Customer feedback can be vital to a company in many ways. With data-driven changes based on consumer input, you can improve everything from customer retention to conversion rate and brand awareness. Pretty useful, right? But how do you create surveys that provide you with actionable insights? Well, to start, you need to ask the right questions – luckily you’ve come to the right place. Dive in and learn everything you need to know about customer feedback questions and how to pick the ones that suit your goals.
To gain valuable insights that will improve your customer experience, it’s important to ask the right questions in your feedback surveys. But to get to the right questions, there are a few things you need to keep in mind before you start writing them. So let’s start at the basics.
This article covers:
- Why should you collect customer feedback?
- What are good customer feedback questions?
- Customer feedback questions and metrics
- Choose the right question type for your survey
- customer feedback questions – when and how to use them
- Website feedback questions
- App feedback questions
- Marketing-focused questions
- Product research feedback questions
- Customer service questions
Ready? Here we go!
Why should you collect customer feedback?
Did you know that companies excelling in customer experience grow their revenues 4–8% above the market average? It makes sense, of course: if customers feel well taken care of and trust your brand, they’re more likely to return and do business with you again.
In fact, 87% of customers who have had an excellent experience with a company, say that they would return to make another purchase.
But to provide an excellent experience, you first need to know what your customers actually want and need. Which is where customer feedback comes in. It is important to collect input from consumers both online and offline, but as our expertise lies in the digital world, this blog will focus on online customer feedback. However, you can reuse many online questions for offline experiences as well.
To collect digital feedback, you also need a customer feedback tool or software (like Mopinion) as these allow you to create and deploy forms, gather all your data in the same place and analyse the results. A good customer feedback software can also create sharable dashboards, making it easy for you to spread your feedback insights within your company.
What are good customer feedback questions?
While there is no magic formula for successful customer feedback questions, there are a few pointers to keep in mind.
Most importantly: good survey questions are concise and relevant.
Keep your questions short and to the point while being clear about what you want to know. You should also ask questions that are relevant to your goal, meaning that you need to set these before you start putting your survey together.
For example, if you are researching the goal completion rate for a FAQ page, it doesn’t make sense to ask if your customers are satisfied with your delivery options in the same survey. It might be an interesting question, but it’s best asked in another questionnaire specifically on your check-out page.
Customer feedback questions and metrics
Feedback metrics are a partial exception to the “no magic formula” rule. These surveys are designed to be measured in a specific way and therefore rely on some degree of standardised questions.
Below you can find a short description of the four most popular customer feedback metrics and what the questions you’d use in these surveys typically look like.
NPS – Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most popular customer feedback metric. It essentially measures loyalty and helps you identify which customers belong to your brand’s personal cheerleading squad (Promoters) and which ones are seriously unhappy (Detractors). This allows you to:
- Measure the general satisfaction among your customers.
- Turn a bad experience into a good experience for a dissatisfied customer by following up and compensating where necessary.
- Leverage your Promoters by word of mouth marketing – this can be done with incentives or promotion codes for example.
NPS questions also follow a certain formula, here are some common examples:
- How likely are you to recommend our product/service to your friends and family?
- Based on your last order, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to friends and family?
- Based on your last experience with us, how likely are you to recommend our product/service?
Keep in mind that NPS surveys should only be sent out to customers who have already purchased something from your company. It’s ineffective when asked to customers who are, for example, visiting your website for the first time. And as always, don’t forget to include an open-ended follow-up question!
Translation from Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn: “How likely are you to recommend ah.nl to a friend or a colleague after you received your last order?”
CSAT – Customer Satisfaction
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys measure, to no one’s surprise, customer satisfaction. They are helpful to keep an eye on how happy your customers are and if there are any correlations between replies. This helps you identify both potential improvement points for a better digital experience but also which your strong points and unique selling points are.
Data that your marketing, customer success and sales team all will be very happy to take part of!
As CSAT is another customer feedback metric, it follows a certain formula. Just like CES, GCR and NPS. Some typical examples of a customer satisfaction survey question is:
- How satisfied are you with [insert website, app, brand or business]?
- How would you rate the experience on our website/app?
- Rate your satisfaction with the [insert categories, i.e. purchasing experience, product information, etc]
The answers are often given with a smiley or star rating.
When creating a CSAT survey, you can of course also follow up with less general questions, like:
- What’s one thing you would improve if you could?
- How often do you use our product/service?
GCR – Goal Completion Rate
This metric measures the rate at which your customers can complete a certain task. In other words, it is used to determine how user-friendly your page, website or app is.
A typical example of a GCR question is:
- Did you find what you were looking for on this page?
If the response is no, the customer will get a follow-up question asking what they were trying to find.
A pro tip is to really think about where you are placing these kinds of customer feedback forms. They can be triggered when a visitor indicates that they are leaving the page (exit-intent) or be embedded on a certain page. The most important thing is that they are placed on the particular page you want to research.
Are you looking into why customers are abandoning their baskets? Place the form at the checkout. Are you checking if a text is informative enough? You guessed it – place the form by the text.
CES – Customer Effort Score
These surveys measure how easy it is for a customer to go through a certain process on your website or app. This is to measure how smooth the customer journey is and to optimise the user experience.
An example of a typical CES question is:
- How easy was it to complete your order?
Even though most CES questions look quite similar, they can be beneficial to use in different places in the customer journey. You could for example ask:
- How easy was it for you to complete a purchase?
- How easy was it to find the information you were looking for?
- How easy do you find it to use our app/website?
Don’t forget to follow up with an open-ended question, particularly if the response is negative. That’s how you will find out what parts in the different processes are causing issues for your customers, allowing you to take appropriate action.
That was four of the most popular feedback metrics and what they look like. We’re getting very close to start writing your questions, but before we do, we have one more important pitstop to make: which question types should you choose?
