The customer feedback surveys are a crucial part of business strategy and planning. It provide detailed and very accurate insight to the customers. Businesses can easily assess and evaluate their customer journey, business processes, employee, quality of product and services and the entire operation with the customer feedback surveys. The main objective of any customer feedback survey is to understand your customers. Without understanding and learning about the desires, needs, expectations and problems of the customer a business can’t sustain its reputation and growth. The customer and businesses relationship is a very delicate relation, no matter what industry you belonged to or what type of audience you are targeting, one thing is for sure that the key to success is the customer satisfaction. In order to strengthen this relationship the businesses often conduct customer feedback surveys to collect meaningful data which help them to take actions and set policies for higher customer satisfaction.
For any customer feedback survey the most important thing is the data that is being collected. Both the data quality and quantity matters. For that it is crucial to prepare questions correctly to ensure high quality data collection with higher customer response rates. If a customer feedback survey asks irrelevant or confusing question the customer response rate will decline and the quality of the data will also decline. The businesses can measure directly how well it is performing in general and businesses can also easily highlight their strengths and weaknesses. At the end it all depends on the questions that a business will ask to the customers. These questions will determine the amount and accuracy of the data that a business can collect from any customer feedback campaign. The purpose of this blog is to discuss the major types of the question, how a business should prepare questions and some examples of the most widely used customer feedback questions.
What are the Best Customer Feedback Survey Questions?
The customer feedback surveys are a well-established field with a huge multinational and local marketing and research institutes and agencies working on it. The customer feedback surveys have been established from a very simple form of just asking your customers whether they are happy or not to a more sophisticated form which accurately identifies the problems in the system and let the businesses make informed decisions to improve everything from their customer journey to products’/services’ quality and each and every aspect of the customer journey. Here are some most widely used and proven types of customer feedback survey questions that can help any business achieve their goals:
- Rating Scale
- Happiness Meter
- Open-ended Questions
- Close-ended Questions
- Conditional Logic
- Likert Scale
- Multiple Choice Questions
- Demographic Questions
These can be considered as the fundamental types of the customer feedback survey questions. There are some more categories but mostly all of them are derived from the above mentioned types.
Customer Feedback Survey Question: Rating Scale
Rating scale is a simplest form of the customer feedback survey questions. It ask customers to rate their experience, or the service quality or the agent behavior or the product/service or any other thing. Basically the rating scale answer is a star based rating or it could be 0 to 10 scale or any such thing. The customers can chose any digit or percentage as per their satisfaction.
Here are some rating scale question’s example:
- How would you like to rate our service quality out of 5 stars?
- How many start would you like to give to our [NAME] product/service?
- Please rate how happy/satisfied you are with your waiting experience?
Customer Feedback Survey Question: Happiness Meter
The happiness meter is one of the most widely used customer feedback question type it is a simple question with a single choice answer, the customers are asked to select their answer from a range of emoticons or cartoonish figures with expressions ranging from ‘sad’ or ‘upset’ to ‘happy’ and ‘excited’. The answer usually contains 3 or 5 emoticons or icons which clearly express the happiest and unhappiest and middle stages by expressions or any other indicator such as a text under the icon to identify the state of happiness/unhappiness. Usually businesses use emoticons. That is why it is called the happiness meter.
Here are some happiness meter question’s examples:
- How happy/satisfied are you with your today’s experience?
- How happy/satisfied are you with the employee behavior?
- Will you be happy to recommend our product/service to a friend?
Customer Feedback Survey Question:Open-ended Questions
The open-ended questions are very simple and provide you a chance to get more detailed answer rather than just a single yes/no or happy/unhappy answer. The open ended-questions are very good at encouraging your customers to express themselves and allow them to write about their experience or their thoughts in a simple and short text format. Later the marketers can read the text to segregate it in multiple categories to quantify the happy and unhappy experiences and the business can also get good suggestions or recommendations directly from its customers.
Read More: How to Build Customer Feedback Strategy?
Here are some open-ended question’s examples:
- What feature should we add in our product/service to make it more desirable for you?
- How did you heard about us? Please mention all with comma ‘,’ separated.
- If you would like to change just one thing about our product/service what would it be?
Customer Feedback Survey Question:Close-ended Questions
The close-ended questions are customer feedback survey questions with just a very simplified and short answer, usually it is just one word, yes/no or true/false, etc. The close-ended questions are usually used in pre-text of a wider set of questionnaires, and on the bases of the answer the customers can be taken to the next set of questions. It is used when there are two or more patterns are set for the questionnaire. Sometimes the businesses use close-ended questions as a poll or short survey too. The close-ended questions are widely used in customer feedback surveys.
Here are some close-ended question’s examples:
- Do you like the new feature of our [NAME] product/service?
- Was your problem resolved as per your expectations?
- Would you like to buy [NAME] product/service again?
Customer Feedback Survey Question:Conditional Logic
The conditional logic questions are mostly used to collect detailed data to identify an important problem or issue. The conditional logics means that the surveyor ask a question with multiple answers and on the bases of the selection of the customer more follow up questions are asked. Each answer will take the user to a different set of follow up questions. That is how the conditional logic customer feedback questions work. The conditional logic is used to collect only filtered information about a very specific topic. Such surveys are very helpful in identifying the problems and finding their solutions.
Here is anexample of conditional logic customer feedback survey question:
- Was your experience satisfactory?
The answer would be either Yes or No each with a set of follow up questions that can help identifying the exact cause of each answer.
In case of yes, the customers can be asked about what do they liked the most and in case of no the businesses can present possible reasons for a bad experience and when a customer chose any one of them the next follow up question can be to further get precise info about it. For example if the customers say the waiting experience was not good, the next question could be related to the possible factors that can impact the waiting experience. That is how the conditional logic survey questions work.
