Getting customer feedback is one of the most effective ways to increase revenue and drive loyalty to your business. But asking for feedback can be overwhelming and is more challenging than it sounds.
How do you ask customers for feedback? What questions should you ask? How do you encourage customers to give feedback? Where do you even start? These are all questions you’ve likely thought about.
In this post, I’ll answer these questions and much more. I’ll share proven ways to get customer feedback, a list of top questions you can start using right now and explain how you can take your customer experience to the next level.
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Why Is Customer Feedback So Important?
No business owner wants to hear that their customer service is terrible or that their products or services are inadequate. But feedback like this is critical because it can help improve your business in three fundamental ways.
- It improves your products or services: It isn't easy to understand all of your customers' needs when introducing a new product or service. The market research you perform can help, but the feedback you get from customers provides insights into what’s working well and what needs improving. The same goes for more established products and services.
- It improves your customer experience: If you provide the best customer experience at every interaction point with your business, your customers are far more likely to stay loyal. Customer feedback can help determine if your customers are happy with your service and highlight where you need to improve.
- It shows customers you care: When you ask for your customer’s feedback, you tell them their opinion matters. This allows customers to help shape your business, making them feel more attached to your company and creating a stronger relationship.
What Questions Should You Ask Your Customers?
When it comes to customer feedback, there are many potential questions you can ask to improve your customer service, upgrade your product or service, and better understand your customers. The questions below cover all these aspects. The answers you receive will provide you with the most essential information needed to make the biggest impact on your business.
Question 1: How did you find out about us?
What you’ll learn: Determine how your customers find you so you can fine tune your marketing and better understand where to spend your time and money with advertisements and promotions.
Question 2: Did our product or service meet your expectations? If not, why?
What you’ll learn: Enables you to improve your offering and close the gap between customer expectations and the actual customer experience when using your products/services.
Question 3: Did our customer service or support team help you?
What you’ll learn: Understand how your team is interacting with customers and what needs to be improved.
Question 4: What would you change or improve about our product/service?
What you’ll learn: Understand if your product or service is meeting customer expectations, how you compare with competitors, and how you can improve it.
Question 5: What did you like most about your experience? Why?
What you’ll learn: Narrow down the specific parts of your business that are working well (e.g., customer service, product, etc.) and use them as selling points to attract new customers.
Question 6: How would you describe your experience?
What you’ll learn: Determine whether any parts of your website or in-store experience need improvement.
Question 7: On a scale of 0-10, how likely would you be to recommend us to friends, family or colleagues?
What you’ll learn: This question provides a way to measure the customer experience and their loyalty to your business.
Question 8: On a scale of 0-10 (dissatisfied to satisfied), how would you rate your satisfaction with us?
What you’ll learn: Customer satisfaction is a great way to analyze customer service and product/service quality.
Question 9: On a scale of 0-10 (not easy to very easy), how would you rate your checkout experience?
What you’ll learn: Whether you own a brick-and-mortar store or ecommerce shop, your checkout is one of the most critical parts of the customer experience. This question will help you quantify where you stand.
Question 10: What would you change about your experience?
What you’ll learn: Discover specific areas within your business that frustrate or annoy your customers and how you can improve them to meet customer expectations.
Question 11: How could we upgrade this product or service?
What you’ll learn: Get valuable insights into new features or product/service additions that can help you attract new customers and deliver enhanced benefits to existing ones.
6 Ways to Ask Customers for Feedback
It’s one thing to know what feedback questions to ask your customers - but how will you actually ask them? Here are six ways to collect feedback, no matter where your customers are.
1. Send an Email
To get feedback via email successfully, it’s imperative that your email design is clear and easy to understand. Customer feedback emails should have a minimal design, simple copy, and a clear call to action.
A phrase like “how was your recent order” is a great way to engage with your customers but you’ll also want to share why you want their feedback. Doing so can make all the difference between a customer responding or ignoring your email because it reassures them that you care and that feedback will be acted upon.
