The right process and questions for customer feedback surveys

The fact that you're reading this blog post probably means that you want to run a survey or get feedback some other way, and you're wondering what the right questions are to ask. We'll go over how to define some good questions. It's pretty simple!

Start at the end

If you just blindly jot down questions for your survey, it probably won't lead to good results that can help you improve. This is because you'll think about it from the question perspective instead of your end goal.

Getting feedback just for the sake of it and without a clear goal leads to disappointing results. Because you don't really know what you were looking for in the first place, the thing that you find is often not usable.

So the first thing you'll need to do is define a goal.

Defining goals

Below this blog post you'll see the question: What do you think about this blog post?. That question came from a goal we've set: we want to know what people think about our blog content.

Here are a few examples of some high level goals you can have for your surveys:

• Get a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) for your onboarding
• Understand if users like or understand a new feature
• Know if people think there's something missing from your documentation articles
• Get a Customer Effort Score (CES) for a specific action, for example: finding an API key
• Figure out what users think about newly introduced pricing tiers

If you've defined your goal, the next step is to think about what you'll do with the results.

Using the survey results to improve

This is important to think about, because next to your goal this will also help define your questions. And also: if you don't know what you'll do with the results there's no point in collecting feedback. You obviously want to use it to make your user experience better!

Going back to our blog post survey. We defined our goal as 'Know what our readers think about our blog content'. What we will do with the insights from the feedback is:

• Write more blog posts about content that customers like
• Improve blog posts that customers don't understand

Other examples of using insights from feedback are:

• Knowing whether a newly introduced feature should stay, or should be reverted to the previous version
• Improve documentation content
• Monitor customer satisfaction and use the insights to increase this satisfaction

This is all really specific to your business, so think about a goal and how you'll use the insights to make your product better.

Good survey questions

Now that you have a goal and defined how you'll use insights to improve, you can start defining questions.

Ask yourself: if I ask this question, will this lead to my goal and can I use the insights to improve?

In our blog post survey example, if we would ask What do you like most about this blog post? then we'll only get the things that customers like, and we'll never be able to improve on things they don't.

So for every question that you think of, go back to your goal and how you'll use the insights.

Examples of good survey questions

To get you started with some inspiration, here's a list of a few good survey questions:

• What do you think about our new dashboard?
• How easy was it to find X?
• Was this documentation helpful?
• How was your experience doing X?
• If you can improve one thing about feature X, what would that be?

It's OK to fail and try again

After running your survey you might find that your question does not give the desired insights. It's difficult to exactly predict how customers will answer the question, so it's OK if you don't get it right the first try. With Freddy Feedback you'll get unlimited surveys so it's easy to improve based on learnings and create new surveys.

Good luck on creating questions and if you'd like us to review your goal, ideas for improvements and survey questions always feel free to send us an email.