Customer Feedback Questions You Should Dare to Ask

Done incorrectly, customer feedback questions can feel like a kid constantly asking his mom “why?” (at the very least) and downright annoying (at the very most).

And yet, customer feedback questions can also be an invaluable tool for your business.

Regardless of whether you run a multinational company or a local bakery, asking your customers the right questions can give you a serious advantage over your competition – precisely because the right feedback responses will allow you to truly understand your customers and provide them what they need in return.

We have already discussed, quite extensively, a wide range of topics connected to customer feedback methods,customer feedback tools, customer feedback mistakes, and even the (in)famous NPS (Net Promoter Score).

As such, we will not expand any longer on these topics – or at least not in the article at hand.

In exchange, if you are looking for the best customer feedback questions (and more importantly, how to make sure they are right for your specific situation), this is the piece you have been looking for.

How exactly to ask for feedback from your customers?

Our next section covers this in detail.

Feedback Question Examples for Every Scenario

Asking the right questions in your customer survey is, in many ways, half of the entire deal. If you’re not asking the right questions, you won’t get the right input (not to mention, you might end up annoying your respondents).

Regardless of whether you are looking for feedback questions for the service industry, such as for restaurants, or customer feedback questions for real estate, your questions will essentially revolve around 13 main categories, as follows:

Customer Service

These customer questions are purely meant to analyze customer experience and improve it, whether it is for a physical product or a service sold over the internet.

Some examples include:

1. Are you pleased with how you have been greeted?
2. Was our location satisfactory to you?
3. Did you like interacting with our staff?

Exit Surveys

Essentially, these questions are meant to help you understand why a customer might not want to buy from you (anymore) or decides to cancel your service. Some of the good survey questions to ask when it comes to this type of problem include:

1. Is our product not meeting your expectations?
2. Is our product/ service no longer of use to you?
3. Do you intend to test out another product in the same niche?

Product Surveys

Sometimes, you need to know what you are doing right as well (and not just what you are doing wrong). This will help you emphasize the best features of your product – both in marketing and sales campaigns and in your customer service’s day to day interactions with your customers. Some of the feedback survey questions you could use here include the following:

1. Did our product/ service make an impact on your business or on your lifestyle?
2. If yes, what is the impact we had?
3. What is your absolute favorite feature of our product/ service?

Product Improvements

These questions are quite direct and they tap directly into the specific positives and negatives of your product. Some customer feedback questions you could include in this category are:

1. Which is/are the feature(s) you love most?
2. Which is/ are the feature(s) you don’t like/ don’t find useful?
3. Can you name a feature you would like to see in the future?

Customer Needs

Understanding WHO your customers are and WHAT are their wants and needs is extremely important because it will eventually help you build a better product and create a better experience for them. Some of the questions to ask customers to learn more about them include the following:

1. What are the challenges we help you solve?
2. How long have you been using the product?
3. When did you start to see results?

Looking for even more customer feedback questions to inspire you? 

Download 100 customer feedback questions 

Marketing Campaigns

When you create marketing campaigns, having your customers’ input can be priceless because it will help you bring to life campaigns that are truly suitable for your target audience.

Here are some market research questions to ask customers when you want to draw marketing information from them:

1. How did you find us/ how did you hear about us?
2. Have you been a customer for a long time now?
3. If yes, for how long?

Competition

Your customers are a great lens to use when you want to learn more about your competitors. These questions have to be handled quite carefully because they can very easily sound pushy, intrusive, or like you are downright threatened by your competition.

Here are some examples:

1. Have you ever used a similar product before?
2. If yes, how would you compare the experiences?
3. What product were you using before you purchased ours?

User Experience Surveys

It is essential to provide an excellent customer experience on your site or in your product (if you are selling a digital product, service, or SaaS). People want things to be simple, intuitive, and perhaps even a little fun – and your site and product UX should match these wants.

Here are some good survey questions to ask when you want to learn more about your customers’ interaction with your site and/or digital product:

1. Have you visited our site?
2. Did you find our site easily?
3. How did you find our site?

The same questions can be adapted to a digital product as well, with their focus lying on how easy it is to use. For example:

1. Have you used our product?
2. How many hours a week do you use the product?
3. Do you find it easy to use?

Testing Your New Product

Launching a new product, a new feature, or a new strategy can be quite terrifying. As such, testing it our with a customer survey can be a very good idea. You can either send out these surveys before you launch (when the product is still in the incipient stage for example) or during a user testing phase (where you hand the product to a selected few customers and ask for their feedback on it).  Here are some questions you might want to ask in this situation:

1. Would you/ did you find [new feature/ product/ strategy] useful?
2. Would you buy [new feature/ product] if it was available?
3. If we introduced [new feature/ product], would you want to test it?

