If you are thinking about conducting a customer survey at your company, you're moving in the right direction. Customer feedback can help an organization understand what they do well, what needs to improve, and how to best market to new customers. But developing the questionnaire can be quite a task.
What questions do we ask?
How do we ask them?
How many questions do we ask?
If you're asking yourself these common questions about Voice of Customer (VoC), we are here to help. Our VoC company gives you several questions you should think about including in your customer survey.
Here are 8 questions you should include in your customer survey.
Question 1: Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The ultimate benchmarking question in market research. This is based on a scale of 0 to 10 where you ask likelihood to recommend. You group the 9 and 10s into a category called promoters. The 7 and 8s are passives. The 0 to 6s are detractors. The difference between the promoters and detractors is your NPS and it ranges from -100 to +100. This is one you'll want to benchmark yourself against others. Some of the best NPS ratings are Apple, Amazon, and JetBlue in the upper +70s and low +80s.
Question 2: Word Associations
This is a fun question to ask but also one that will provide a lot of depth and understanding of your brand. Ask "what is the first word or phrase that comes to mind when you think of...?" These answers are unaided and asked through an open comment box. The answers can range both positive or negative and make a great word count chart or word cloud. These can also be exported as single responses.
Question 3: Advertising Recall
This is an excellent question to help understand where your customers have seen or heard advertising for your company in the past 30 days. Here, you list off all of the different types of marketing and advertising you've done: social media, billboards, display advertising, television, radio, etc. You can use the results to help guide budget and understand sources of awareness.
Question 4: Importance and Satisfaction
For this question series you should start by asking "what factor(s) are most important to you when selecting a product or firm?" You can either ask respondents to score importance on a 1 to 5 scale, select one choice, or select multiple. Then later in the survey you ask satisfaction with the same criteria on a 1 to 5 scale. Then as you graph each on a scatter plot you can split the scores into quadrants to understand high and low priorities. Higher priorities are areas which were scored high in importance but low in satisfaction.
Question 5: Comparison to Competition and Benchmarks
At Drive Research we always talk about 4 benchmarks you should compare your customer survey results against. The first is your industry peers. These benchmarks can be purchased by your customer survey company. The second is the best-in-class brands. These would be the top NPS scores in the industry. Third is your competition. Ask how your satisfaction compares to the competition in your survey. The fourth and final benchmark is yourself. Compare your scores over time, quarter-after-quarter, year-over-year.
Question 6: Testimonials
Now we get into the value-added questions. If you do not have a formal testimonial process, a customer survey is a great way to collect a lot of testimonials quickly. You can simply ask customers to provide a 2 to 3 sentence testimonial to use in your marketing materials. Better yet, with an online survey you can set up skip patterns for those who rate you poorly. This will not ask the testimonial question to this audience.
Question 7: Reason to Contact
Use one of the final questions in your customer survey to give the respondent an opportunity to request a follow-up from your company. This can range from a sales lead to question, comment, or issue. If you are going to reach out to your customers through a mass effort like a customer survey, you might as well open the lines of communication and allow some follow-up.
Question 8: Future Research Participation
Finally, use the last question to inquire about future participation in market research. Market research often leads to more questions than answers. If additional questions emerge, you can follow-up with surveys, phone interviews, and other types of market research. The survey can be the first step of many to help you align your strategies with customer wants and needs.
Contact Us
Drive Research is a customer survey company in Syracuse, NY. We work with clients across the country and our team specializes in a number of industries. Interested in working with our Voice of Customer (VoC) company?
Contact us at 315-303-2040 or email us at [email protected].