Asking the right questions to your customers can be a difficult balancing act. You want your customers to think about the answers, but you don’t want them to be tired or frustrated with your customer feedback survey. The solution for this dilemma is to create specific customer feedback questions with a clear objective. Today, we’re bringing you a go-to template for improving your website, your business and getting valuable insights about your competitors.
Voice of customers can become one of your most powerful weapons if you want to increase your bottom line and create positive experiences. Not only are you able to gather business ideas and suggestions, but you’re getting them from the most valuable group – your website’s visitors. This way you can align your offer to their needs and increase brand loyalty. According to a study by Cint, 62% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that has asked for their opinion(source).
Worried about negative consumer backlash? Collecting criticism shows you what needs to be changed but a customer feedback form is also a great outlet for you users. You’d rather see negative opinions in your feedback inbox than all over social media, right?
Take a look at the list of useful customer feedback questions you can implement on your own website in just minutes:
Ask about your website:
When asking people about your website you should avoid general questions and rather ask about specific elements. Here’s a list of basic questions you might want to ask about your product’s website:
1. What task did you want to accomplish on this website?
You might be really surprised, as visitors might have been looking for things you wouldn’t even consider before (and no traditional web analytics would tell you that). This might turn out to be a valuable suggestion for your product new features or website structure.
2. Were you able to find the information you were looking for on our website?
3. Did you find that information valuable?
Questions like that can help you quickly assess the information architecture of your website. The value of information is a simple indicator if your content is useful for the customers.
When you’re asking about customer experience on your website, it’s worth considering to use Customer Effort Score. This way you can discover ways to decrease users’ effort and improve the overall experience:
4. How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?
5. How did this effort compare to your expectations?
Asking about expectation gives you additional insight about your brand. Maybe visitors, in fact, expect a lot of effort when dealing with your advanced product? To be on the safe side, though, it’s useful to compare this with your competition. If their solution is easier to handle in the eyes of the users, you will be losing potential customers to your opponents.
6. How visually appealing is our website?
7. How easy is it to navigate our website?
8. What do you think about the story we tell through our website?
When you want to evaluate your website using customer feedback it’s always handy to ask about different aspects of the page. Answers to general questions like “do you like our website?” can be misguiding, because visitors may, for example, like the look and feel but be disappointed about the textual content. When you ask direct questions, you minimize the risk of making bad website redesign decisions. There is no harm, however, in trying to uncover general mood of your website’s visitors. In order to do that you can ask them to choose from different mood icons.
Using mood icons is a good way to ask about general impressions
9. Is our pricing clear?
10. How can we improve our pricing page?
Remember that if you’re most interested in gathering customer feedback about your pricing page, the best way to go is to implement your feedback form directly on this page.
11. What originally attracted you to our website?
First impressions are extremely important for web visitors. Knowing how you made people stay on your website gives you that extra knowledge for your next website tweaks.
12. If you were to review the website what score would you give it out of 5?
When asking a rating question you can also additionally ask why have you given this score? to gather extra customer feedback and uncover the customer’s rationale. You can also change the scale to 10 points, but scale 1-5 performs better.
13. What did you like best about our website?
Asking about different aspects of your website (navigation, look & feel, content) is one thing, but there might be this one tiny detail that draws people to your website. This question is a good way of identifying selling points of your page.
14. Do you have any other comments, questions, or concerns?
Open question like that give you a chance to find out about bugs and other problems with your website. Being the first one to know about such issues helps you protect your brand’s reputation.
16. When looking for this product, how likely are you to consider our company first?
There are several basic questions that can give you interesting (and sometimes surprising) insights about your own company:
17. How did you hear about us?
This question is a great way of evaluating your marketing channels and helps you decide what to focus on in your advertising efforts.
18. Why did you choose us as your service provider?
It is extremely important to know why people choose your product over everyone else’s. Is it the informative website? Is it a savvy salesman? Is it great online reputation? Ask this question and see what (or who) brings you the most value.
19. What problem would you like to solve with our product?
Knowing what kind of solution people are seeking in your product helps you focus on its strongest features or decide which direction to go in product development process.
20. What would you say to someone who asked about us?
You have probably memorized several descriptions of your brand, which you use depending on the person you’re talking to. A question like that, however, allows you to find out what your customers think of you, an extremely important insight in the digital environment where perception is reality.
21. If you were unhappy with us what can we do to get you to come back?
This question gives you a chance to uncover any customer issues and mend them before they go viral.
22. What is the primary benefit that you have received from our company?
23. What features could you not live without?/What is the one thing that we should never stop doing?
Asking questions like that is the easiest way to evaluate your killer features. Using the analytics, you know which features are popular but customer feedback informs you which feature is the most important.
24. What features could you live without?
Keep it simple stupid! You probably know (and live by) this rule. When it comes to your own product, however, you might be tempted to exaggarate. This question helps you identify the overkill features.
Installing feedback form on website can engage customers
Ask About Your Competition:
Knowing your brand’s strengths and weaknesses is one thing, but the knowledge about your competition is also essential. Chances are, you have done your own market research and know who are the biggest players in your niche. Your customers, however, have their own opinion about this. In their eyes, you can be an alternative for a brand you haven’t even considered as competition. This is yet another chance to reconsider the features of your product and the way they are showcased on your website:
25. Who can we learn from?
26. What would you use as an alternative if our company was no longer available?
27. What makes us stand out from the competition?
28. Compared to our competitors, is our product quality better, worse, or about the same?
29. Compared to our competitors, are our prices higher, lower, or about the same?
Ask in a right way
When creating a customer feedback form remember about clarity of questions, but also keep in mind that the tone should be conversational. This way, you are more likely to engage customers who will, in turn, provide you with specific and helpful feedback.
Different question types engage users
In order to keep things interesting for the respondents, you can use different question types. Open questions work when you want your visitors to express their opinion. Sliders are useful for grading tasks and closed droplist allow you to limit the options when asking, for example, about how users heard about your product. If you are giving users two-three answer options, consider using radiobutton question type. This way you’re not only keeping your visitors engaged but the feedback form is also more informative and easier to analyze for you.
Customer feedback is a way to gather valuable insights that help you improve your product’s website and the product itself. What is more, engaging and usable customer feedback survey is a way to establish better relation ship with a user. Relationship that makes it more likely to turn this user into a customer. Remember that, when you’ll create your next feedback form.
Torsten is CEO and founder of Userpeek. He is an old stager in the online business with 20 years of experience as an online marketer, conversion rate optimizer and UX strategist.