Customer Purchase Habits

Your customers have different buying habits – and as such, it is quite important to understand how different categories of people buy, so that you can optimize their path from simply “checking out” your product to an actual “check out” (of any kind: online or not).

Some of the customer feedback questions you could use to better understand your customers’ purchase patterns include:

1. Was it easy/ difficult to complete the purchase?
2. Did you find the buying process to be time-consuming?
3. Is there something you would improve about the check-out process?

Employees

If you have employees or team members who have a client-facing position, learning about your customers’ interaction with them can be a priceless asset (not because it will help you be quicker in how you place the blame, but because it will help you understand where things are going well and where things are going… not so well).

Here are some customer service survey and client-facing employee survey questions  you could use:

1. Do you recall the name of the employee who helped you?
2. How was your experience with this person? How would you rate it?
3. Did this person help by answering your questions and/or concerns?
4. Would you like to interact with this person again?
5. Would you say this person did an outstanding job?
6. If not, why?
7. What are some things you would improve about the interaction you had with our employee today?
8. Is there any complaint you would like to make?

Quantitative Data Collection

Collecting quantitative data is essential if you want to understand where you can meet your customers’ needs better and where you are already doing it quite well. Some of the questions you could include in a quantitative data collection survey include the following:

1. Would you recommend this to a friend? How likely is it that it will happen? (this is used to find the Net Promoter Score)
2. How do you rate your satisfaction with our business? (this is used to find the Customer Satisfaction Score)

Net Promoter Score

As you may know, NPS (Net Promoter Score) is used to determine the detractors and the promoters of a business or product. Some of the questions you could include in an NPS survey are:

1. On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to talk positively about our product to your friends?
2. On a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied were you with the delivery services offered?
3. On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to buy from us again?

In addition to the classic NPS questions (such as those mentioned above), there are also customer service questions you could ask and which would eventually lead to an increase in the Net Promoter Score:

1. How do you think we could make the purchase, check-out, or delivery processes faster and easier for you?
2. Is there something we could change about our product to make it more user-friendly?
3. Is there something you expected from our product/service and you did not get?

Need more customer feedback, NPS, and customer-centric questions to add to your survey or feedback? 

Download 100 customer feedback questions 

Industry-Specific

Depending on what industry you work in, you might also want to add some industry-specific questions into the mix. Below, you will find some questions typical for the food/ restaurant and retail industries:

1. Did you have to wait in line for more than [x] minutes?
2. Did you check for the product’s specs online?
3. How likely are you to bring a large party of friends/ relatives in our restaurant?

All of the questions in this article are examples. You can definitely create your own, and you can definitely stray from what we suggested here as well. As long as it brings you knowledge, value, and the potential to improve your business, you can use any question you want.

How To Build a Successful Customer Feedback Survey

Many people use customer feedback surveys as they would with a machine gun: endlessly shooting questions at their users in an almost violent, resentful way.

Instead, customer feedback surveys should be built in a tone of friendship and cooperation. They should not feel like a question-based aerial attack but like a genuine discussion. It should make your customers feel like they are being listened to, not assaulted.

That being said, you should build a customer feedback survey kind of the same as you would bake a cake:

• You decide what you want from this cake (birthday, anniversary, wedding, to eat it all on your own on a Friday night as you binge-watch Netflix shows – you decide)
• You get the best ingredients
• You follow the instructions on how to bake the cake (step by step, in the indicated order)
• You decorate the cake
• You serve it (at the best moment)
• You ask people “did you like it?” obsessive-compulsively until they say YES, IT WAS THE BEST CAKE EVER. 

OK, maybe not the last part. But everything else can be brought into the world of feedback questionnaires and the question of how to ask for feedback from your customers becomes a lot easier.

• You decide what is the purpose of your customer feedback (collecting feedback on a new feature, on the service, etc.)
• You gather the best ingredients (including the best client feedback software – cough, cough, 123FormBuilder – and the best feedback questions)
• You structure the survey in a way that has logic, coherence, and follows your goal
• You make it pretty
• You “serve” it to your customers (at the best moment)

… And that’s pretty much it.

For obvious reasons, we skipped the last part from the aforementioned cake bake – but there’s nobody to stop you from asking one last feedback survey question about how relevant your customers found the entire survey.

Furthermore, if you are looking for customer feedback question templates, keep in mind that we have a very comprehensive collection of customer feedback templates that you can grab and adjust as you please with our form builder.

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