9 feedback questions to ask your customers

Getting feedback from your customers is essential to learning about their likes and dislikes, and understanding their perspective. You can use these insights to improve the products and services you offer, the customer experience, and ultimately your bottom line.

But what feedback questions should you ask to get the information you need? We explore several questions below.

Feedback questions to ask your customers

Learn about their purchase experience

Customer feedback surveys are a core business competency for Matt Seltzer, market research and strategy consultant at S2 Research. He always advises his clients to ask these three questions:

• Why did you choose to purchase from us?
• What was the most memorable part of your purchasing experience?
• What could we do to make your experience even better?

“Customer feedback is a great way to gain marketing intelligence, and these questions work to address the marketing life cycle of your customers,” says Seltzer. He explains that the first question addresses the customer’s need state, which you can capitalize on for future marketing efforts.

The second question addresses the experience itself, which is often the most critical factor in whether a customer will purchase from you again. As for the third question, Seltzer says, “It effectively brings the customer into the marketing brainstorming process with you, so you can develop even more interesting and innovative marketing campaigns in the future.”

Seltzer notes that for low-volume customer responses, you should keep questions open ended and be sure to review every response. If you expect a high volume of responses, use multiple-choice answers instead and build KPIs from your aggregated results.

Gain insights about your business

Dylan Max, head of growth marketing at Netomi, has performed extensive research on psychology and human behavior, with a heavy focus on user and customer feedback questions. He recommends asking customers these questions:

• On a scale from 1–10, how would you rate your experience today?
• What was your favorite (or least favorite) part about our service?
• How did you hear about us?

Max explains that the first question helps you evaluate how your business is performing from a high-level perspective. The easier the questions are to answer, the greater the number of responses you’re likely to get. The more responses you get, the more confidence you’ll have in what the answers tell you about how your business is doing.

For more clarity on what you can improve, consider narrowing the second question to discrete service areas such as product quality, customer service, price, facility cleanliness, etc. Max suggests including space beneath these options where customers can write comments if they feel inclined.

Even if there are complaints you can’t address, such as the price, customer feedback helps you determine if your product is properly positioned in the market. For example, you may change your messaging to emphasize that your product is responsibly sourced, organic, or specially formulated.

“The last question is great for understanding how and where to spend your marketing dollars to reach customers,” notes Max. Customer response will help you figure out where to make changes.

Should you spend more on online advertising and less on billboards? Is it worth the effort to pitch local press to write about you? Would advanced customer service training for your employees pay off with glowing word-of-mouth marketing?

Listening to your customers will give you the answers you need.

Ask customers their feelings

The “customers” of Nicole Woolf, associate clinical social worker at LA Caregivers Therapy, are her therapy patients. Woolf encourages her patients to express how they’re feeling and guides her psychotherapy approach and practices based on their responses. She asks the following questions:

• How are you feeling about your therapy sessions?
• Do you feel heard/respected/understood?
• Have we worked on what you wanted to talk about?

Though her purpose in asking is therapeutic and not for marketing, marketers can adapt these questions to encourage people to express their feelings about their customer experience.

“I empower my clients by asking for their feedback, as they feel more in control over our sessions. Their answers help me confidently plan my next course of action, which can be continuing with our current methods, trying new methods or, in some cases, referring them out to another therapist who may be a better fit,” explains Woolf.

Her business is based on the guiding principles of empowering and respecting the individual, building a working relationship with them through rapport, and fine-tuning the process of therapy.

“Without feedback, I would be blindly guessing how to best work with my clients, which could make them feel like the therapeutic process is unhelpful and possibly even damaging,” Woolf says. “That’s why asking feedback questions about their feelings is so important.”