Are surveys worth a customer’s time? Are you getting enough out of them to actually do something useful? Let’s be honest with ourselves here and admit that we, as customers ourselves, have often lied and said we’d answer a survey after customer support was over, and then hung up, not wanting to be bothered. A lot of customers will do this, so the real challenge is to make sure your customer feedback questions get really valuable and insightful data, so you can make the most of the few that actually do keep their promise and fill out surveys.
Customer feedback questions have become somewhat standardized over the years, and while some of the routine questions that most ask are indeed insightful, people have grown so accustomed to the bulk of them that they have a preprogrammed answer to give in response, thus meaning you aren’t getting what you could be getting from the precious small sector of people who volunteer to answer your questions.
Oh dear, that’s a problem. Well, the only way to really address this is to maybe think of some better feedback questions, right? Well, if you’re expecting some off the wall, amusing but insightful things here, you may be slightly disappointed as these will be moderately clinical in their wording and nature. Nonetheless, you’ll find that these do in fact get more out of your surveys than you otherwise likely are!
#1 – What drew you to us originally? – This one is to help you understand what needs various customers encountered and with what context, that caused them to look for a solution like you, and what about you appealed to their demographic, versus competition.
#2 – Who would you use if we didn’t exist? – This is a direct insight into what your biggest average competitor is, because if you aren’t there, they’d choose that company.
#3 – Can you name someone here who impressed you? – This one will allow you to find out things like if so and so with customer service was excellent, or if another person in sales or accounts was helpful. This helps you improve customer service by picking the commonly named people, and using them as examples for the rest to model their approaches around. It also helps you identify and reward excellent employees – never overlook that part of your duty!
#4 – Is there anything we could do better, and anything we do that annoys you? – These should be a singular question. I think it’s pretty obvious what you can learn from these.
#5 – What is something we should never stop doing? – This is the final one I have room for (I could name hundreds). But this is a big one, because it will help you identify what it is you are doing that makes customers love you. This is something you can focus on doing more and better, and of course, avoid ever unwittingly cutting out and thus losing customers.
These are only five of many such very strategic customer feedback questions that can give you a lot of insight for what few people actually provide feedback like this. Please, use these or a variation of them, you’ll be glad you did.
