The Quick Guide to Customer Experience Survey Questions

The Quick Guide to Customer Experience Survey Questions 

Businesses need to form the right customer experience survey questions in their surveys to reap valuable insights on their customers. Regardless of the industry you operate in, providing an optimal customer experience (CX) is vital to the success of your business. Customer experience can make the difference between acquiring new customers and losing them to a competitor. 

Customer experience is an umbrella term that refers to all the impressions your customers harbor about your brand e throughout all the stages of their interactions with your brand, which includes the customer journey before and after generating sales.

A remarkable CX can improve the overall customer lifetime value, while a poor one can contribute to a high customer churn rate.

As such, if you intend on attracting and retaining customers, you must establish an optimal customer experience from the moment they become aware of your brand until they seize their keyboards to write a review.

This article will provide you with the various types of customer experience survey questions you can ask your customers in order to refine your brand’s CX. 

Using Customer Experience Survey Questions to Measure Your CX

Since the success of your business hinges on customer experience, you should continually check in with your customers to ensure that you provide them with an excellent CX. Online surveys are one of the best and easiest ways of doing this. 

Customer experience survey questions are the key to measuring the strengths and weaknesses of your customer experience. This research technique can shed light on how your CX can be improved at every step of the buyer’s journey.

In order to make the most of your research efforts, however, it is important that you create customer experience survey questions that will yield valuable and accurate results, which will help you enhance your brand’s CX.  

The following will acquaint you with the various kinds of customer experience survey questions with examples. 

Questions about the Discovery Process

The first step in the buyer’s journey happens when they become aware of your brand. From their earliest encounter, a customer is already forming opinions about your company, which is why your CX needs to be flawless. After all, first impressions matter. Customer experience survey questions to ask about the discovery process include:

  1. How did you first learn about our company?
    1. Multiple-choice answer (i.e. “Social media” / “Google search” / “YouTube ad” / “Recommended by a friend” / “Other”)
  2. Think back to the first time you visited our website. On a scale of 1 – 10, how easy was it to find the information you were looking for?
    1. Scaled response (1 = very difficult 10 = very easy)
  3. How did our Instagram channel influence your feelings about our brand?
    1. Multiple-choice answer (i.e. “I did not visit your Instagram channel.” / “I visited your Instagram channel, but did not find the content interesting.” / “I learned a few new things about your brand from Instagram.” / “Your Instagram channel is what convinced me to purchase from your brand.”
  4. Which of the following features did you use while considering which product to purchase?
    1. Multiple-choice answer, with multiple selections allowed (i.e. “Live chat” / “Ratings and reviews” / “Support videos” / “Product comparison matrix”)

Questions about the Consideration Process

Once familiar with your brand and offerings, customers often shop around to find a better price or ensure they choose the product or service that best suits their needs. By understanding your customers’ thought process during this phase, you can enhance the CX to ensure your products and services are seen in the best light. Questions to ask include:

  1. While you were deciding which product to purchase, how easy was it to find the information you needed on our website?
    1. Scaled response (1 - 10, with 10 being very difficult)
    2. Multiple choice (i.e. “Very easy: / “somewhat easy” / “difficult” / “very difficult” / I did not find the information I was looking for on the website.”)
  2. What other companies did you consider before choosing our company?
    1. Multiple-choice answers with multiple selections allowed – list out your main competitors in these responses. 
    2. Based on the response to this question, you can use skip logic to route respondents to the appropriate questions to understand how you measure up to competitors.
  3. When choosing our product, how well did we convey the following aspects of our product : 
    1. Use a matrix to list out items you want to assess (i.e. product features, product quality, ease of use, pricing options)
    2. Allow users to rate each of these by providing a scale of 1 – 5 (1 = unclear, 5 = very clear)
  4. What was the best part about browsing our website?
    1. Multiple-choice answer (i.e. “The interactive design that let me explore product features” / “The videos” / “The blog with personal stories.”) 
    2. Open-ended answer  

Questions about the Purchase Process

customer survey questions

Once someone has decided to purchase from your company, it is imperative that your purchase process provides a smooth and enjoyable customer experience. Barriers in this process can result in abandoned carts, bounces or, even worse, a prospect choosing your competitor instead. 

