Using Customer Feedback Survey Questions to Draw Quality Data
It is critical to form viable customer feedback survey questions, as it is the questions that power this kind of survey.
The customer feedback survey provides a wealth of commentary from customers on various aspects of your business and their customer buying journey. This kind of data is critical to extract from customers, namely to satisfy them and to also maintain a reputable business.
This is because customers — including unhappy ones — don’t keep quiet; they air their feedback online and to their peers, friends and family. This can have either good or damning consequences for a business, depending on the kind of feedback customers provide.
77% of customers would recommend a company to a friend after having a positive experience with it. However, if they are not happy with a business, 13% of customers will share their experience with 15 people or even more. Compounding the damage is the fact that only 1 in 26 unhappy customers complain to the businesses themselves about their bad experiences.
Dissatisfied customers may skip on sharing their feedback with a company, instead taking their grievances to readily available online reviews. Bad reviews don’t sit well with customers; 53% of customers expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within a week. 1 in 3 have a shorter time frame of 3 days or less.
As such, businesses should use the customer feedback survey to collect all kinds of feedback, in turn, avoiding negative reviews and unhappy customers in general.
This article lays out various types of customer feedback survey questions — along with their wider context in the sales funnel — so that you can power your questionnaire with the right questions.
Approaching the Customer Feedback Survey
There is no hard and fast rule to surveying customers for their feedback, as there are various instances in which you can collect it. For some businesses, certain instances may be redundant to send this survey, especially if you’ve already used another kind of consumer survey about a particular brand experience.
For other companies, even those that haven’t deployed any surveys about a particular customer experience, it too may not be a priority if they’re conducting other kinds of market research. Ultimately, using this kind of survey depends on the kind of feedback you seek in relation to a certain business campaign. However, it is still useful, especially to those who are in lack of conducting market research techniques.
To determine the kind of customer feedback you seek to create questions for, consider the sales funnel, or the customer journey. While there are different occurrences and experiences in this funnel, they can be classified into 5 distinct stages:
- Top of the funnel
- Early aspects of the customer journey.
- This is when brands use brand awareness tactics to draw their target market’s attention to the company.
- This involves visual, snackable and engaging content.
- Early Middle of the funnel
- This is the early consideration stage of the customer journey.
- Customers contemplate solutions to their problems, considering your product or service as a potential fit.
- It involves new leads gained from top-of-the-funnel marketing and current customers you would urge towards making repeat purchases.
- It involves using a strong content marketing strategy to nurture leads.
- Middle of the funnel nearing conversions
- This involves educating leads further down the funnel and strengthening their interest and connection to your brand.
- At this point, potential customers are weighing your brand against others.
- This stage is the heart of the decision-making process.
- Aside from content, this stage requires a final push towards conversions, such as a promotion, sale, etc.
- End of the funnel
- This stage represents the beginning of purchases.
- Customers make a purchase or are in the process of purchasing, such as filling up an online shopping cart, but not yet buying.
- There can be hiccups during checkout, such as a malfunctioning page, difficulties in choosing a shipping method, etc.
- Post-sales
- This can include post-purchase order modification.
- Some customers change aspects of their orders, whether it is the products themselves, shipping type, credit card info, etc.
- This may include order cancellation.
- For businesses, it often involves nurturing for cross and up-sells.
- This stage also involves regular check-ins for brand tracking and customer satisfaction.
- This can include post-purchase order modification.
Common Types of Customer Feedback Survey Questions
There are various kinds of questions you can ask to extract valuable customer feedback.
The following provides question examples to use in the customer feedback survey:
- What challenges are you trying to solve?
- Question Type: Multiple-choice and an open-ended question
- Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel
- Have you used a similar before?
- Question Type: Yes or no
- Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel
- Which of the following brands have you [heard of/used]?
- Question Type: Multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers, a follow-up to the previous question
- Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel
- What is the biggest issue you have [in a niche, with a product or service]?
- Question Type: Multiple-choice and an open-ended question
- Sales Funnel Position: Top and early middle of the funnel
- What kind of content would you like to see from us?
- Question Type: Multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers and an open-ended question
- Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel, early middle- middle of the funnel
- How can we make this page better for you?
- Question Type: Ranking, multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers and an open-ended question
- Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel, early middle- middle of the funnel
- What feature or option could we add to make your experience better?
- Question Type: Multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers
- Sales Funnel Position: Middle of the funnel
- What, if anything, what is stopping you from buying/subscribing today?
- Question Type: Multiple-choice and an open-ended question
- Sales Funnel Position: Middle and end of the funnel
- On a scale of 1 (unhappy) to 10 (very happy), how would you rate your overall satisfaction with us?
- Question Type: Numeric, scaled
- Sales Funnel Position: End of the funnel and post-sales
- What convinced you to buy the product?
- Question Type: Multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers and an open-ended question
- Sales Funnel Position: End of the funnel and post-sales
- What was the most difficult thing in your buying experience with us?
- Question Type: Multiple-choice and an open-ended question
- Sales Funnel Position: End of the funnel and post-sales
- How satisfied are you with the product or service from a scale of 1 to 10?
- Question Type: Numeric, scaled
- Sales Funnel Position: Post-sales
Listening to Your Customers
Market research involves far more than gaining intelligence on your customers’ likes, dislikes and customer behavior. Instead, it involves monitoring their CX and feedback on other matters throughout their journey with your brand.
This way, you’ll be attuned to their needs and perceptions towards their CX and your brand at multiple stages in their relationship with you. In order to collect this data, you’ll need a strong online survey platform. Ideally, it should make it easy to set up, target the correct target market sample and deploy your surveys.
You should use an online survey platform that offers random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.
Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.
Additionally, your market research platform should allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.
With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to reap invaluable consumer insights to help you power any campaign.
Do you want to distribute your survey? Pollfish offers you access to millions of targeted consumers to get survey responses from $0.95 per complete. Launch your survey today.