Choose the right question type for your survey
There are a myriad of different question types: open feedback, multiple choice, number scales, smileys and so on.
I could go on all day if you’d let me, but I doubt that would be helpful so let me get to the point instead.
Choosing the right question type for your goals makes the analytics part of the feedback loop easier. Each type is designed to be used for specific scenarios. Below you can find how some popular examples should be leveraged to reach the best results.
Multiple choice questions
These can either be done with radio buttons or checkmarks and are typically used when you want to categorise something. Like which device your customers are using or their demographic (age, gender, location, etc.)
Open-ended questions
These questions are used when you want to dive deeper into a certain topic and it’s common to add them as follow-up questions, asking why your users gave their initial answers. Open-ended questions are often what make the insights you gather actionable.
Rating questions
These questions ask your customers to rate their experience with your website, a certain page, a feature, etc. They can vary in terms of design, from stars and smileys to numbers. As we mentioned above, they are common in both CSAT surveys and NPS surveys, for example.
These are just a few examples of popular question types – be sure to check out our extensive article on survey questions for even more information on the topic.
Customer feedback questions – when and how to use them
Ready to go through some impactful questions? We sure are! As mentioned, the type of customer feedback questions you ask are dependent on your goals, but they also need to be relevant to the context they’re in. You might not ask the same thing on your website as you would in an email.
To make things a bit easier to digest, we’ve therefore divided the questions into different categories. Have a look, see what inspires you and feel free to nab any questions you find useful!
Website feedback questions
Are you looking to improve your website? Great! Feedback from visitors is an effective way of optimising flows, improving design and content or even getting on top of your digital pest control by allowing bug reporting.
Here are some questions that can help you achieve these goals:
- How would you rate this page?
- Did you find what you were looking for?
- How helpful was this [blog/video/graph/other content]?
- How difficult was it for you to place an order with us? (CES)
- What’s one thing that you are missing from our website?
- Would you like to report a bug?
- How easy is it to navigate our website? (CES)
Don’t forget to include open follow-up questions where your visitors can express themselves in their own words. This is how you’ll find out what information they couldn’t find, why it was difficult to place an order and so on.
It’s also a good idea to allow your visitors to give “visual feedback” in the form of screenshots. This way you can see what your customers are seeing when they report an issue or a bug.
App feedback questions
Collecting feedback on your app(s) can help transform it into a tool your users will truly love. The first step in making it an essential part of their daily lives is understanding their thoughts about it.
Here are some examples of impactful customer feedback questions to ask your app users:
- How would you rate this app?
- How important is this feature to you?
- How often do you use this feature?
- Is there anything you are missing in this app?
- How do you like the app design?
- Do you find it easy to navigate in this app? (CES)
- What do you like/dislike the most about this app?
- Would you like to report a bug?
You can also ask more general questions about your product or service. Since these focus on the overall experience with your business rather than just your app, they could also work well in other contexts, such as on your website, webshop or in an email.
Here are some examples:
- Are you satisfied with the payment/delivery options in this app?
- How easy was it for you to place an order on our app? (CES)
- How satisfied were you with your latest order?
- On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate our product/service?
Like with website surveys, remember to include an open-ended question to let users provide more detailed explanations.
An example of an app feedback form from DHL
Marketing-focused questions
Marketing campaigns are always, always, ALWAYS better when they are backed up with relevant data. If you work in digital marketing, we are sure you agree.
Customer feedback can help you find out things about your target demographic that Google Analytics just couldn’t tell you. Like how they first heard about your product or service and how they view you compared to your competitors.
Here are some examples of questions that will be sure to help your marketers out when they map out their next campaign:
- How did you first hear about our product/service?
- Have you used another similar product/service before?
- Why did you choose our product/service over other options?
- How likely are you to recommend our product/service to family and friends? (NPS)
- How or for what do you use our product/service?
Product research feedback questions
Product feedback can help you with everything from UX design to usability and product innovation. It really shows you the ‘why’ behind your users’ behaviour, which we are all about here at Mopinion!
Some examples of questions to ask regarding your product are:
- How would you rate [insert product]?
- Is there a feature you are missing?
- Which feature do you like the most/least?
- How often do you use [insert feature]?
- How do you use [insert product]
- On a scale of 1-5 how well does our product meet your needs?
- How satisfied are you with the ease of use of our product?
- Which feature in our product do you use the most?
- If you could change one thing about our product, what would that be?
Customer service questions
Last, but absolutely not least, on this list are questions for your customer service surveys (say that three times fast, if you can). These are the kind of forms you will send out after a customer has been in contact with your support team. They help you evaluate the quality of the service given as well as identify improvement points. Not to mention strong points and technical insights. A customer might be very happy with the support given but wish that they could reach you in another channel.
Some examples of questions to ask in customer service surveys are:
- How satisfied are you with the support you have received today?
- How would you rate the knowledge of the customer service representative you spoke to?
- How willing was the customer service representative you spoke to to help?
- Is there anything we could improve?
- How would you rate the quality of the conversation?
And with that, we’ve reached the end of our article! We hope you are ready to get started with your feedback form. BUT if you do need more information, check out our blog on survey questions – complete with even more examples, tips and tricks!
Itching to put your new customer feedback questions to use?
All you need now is a reliable customer feedback platform! Mopinion is the #1 feedback software for web, app and email — we help companies and organisations to find out the ‘why’ behind their users’ actions.
Create highly customisable feedback forms and publish them wherever you want. Sophisticated settings for triggers and conditions allow you to embed forms, trigger them on exit intent, activate them with a button and much more.
Finally turn the feedback data into actionable insights with the help of our analytics features, including sentiment analysis and AI-powered summaries for open comments.
Ready to see Mopinion in action?
Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.