Customer Feedback Survey Question: Likert Scale
The likert scale is also a measuring scale which usually have value of 1 to 5 or 7 or 9 points. It is mostly used at the end of the long customer feedback surveys. The questions are generic and doesn’t required very specific details for the answer, a simple scale is enough. It is usually used to understand what your customers might be thinking about certain things.
Here are some likert scale question’s examples:
- Do you agree that the service A is better than the service B?
- How agreeable this statement is “The new counters have reduced the waiting time”?
- What do you think how helpful the latest feature [NAME of the Feature] is?
Customer Feedback Survey Question: Multiple Choice Questions
The multiple choice questions are most widely used in different surveys. The question format is simple and it can provide exact information that the business wants. The question is presented with 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 possible answers and the customer will have to choose one answer. In some cases the customer feedback survey questions are designed to take more than one choices in the answer and sometimes the multiple choice customer feedback survey question is used to implement conditional logic. Whatever the case is the multiple choice survey questions are a great tool to improve your feedback data.
Here are some multiple choice question’s examples:
- How many of our branches in Dubai have you visited in past six months?
- What two factors out of following will compel you to purchase again from us?
- What features from the following make us better than other businesses?
Customer Feedback Survey Question: Demographic Questions
The demographic questions are used to collect customer’s personal information and usually comes at the beginning or end of the customer feedback survey. Businesses can use different types of formats for the answers for example, radio button, check boxes, dropdowns, and in some cases open-ended answer formats are also used. The main objective is to collect customers’ personal information to build a customer bio or profile which has several applications in marketing and communication and customer satisfaction.
Here are some demographic question’s examples:
- What is your age?
- What is your gender?
- In which emirate do you live?
- In which industry do you work?
- What is your occupation?
Businesses can use as many questions as they want but the best practice is to only ask for most relevant and important personal information that can help you to achieve your goals.
What are the Different Types of Customer Feedback Surveys?
The above question types are most commonly used by businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE. Apart from learning the question types another most important thing is to understand when you should use which type of question to ensure better customer response and a good quality customer feedback data. There are five major types of customer feedback surveys and all of the above mentioned questions can be used to conduct any type of customer feedback survey.
- NPS Survey (Net Promoter Score)
- CSAT Score (Customer Satisfaction Survey)
- CES Survey (Customer Effort Score)
- Rating Survey
- Customized Survey
NPS Survey (Net Promoter Score)
The NPS Surveys or Net Promoter Score is the measurement of the customer satisfaction and it is also considered to be the measurement of the development, growth and performance of any business. It is a very simple customer feedback survey and it usually use only a single question to measure the customer satisfaction.
- How likely are you to recommend our business/product/service to your family and friends?
That is it. It is that simple. The answer is a 1 to 10 point scale. If a customer is satisfied and very happy only then they might recommend your brand or service/product to others. That is why the NPS Score is also taken as the equivalent to the general performance and success of a business.
CSAT Score (Customer Satisfaction Survey)
The CSAT Score or Customer Satisfaction Score is also a customer satisfaction survey but the difference between the NPS and CSAT is that the CSAT always ask about a particular aspect of the customer journey. Different businesses use different types of questions. Usually the answer is a rating scale or a happiness meter.
- How satisfied are you with our [NAME] service/product?
The customer satisfaction score is a widely used customer feedback surveys.
CES Survey (Customer Effort Score)
The CES Survey or the Customer Effort Score is the measurement of how difficult or easy any particular task or step was during their interaction or availing the service. It is used to rectify the problems of the service delivery mechanisms and it is also widely used to improve the customer journey. The question format is simple and mostly only rating scale is used.
- How easy or difficult it was to make the payment from newly installed self-service kiosk?
Sometimes businesses also use a follow up question or just an open-ended follow up question to take more elaborated customer feedback.
Rating Survey
The rating surveys are most commonly used for on-site feedback. The question is short and submitting the feedback is very simple and easy for the customers so when the businesses want to collect feedback from a very large amount of customers or daily visitors usually the rating scales questions are used. The business can ask the customers to rate anything such as the service, the waiting experience, the staff, the price, the facility or anything.
- How would you rate your experience with our sales staff or counter agent?
Usually a visual rating is used but some businesses do use the rating scale. Sometimes the marketers also use the emoticons or simple text such as very good, good, neutral, bad or very bad, etc.
Customized Survey
The customized surveys are general purpose surveys. The businesses can use such surveys for a variety of different objectives. The customized surveys usually contains at least five questions and sometimes the question could be as many as twenty or even more. It entirely depends upon the objectives of the campaign and what type of feedback data the business want to collect. There is particular set of questions that a business can ask, for example if a business wants to analyze the customer journey it can include questions that are asking to opine on different aspects of the customer journey and so on. The customized surveys can pushed through multiple digital formats along with on-site interactive devices. The results required deep analysis to form actionable reports. Such surveys can include any type of question and are considered to be the most effective tool to collect valuable business intelligence.
Conclusion
The customer feedback survey data can provide a very valuable business intelligence and deeper insight to the customers as well as the operational strategies and employees too. The customer feedback data quality is always a big concern for the businesses. The data quality is highly dependent on what you ask and how you ask. That is why we wrote this blog to provide our audience with a deeper understanding of the survey questions and different customer feedback survey types. It is crucial that a business chose right question to achieve the goal. The questions could compel or repel customers form submitting the feedback so right wording and right question type is very important. Sometimes businesses just ask too many general purpose questions, or sometimes double barrel questions which not only confuse the customers but also result in inconclusive or poor quality data. It is always better to use a professional customer feedback system to collect customer feedback. RSI Concepts is a leading customer feedback system provider in Dubai, UAE. If you need any help or want to learn more about our customer feedback collection tools, feel free to reach us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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