Priority in Customer Satisfaction: "Develop skills to Listen them"

Every product or service is made for its customers. It's created to either solve their problems or fulfill their needs.

Your product or service revolves around your customers and their experiences, and every single day, you're making significant efforts to provide them with a positive experience.

This journey of providing your customers with a positive experience starts from the moment they land on your website and extends beyond the moment they become your customer. Although it's a never-ending commitment, encouraging them to become a loyal customer by retaining them is definitely considered a milestone of growth.

As Derek Sivers from CD Baby puts it, "Customer service is the new marketing." And that couldn't be truer.

Your customers' opinions and feedback are one of the most essential components for the sustainability and growth of your business and are considered important throughout the customer lifecycle.

So, why don't we involve them enough? Because we don't know how to.

How do you know if the customer is satisfied? Or dissatisfied? How do you decide to work on a new feature, if you don't even know whether the customer needs it or not? What do you think your customers expect from you? Did they find what they're looking for?

A customer's experience and feedback should be the only factors that validate important decisions within your business. In this post, we'll dig into customer satisfaction survey questions and real survey examples -- as well as what makes them so impactful.

Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

If you want to obtain valuable feedback from your customers then you have to be asking them the right questions. Sharing information isn't always an easy task, and it's not the customer's job to provide your business with constructive criticism. Instead, it's the surveyor's responsibility to create a thought-provoking prompt that engages the participant.

If you're getting stuck on deciding what to ask your customers, here are some of the types of questions we recommend including on your

customer satisfaction survey:

Product Usage

When it comes to customer success and satisfaction, it's critical that your business collects feedback about your product or service. If you don't, then it's more difficult to assess customer needs and provide effective solutions. Finding out how satisfied your users are with your offer provides your marketing and product teams with valuable information that can be used to improve customer retention. Some questions that you could ask in this section are:

How often do you use the product or service? Does the product help you achieve your goals?What is your favorite tool or portion of the product or service?What would you improve if you could?

Demographics

Demographics are essential to marketing and sales teams because they make it easier for companies to segment customers into buyer persona. By grouping customers together based on key characteristics, this categorization helps employees visualize their target audience. Marketing and sales teams can then use that information to pursue leads that are most likely to convert. Here are some demographics questions that you should consider including in your next survey:

How old are you?Where are you located?If applicable, what gender do you identify as?What is your employment status?What is your marital status and do you have children? When asking these types of questions, be sure to embrace a proactive and inclusive approach. These questions shouldn't be mandatory, so always provide an option for customer's to omit an answer. Your goal is to extract honest information, but you don't want it to come at the expense of the customer's comfort.

Satisfaction Scale

Sometimes there are aspects of your offer or business that you want feedback on, but they aren't things that your customers are actively addressing. In these cases, it helps to be direct with your customers and ask them how they feel about these specific details. Before you do though, you'll have to determine a quantifiable way to measure their responses. Adopting a satisfaction scale section is a great way to create a consistent approach to quantifying this subjective survey feedback. A few ways that you can implement this scale are:

A scale measuring from 1 to 10 (or another number). 1 is an extremely unsatisfied opinion and 10 meaning the customer was very satisfied.A descriptive scale that measures a customer's response from unsatisfied to satisfied. The customer is a given a short list of responses to choose from that range from "very unsatisfied" to "very satisfied."A picture scale that uses images to symbolize customer satisfaction. For example, you can use happy, sad, and indifferent emojis to quickly communicate customer feedback.

Open-Text

Open-text questions are survey questions that allow the participant to write out their response within a text box. This allows users to fully express their opinions using the customer´s voice instead of the company's pre-written responses. While they can sometimes be time-consuming to analyze, these questions encourage the participant to be honest and give them the freedom to address any topic. Open-text questions can be an instrumental asset when determining the core values of your customers. Here are open-text questions you can ask in your next survey:

In your own words, describe how you feel about (insert company name or product here).How can we improve your experience with the company?What's working for you and why?What can our employees do better?Do you have any additional comments or feedback for us?

Longevity

In the last section of your survey, you'll want to include questions about the steps that'll happen after submission. These questions permit your team to follow up with the participant in the future. This comes in handy when you roll out changes and want to get updated feedback from the same customers that were surveyed earlier. You can phrase these types of questions in a few different ways:

May we contact you to follow up on these responses?In the future, would you be willing to take this survey again?If we were to update (insert product feature here), could we reach back out to talk about these changes?

While measuring customer satisfaction can be tricky to manage, asking effective questions can reveal highly valuable customer insights. If you're still in need of some inspiration for your customer satisfaction survey, take a look at these examples we pulled from different companies.