and especially how you ask them) will have a significant impact on the feedback you get. Natural biases can easily seep into your survey questions unnoticed if you’re not careful and influence customers to answer in a certain way.
You’ll need to make sure you try and phrase your questions as neutrally as possible in order to avoid bias in the insights you receive. For instance, instead of asking questions like we’ve added a bunch of great new features to our product. Which one is your favourite? Consider asking what features customers use the most. Likewise, instead of asking if your customers had bad experiences with competitors, you could ask why they switched or what products they used before.
Humans are creatures of habit. Have you ever answered a question on a survey or test wrong because it was worded differently than you expected or in a different format than the other questions?
These inconsistencies can be frustrating and off-putting for respondents. That’s why it’s so important to try and keeping the scales and ratings you use in your surveys consistent.
For instance, if you’re doing Likert scale questions, make sure the scales you use are the same. If you start the scale with the most positive response, don’t start the next scale with the most negative. This can cause people to answer on instinct and give you inaccurate feedback.
On a smaller level, you should also make sure you use the same rating formats throughout your survey. For example, if you number your answers on a 1-5 scale on one question, don’t use an A-E format for the next question.
A/B testing your surveys by creating two slightly different versions will help you figure out how to make your surveys more effective and get more responses. Simply send each version out to small groups of customers and then disseminate whichever version gets better responses to your wider customer base.
The contents of your surveys are important, but so is its timing. Where within a customer’s journey you send a survey can affect the feedback you get and what they have to say. You wouldn’t want to send a survey about onboarding to an experienced user, or a more detailed survey to someone who’s just signed up.
Some good times to consider sending surveys are a couple weeks after onboarding, after they’ve resolved an issue with customer support, and at regular (but not too frequent) intervals throughout their journey.
Customer satisfaction surveys can give you incredibly valuable insights into your product, but sometimes they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
The best customer feedback follows a feedback loop, and surveys are no exception. Looking over the feedback you receive can provide you with ample opportunities for further insights. Following up on responses that intrigue you or seem to leave things unsaid can give you a wealth of information you may not have otherwise known about. Even negative responses can provide you with a learning opportunity.
UserVitals is an all-in-one feedback management platform that helps you get the most out of your customer feedback and better connect with your users. Learn more about UserVitals today.
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