Feedback surveys are a great way to hear directly from your customers. By listening to what they have to say, you can identify, or confirm, areas of improvement for your customer support team. Effective customer feedback surveys will have a mixture of closed and open-ended questions and be presented at just the right time. Always remember that customers are taking their valuable time to answer your survey, so it’s best to limit customer feedback surveys to 10 questions or less.

When designing a customer feedback survey, the first thing you should do is consider your goals. At the current time, are you interested in learning more about how customers feel about your products, competition, customer support team, or gaining insights in another area? Once you have a theme for the survey, you can select the ideal questions to support that goal. To help you get started, we’ve identified six insightful questions that you should consider when creating your next customer feedback survey.

1. How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the product or service?

This popular question is the most direct and fundamental way to collect customer satisfaction data. It’s usually measured by asking the customer to rate their level of satisfaction from 1 to 5, with 1 being highly dissatisfied and 5 being highly satisfied. Some companies measure a CSAT score by dividing the number of customers who selected a 4 or 5 by the total number of respondents. You can then multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage of satisfied customers, which you can use as a satisfaction benchmark for future surveys.

2. Which of the following words would you use to describe our product?

Learning how your customers would describe your product can help you understand how they truly feel. For example, hearing the word ‘buggy’ versus ‘life-saving’ will mean two very different things. You also can structure this question in a way that makes the data most useful to your needs.  If you’re trying to update some marketing material, you could present a multiple-choice list of words that the customer can select from. You could also leave the question as an open field and collect a variety of responses that provide valuable insights into the Voice of the Customer (VoC).

3. How often do you use the product/service you purchased?

A customer feedback survey is the perfect opportunity to ask questions about how customers are using your products or services. You may be able to identify the difference in habits between different demographic groups, or you might discover that your product or service is used in a unique way that you didn’t expect. This particular question will help you understand how engaged customers are with your product and is best presented as a multiple-choice selection. Hopefully, these types of questions can help you identify some product improvements that can lead to improved customer retention.

4. How would you rate your interaction with our employees?

It is always essential to understand if the efforts of your customer-facing employees are having a positive impact on customers. You can present this question as a simple rating scale from 1 to 5 or by having them select from a multiple-choice list with descriptions ranging from positive to negative. A positive response to this question is a valuable confirmation of the effectiveness of your customer support activities. A negative one can help identify team performance issues or the need for more training overall.

5. Why did you choose our product or service over others in the market?

Competition can be fierce, and you may not always know the best way to describe your unique differentiators. One way to help with this is to ask your customers to describe them for you. This question, best asked as an open-ended entry field, will help you collect data on the specific reasons why customers chose you. These statements can be summarized and used in your product marketing materials. The answers to this question also reveal which of your unique features are the most appreciated by your customer base.

6. Kindly share a few things we could do better.

One of the best things you can do near the end of your customer feedback survey is to give your respondents a chance to answer an open-ended question. Simply asking them for feedback about what you can do better is a great way to do this. Many of your customers may choose to skip the question entirely or provide only a short response, but some of them may have much more to say. By collecting feedback about specific areas of improvement, you might be able to find some actionable ideas to help improve your customer experience.

Your customers are your most valuable asset, and you should always be looking for new opportunities to collect their feedback directly. By defining a specific goal for each customer satisfaction survey, you can select questions that will provide you meaningful data to review. Feedback is a gift, and regularly seeking out customer feedback will always be vital for companies dedicated to providing world-class customer service.