If you don’t know what your customers are thinking or feeling, it’s going to be difficult to set goals and put together a business strategy. A feedback questionnaire is the best way to figure out whether your customers are happy or not and how you should improve your product or service. Their answers are a great benchmark. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know. Customers want to be appreciated, and by listening to their problems, you’re proving that you care and will do as much as possible to provide a solution. But asking the wrong questions in the wrong way will result in useless answers—wasting your time and your customer’s time. And if you can’t track or measure feedback, there’s no use in creating the survey.
Be clear in the purpose of the survey. What kind of survey are they doing and why are they doing it. A confused customer will likely abandon the questionnaire.
Pinpoint the questions you want to ask. Make sure you’re only asking questions that will provide useful and measurable answers. Irrelevant questions are a waste of time and will only take up more time. Try sticking to a questionnaire with 10 questions or less.
Don’t make each question mandatory. We’ve all been there. You see the little red asterisk next to a question you’d prefer not to answer. It’s frustrating and will result in low response rates. Leave it up to the customer to fill out what they want and don’t want to fill out.
Offer particular answers. This makes the questionnaire much easier for a customer to fill out. If you do this, be sure to offer all possible answers to the question you’re asking. If none of the options match what they’re thinking, you won’t get accurate feedback or the customer may abandon the survey all together. Add an “other” option or a blank area for the consumer to customize their answer. Using a rating scale of 1-5 or 1-10 also works.
Be specific. Yes, pre-selected answers make the questionnaire easy to fill out. But you may get a more detailed response if you stay specific and provide the option to dive further in their feedback. Asking surface questions like “What did you think of our customer service?” will get you surface answers like “It was okay.”
Create a thank you page or email. Let them know you appreciate their feedback. You could even tell the customer what you plan to do with their answers so they know it was worth it. They took the time to fill out the questionnaire, let them know you’ll take the time to use their feedback to improve the product or service.
