One of the most important things you need to do as a business is to monitor customer satisfaction.
This is so critical because it can allow you to see where your business is going right, where it is going wrong and requires improvement and other handy reasons.
Of course, there are multiple ways you can request feedback from your customers to track customer satisfaction, but ultimately you will want to know some key information.
This is why you will need to know the top 5 questions you should ask your customers.
Luckily, we’ve written this guide and will tell you these five, along with some fantastic information that you might need to know.
So, if you want to know a lot more about this – then read on!
Table of Contents
1. On A Scale Of 0-10, How Likely Are You To Refer Us To A Friend Or Colleague?
This is perhaps the most popular question businesses ask their customers.
The reason why is because the answer to this question can be used to calculate a proprietary market research metric, known as Net Promotor Score (NPS).
The NPS methodology breaks respondents into three categories:
Promoters
Promoters are customers that score 9s and 10s in this question.
They tend to be loyal customers and will be the driving force behind getting you extra business through word of mouth and recommendations.
Passives
Passives are customers that score 7s and 8s in this question.
Even though they are generally satisfied with your service, they aren’t loyal to your business and are likely to be swayed away by your competitors.
Detractors
Detractors are those who have scored between 0 and 6.
They are usually very dissatisfied with your service and are very unlikely to tell others about your business – or they will tell others negatively about it.
What is important about this question though is to use a follow up and ask the customer why they have scored their figure, and perhaps how you might improve your service for them to score higher next time.
2. What Service/Product Would You Like Us To Have?
One of the most useful pieces of data from customer feedback is to gauge a customer’s wants and needs.
However, to do this, you will need to use an open ended question and allow a customer to describe specific information for how you could help.
By empowering your customer’s voices, you are opening yourself up for continuous improvement – and this is usually what makes the difference between a mediocre business and a very successful business.
An important thing to remember though, is that even if you have been receiving fantastic reviews and you have an excellent satisfaction scores, it’s critical that you continue to ask questions to see where you could improve your business.
3. How Did You Discover Us?
A very important question to ask, especially if you are a new business, is where your customers have actually found out about you.
By discovering where your customers are coming from, you can utilize the data to your advantage.
For example, if you have been running a particular marketing campaign via social media which has been relatively costly, it allows you to evaluate what your ROI (return on investment) is.
Not only this, it informs you of where you might want to invest further money for promotion and marketing.
Once you have found out where your customers are coming from, you can not only refocus your efforts, but you should then follow up for further data.
One of the best follow up questions here is to ask why they decided to use your business.
If anything, this question is slightly more important because it will allow you to find out what the tipping point was for someone to go from informed to proactive.
4. Have We Met Your Expectations?
This is one of the best questions you can ask your customers. Let’s use the previous example to see why.
Say that a customer has found out about your business and then proactively decides to visit you (in store or online).
Once they have done this, they will likely have an established expectation in their mind.
However, if they have made their customer journey and discover that what they were expecting is nowhere near the reality, this could be a contributing factor for not making a purchase or not becoming a repeat customer.
This is why you must find out if you have met your customer’s expectations.
It is also why you should have a follow up question of “what could we have done differently?”.
Once again, this allows you to analyze this data more thoroughly and make active decisions to try to improve your business practices.
This should then boost your chances of receiving repeat customer business and then ultimately, more revenue.
5. How Was Your Experience With Customer Service?
Whether you are running a physical business or digital only business, you will have a customer service element to it.
This could simply be you replying to customer queries via email, live chat or phone call – or it could be much larger than that.
Whatever the case, you will need to find out how your customers found your customer service.
Generally speaking, even if a business has an excellent product – they will likely think twice about becoming a repeat customer if they have had poor customer service.
This is largely down to a customer’s expectations. Remember, customers do not have to do business with you, so you need to keep them happy.
Therefore, you must find out if they have had a good or bad experience with your customer service.
Once you have established this, it is then a good idea to use a follow up question of “how could our customer service have been better?”.
This will once again open a door for your customers to have a voice.
Customers will then tell you their expectations, their positive notes and negative notes – and this allows you to make any positive changes that you need to make in order to retain their business.
Final Thoughts
Requesting customer feedback is one of the best and most effective things you can do in order to continually improve your business.
However, it’s often difficult to get customer feedback.
Luckily though, if you do things the right way and ask the right questions – you can achieve beneficial results for your business.