  1. Where did you purchase this product?
    1. Multiple-choice answer (i.e. “On your website” / “On another website” / “At one of your stores” / “At an independent retailer”) 
  2. How easy was it to purchase this product on our website?
    1. Visual rating system with 1 – 5 stars
    2. Multiple choice (i.e. “Very easy” / “Somewhat easy” / “Difficult” / “Very difficult”)
  3. What can we do to improve the purchase experience?
    1. Text entry field to allow the respondent to provide unique insights about the checkout experience
    2. Multiple choice (i.e. “Allow guest checkout” / “Provide the option to check out using PayPal” / “Improve the mobile checkout experience”)

Questions about Usage & Support

Customer experience doesn’t end at the checkout. CX is equally important once your customer has the product in their hands or starts using your services. Ease of use plays into the overall experience, as does the support customers receive when they encounter issues. Understand how your customers use your products and access support by asking the following:

  1. Did you have any problems using the product at first? 
    1. The response can be binary (yes/no) to the first question. For those who answer “yes,” use skip logic to route them to the next questions.
    2. Or multiple choice (i.e. “No, I was able to use the product immediately.” / “I had some problems, but I was able to figure out how to use the product eventually.” / “It was very difficult to use this product.” / “I was unable to use the product.”)
  2. What problems did you experience when you first used the product?
    1. Open-ended answer.
  3. What actions did you take to resolve the problems you had using the product?
    1. Multiple choice (i.e. “I contacted customer support” / “I used your support forum” / “I watched videos on your YouTube channel”)
    2. For those who answer “I contacted customer support,” you can use skip logic to get a better understanding of their customer support experience. 
  4. How satisfied are you with the support our customer service team provided? 
    1. Customer Satisfaction Score survey (CSAT) format, with responses provided on a 1 – 5 scale, with 5 indicating “very satisfied.”
    2. Visual rating system with various emoticons.

Questions about Retention

Your customers are successfully using your product or service, so your job is done, right? Not quite. As long as your customers use your product, you will need to provide support and prompt them to make repeated purchases, be they to cross-sell or up-sell.

As such, it’s important to understand how long your customers will use your product. To understand this, the following questions are helpful. 

  1. How likely are you to continue using this service?
    1. Likert scale with responses ranging from extremely unlikely to extremely like.
  2. Would you purchase this product again?
    1. Multiple choice (i.e. “Yes” / “Maybe” / “No”)
    2. Use skip logic to route to additional questions to explore why someone would not purchase your product again.
  3. How long do you think you will use this product?
    1. Multiple choice (i.e. “A few weeks” / “A month or longer” / “A year” / “More than one year”)

Applying Your Findings to Improve Your CX

Today, customers have multiple resources at their fingertips to help them assess your brand. As such, the customer experience you provide can make the difference between retaining a customer for life or losing them to a competitor.  

While your customers shop around, the experiences they encounter along the way will influence their final purchasing decisions. Once they purchase your product or service, will they keep it and stay a loyal customer? Your CX may be the deciding factor.

Once the responses from your customer experience survey questions are in, you can start to sift through your findings and identify areas to improve CX at every step in the journey. You’ll be one step closer to attracting the right types of customers and keeping them satisfied throughout their entire relationship with your brand.

Frequently asked questions

What are some customer experience survey questions that ask about the discovery process?

To learn about the discovery process, you can ask questions about how customers first learned of your company, their first impression of your website, how your social media influences their feelings about your brand and what website features they utilized while making purchase decisions.

What are some customer experience survey questions that ask about the consideration process?

When researching the consideration process, you can ask questions about how easy it was for customers to find information on your website, what competitors they considered before choosing your company, how well customers think you conveyed certain aspects of your product and what customers believe to be the best aspect of browsing your website.

What are some customer experience survey questions that ask about the purchase process?

You can learn about the purchase process by asking questions about where customers purchased a product, how easy it was to purchase the product on your site and what you can do to improve the overall purchase experience.

What are some questions about usage and support?

You can learn about usage and support by asking questions about any problems customers might have encountered while using the product, what actions they took to overcome these problems and overall satisfaction with customer support and service.

What are some questions about retention?

To learn about customer retention, you can try asking questions about customers’ likelihood to continue using the service, if they will be repurchasing the product and how long they think they’ll be using the product.