15 essential customer retention survey questions

Closing a sale with a single customer doesn’t guarantee long-term success. Retaining your customers is the key to building a profitable, stable business. But keeping your customers coming back for more is difficult if you don’t fully understand their wants, needs, and perspectives. That’s why customer retention surveys are such an important element of a successful business strategy.

Using the right customer retention survey questions, you’ll gather first-hand information that can improve your business, products, and services. But before you start brainstorming questions, it’s important to understand what a customer retention survey is, which questions will lead to actionable next steps, and how you can make the survey-building process easier with the right solution.

An overview of customer retention

Customer retention refers to your ability to maintain relationships with your customers over time. One-time customer transactions provide less return on investment than long-term relationships, which not only provide you with repeat business but also upselling and cross-selling opportunities. There’s a lot of value in increasing customer retention, which is why it should be a top priority for your business.

To retain customers, you need to listen to customer feedback, address common issues, and offer value in return for your customers’ long-term commitment. A customer retention survey can be a key part of building your customer retention strategy. Using the data your business collects from a customer survey, your team can build on successful areas of your business and make adjustments in underperforming areas.

The difference between customer retention and customer loyalty

Customer retention is focused around the transactional relationship between your business and your shoppers; customer loyalty is more personal. You can measure retention using a binary metric: You either retain customers, or you don’t. Loyalty, on the other hand, is more difficult to gauge, and repeat customers can range from being passively loyal to being brand champions.

To measure customer retention, you can simply look at whether or not customers are returning to buy or use your products and services after their first purchase. Measuring customer loyalty requires you to look closer at how shoppers are engaging with your brand and how they perceive your brand.

Metrics like your Net Promoter Score (NPS)® offer insight into your customer loyalty as well as how shoppers interact with your social media or loyalty programs. Meanwhile, if you’re looking to calculate your overall customer retention, you may use metrics such as

• Customer retention rate
• Customer lifetime value
• Repeat purchase rate
• Customer churn rate

Loyal customers are more likely to turn into brand advocates who benefit your business through their free word-of-mouth marketing. Meanwhile, a retained customer without any sense of brand loyalty provides little additional benefit other than their own financial investment. These customers may be swayed to purchase from another brand down the line.

The importance of customer retention surveys

Customer retention surveys can help your business gain a better perspective on what you’re doing right and wrong when it comes to keeping your customers around. When you implement these surveys properly, you can uncover and fix problems, get a good idea of what products and services are performing well, and ultimately increase your customer retention rate.

There are a few elements that will determine the overall effectiveness of your customer retention survey, such as

• When you send your survey: Send surveys after a purchase, periodically during your relationship with customers, and when you notice a customer has dropped off or unsubscribed.
• How many questions you include in your survey: Keep it simple by choosing the most effective questions and keeping your survey brief to avoid survey fatigue.
• How your survey looks: Using a stylish, well-made survey will increase your response rate and leave your customers with a good impression of your business.
• How many customers you survey: Surveying a wide range of customers prevents outliers from skewing your data and provides a clearer picture of overall customer sentiment.

One of the most important elements of your strategy is the quality of your customer retention survey questions. Asking the right questions is essential to gaining valuable feedback that can help you meet your goal by making improvements based on the responses you get.

15 key customer retention survey questions

Before you get started on building your customer retention survey, you need to come up with questions that generate actionable responses. You may want to gain insight into the perceived quality of your product or service or to pinpoint potential issues in your customer experience, and the right questions will help you get there.

Consider some of these commonly asked questions:

1. How likely are you to recommend our products/services?
2. How satisfied are you with our products/services?
3. How likely are you to continue using our products/services?
4. How would you rate the quality of our products/services?
5. Would you continue to use our products/services if we raised our prices?
6. What prompted you to buy our products/services?
7. What part(s) of our products/services did you like the most?
8. What part(s) of our products/services did you like the least?
9. How did our products/services compare to those from any competitors you may have tried previously?
10. Which of our competitors did you consider before purchasing with us?
11. What could we do/have we done to offer you a better experience?
12. Do you plan on buying our products/services again in the future?
13. How easy was it to use our products/services?
14. Would you be interested in learning more about our other products/services?
15. Did you find our customer service helpful? If not, please specify any issues you may have encountered.

To effectively incorporate these questions into a survey and gain the benefits your response data has to offer, you need a powerful form creator. Luckily, Jotform has you covered with tools built to enhance your strategy and make survey building easy.

Tips for creating an effective customer retention survey

The form builder you choose can make all the difference when it comes to the quality of your customer retention survey. That’s why Jotform is such a great option — it’s packed with features designed to help you craft the most effective surveys. Using Jotform’s Form Builder, you can create your survey from scratch, or you can start with a customer retention survey template and customize it to suit your needs.

Beyond the user-friendly drag-and-drop form builder, Jotform also offers a variety of other features and solutions that will take your survey to the next level:

• Multiple question types, such as Likert scales, open-ended questions, star ratings, and more
• More than 2,000 available survey templates
• Data tracking and management with Jotform Tables
• The ability to embed surveys into your website
• Offline survey and submission management with Jotform Mobile Forms

Once you’ve come up with the right customer retention survey questions, start building your form using a powerful form builder like Jotform. By creating an effective survey, you could discover your next best idea for boosting retention rates for your business.

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Photo by olia danilevich