Also, you’ll need to choose the right feedback method for your business. This could be a link to a short survey or an interactive email with a rating system inside the message.
2. Conduct Social Media Polls
You can get a lot of information about what customers think about your business by searching for your company name on different social media platforms and seeing all the posts on your feed.
However, if you want more specific information, conducting a quick poll that enables your customers to click a response is a great way to gather feedback. The main thing to remember when designing social polls is to keep them short and easy to answer!
3. Develop a Survey
Surveys are a simple and effective way to gather customer feedback. You can use free feedback platforms such as SurveyMonkey and Google Surveys, but you’ll need to develop questions that help you get the right feedback as quickly as possible.
The longer the survey, the fewer customers will fill it out! That’s why offering incentives to complete the survey such as discounts and free trials is also essential.
It’s best to email surveys to customers who have recently purchased something from your business. This way, you have the best chance of getting a response and a higher likelihood that the feedback will be valuable.
4. Add a Form to Your Website
Having a form on your website can benefit your business by allowing your customers to give feedback anytime. Forms can be displayed as popups, slide-ins, or panels on your site, but they shouldn't interrupt the customer experience and should be simple and short to complete.
The good news is you don't have to be a tech wiz to do this. There are loads of free no-code form tools that enable you to build customized forms. These tools also offer standard templates that take just minutes to implement.
5. Collect Real-Time Feedback
Traditional methods of gathering feedback like surveys and emails are excellent. But if you want to get real-time feedback that produces even greater insights into your customer experience, then using a chatbot or enabling live chat is the option for you.
Using live chat or chatbots enables your business to get feedback in real-time by surveying or conversing with a customer immediately after an interaction. Because this feedback occurs immediately, insights are often more accurate and detailed.
6. Arrange Interviews
Setting up one-on-one or group interviews is another excellent way to gain customer feedback. Interviews allow you to create a more personal relationship with your customers and get more detailed information and feedback. While some customers will take part in interviews without much incentive, offering discounts or free items is a good idea to encourage your customers to participate.
Whether conducting these interviews online or in person, ensure you create an environment that makes your customers feel safe and appreciated. The person conducting the interview should be well-prepared and professional. It's best to record the interview because you will likely forget much of the discussion but you should only do so after your customer has given you permission.
Improve Your Customer Experience
Your business's customer experience is the cumulative effect of a customer's interactions with your business, from the first point of contact to the final confirmation of purchase. But the last part – the checkout, where your customers make a payment – often impacts the customer experience the most. It's critical to get this part right.
That's where Pay.com really shines. Pay.com is a payment service provider that makes it simple and secure for businesses to accept payments via credit cards, debit cards, and many other payment methods.
With Pay.com, your customers can easily make payments using their favorite payment methods and enjoy a seamless checkout experience that gives them a sense of confidence when making a purchase.
Besides enabling payments through your website, Pay.com lets you create Pay Links and send them directly to customers via email or SMS. When customers click the link, they go to a personalized checkout page where they can make a payment. Customers can also pay by credit card over the phone. All you need to do is get their details and enter them into the Pay Dashboard to receive payment.
All told, with Pay.com, you'll be able to nail one of the most critical parts of the customer experience and do so without breaking a sweat. That means you'll be one giant step closer to keeping your customers happy, satisfied, and leaving great feedback! Click here to get started now.
The Bottom Line
Asking your customers for feedback isn’t easy because when you do, you’re going to hear some things you probably would rather not. But getting feedback is critical to make improvements and grow your business and it doesn’t need to be a daunting task.
Reach out to your customers and ask for feedback regularly. Always put your customers at the center of your business and treat the feedback they provide you as the most valuable source of information for your business.
If you do that and partner with Pay.com, which can help you improve your checkout experience and accept the payment methods your customers use – your business will be sure to succeed.
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