Online spending has reached record highs across the UK as consumers head to their laptops and smartphones to buy everything from groceries to garden tools.
Online spending has reached record highs across the UK as consumers head to their laptops and smartphones to buy everything from groceries to garden tools. The way people shop is changing and retailers need to see the bigger picture if they want to keep pace.
Surveys are the perfect partner to your customer reviews and a fantastic way of being able to find out more about your customers. Whether it’s finding out if your website is up to scratch or wanting a better understanding of your customer experience, what you ask and how you ask it is so important for getting the insight you need.
We’ve collected some helpful questions that you can include in your next customer survey to glean some useful insights into how you can improve your business. We’ve also included some survey templates to help you get started.
Here are 20 questions to add to your next customer survey:
Customer effort score questions:
- How easy was it to find the product you were after on our website?
- How easy was it to pay for your order?
- How easy was it to get the help you needed from our online support team?
- Why did you pick this rating?
- How would you rate your overall experience with us from 0-10?
- Did you run into any issues whilst using our website?
- What’s stopping you from continuing with your purchase?
Customer retention questions:
- How likely are you to shop again with us? And why?
- What can we do to make your next shopping experience with us better?
- Is there anything you’d like to see us do differently?
- Which of these would most likely make you want to shop more with us in the future?
A. Loyalty scheme
B. Discount codes
C. Free delivery
D. Mobile app
E. Other
Customer loyalty questions:
- How likely are you to recommend (your business’s name) to a friend or colleague?
- Why would you/why would you not recommend us?
- What did we do well?
- What can we do differently next time?
Customer behaviour questions:
- Are you more likely to shop online or on the high street?
- What types of products do you prefer to buy online vs in person?
- What would make you choose one brand over another?
- Which products do you predict you’ll spend more on in the future?
- How important is it to you that the brands you shop care about sustainability?
Why you should be using surveys to improve your business
1. To help you learn why your online journey is (or isn’t) working
One of the biggest challenges online retailers face — other than standing out in search results — is keeping customers onsite and securing a purchase. The slightest obstacle can be the difference between making a sale and losing out to a competitor, so your online experience needs to be as smooth as possible, from start to finish.
Back in 2010, the Harvard Business Review published a now-famous article called ‘Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers’. In it, they established the Customer Effort Score (CES) – a way of measuring how easy it was for a customer to interact with a business. Essentially, it’s an indicator of how loyal a customer is to a business.
Running quick and simple customer effort surveys about your website can help you understand how easy (or not) it is for customers to find what they need and complete the payment process.
Customers will rate their experience from “very difficult” to “very easy”, but this is more often than not presented as a simple scale from 1-5. It’s always worth asking a follow-up, open-ended question to give the customer a chance to explain why they’ve rated you the way they have.
The quicker you ask after the experience, the more accurate the responses.
Including a customer effort score question straight after a customer places an order, or finishes up a conversation with your live chat team can give you immediate insight into your online experience. That feedback can then be used to help improve your site for next time.
2. To win back previous customers
Returning customers spend 67% more on average than new customers, so it’s important to convince people to come back time and again.
Contacting them with reactivation surveys eight weeks, six months, or even a year after their last purchase can help you discover why they’ve not shopped with you again. They can also provide insights to help you to re-engage with them and win back their business.
Perhaps your competitors are offering something you’re not. Did your delivery provider miss the promised date last time? Was something wrong with your product?
It could be something as simple as the promise of free delivery, or offering 10% off their next order, that turns their heads.
3. To identify at-risk customers and reward loyal ones
While we’re on the subject of retaining customers, Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is an effective way of quickly identifying those at risk of going elsewhere. And it’s those people you can depend on to spread the word about how awesome your business really is.
All you need to ask is one simple question to get going: How likely are you to recommend ua to a friend or colleague?
Depending on how customers rate your business, they fall into one of three categories:
- Promoters: Score the company with either a 9 or a 10. These are your loyal, enthusiastic customers.
- Passives: Respond with a 7 or an 8. They’re happy with the service, but not enough to be promoters.
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Detractors: Give a score between 0 and 6. These are classed as your unhappy customers, who are unlikely to use your company again.
Now, once you know which category they fall into, you can send them on the right path with a simple customer satisfaction survey to dig a little deeper into why.
For the detractors, ask why they wouldn’t recommend you. What was it about their experience that they didn’t enjoy? How can you offer to make amends or improve for next time so that they’d be more likely to recommend you in the future?
Promoters, on the other hand, will tell you what you’re getting right, and you can use that insight to keep them coming back and attract new customers. The answers you get will shine a light on what people truly love about your business.
Ensure you plug all this insight straight back into how you operate. Improve on the things your detractors highlighted, but, most importantly, start promoting the things people really liked.
4. To prepare for the future of retail
Surveys are a great way to gain insight into a wide consumer audience. A well-written survey can help you to predict trends in consumer behaviour and attitudes so that you can better prepare for what lies ahead.
Multiple-choice questions can help you identify which products could increase in popularity or reasons why consumer spending habits might be about to change.
More open-ended questions can give you detailed insight into what matters most to your customers.
Six survey templates that will get you results
We’ve created six survey templates targeting various different points of the customer journey to help you source the information you need. You can use these as a starting point and amend them to suit your business and objectives.
1. Market research survey
Whether you’re planning to launch a new product or refine an existing one, you need to base your decisions on data. Market research surveys are a great way to understand if your new venture resonates with your audience.
Our example centres around how customers would feel about more eco-friendly initiatives within the business. We started off with some basic demographic questions and then used a mix of multiple choice, scale, and text questions to understand people’s attitudes towards sustainability.
Try the survey here
2. Website feedback survey
Usually delivered in the form of a pop-up, website feedback surveys are an excellent way to understand if your website is meeting visitor expectations.
In this example, we’ve used a combination of question types to discover how people use the website, what their experience was like during their visit, and pinpoint anything that needs improvement.
Try the survey here
3. In-store visit survey
In-store surveys allow you to understand the customer’s experience within your physical location: everything from how helpful the staff were, to why people visit your stores or branches in the first place. With more people shopping online than ever before, physical locations are under increasing pressure to earn their keep by offering an experience your customers can’t get online.
In our example, we’ve used a combination of multiple-choice, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions to measure and understand how shoppers feel about their visit. This gives you key information about how to improve your in-store experience and attract more high street shoppers.
Try the survey here
4. Product feedback survey
While public-facing product reviews are fantastic for boosting sales and helping you understand what people like and dislike about your products, private feedback surveys allow you to dig deeper.
Product feedback surveys are very effective if you’re trialling new products, which is the direction we’ve taken in the example below.
We’ve used a combination of well-recognised metrics, including customer effort score (CES), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer satisfaction score (CSAT), so you can easily benchmark your products against one another if you decide to run multiple product surveys. The inclusion of a short text question at the end gives you the option to collect email addresses too, helping to maintain your customer relationships.
Try the survey here
5. Customer service survey
Ensuring your customer service team is knowledgeable, friendly, and efficient is incredibly important to your overall customer experience and reputation. That’s why surveying people after they’ve interacted with your staff is a great way to understand if you’re providing excellent customer service, or if you need to improve.
In our example, we’ve started with a CSAT question to measure the customer’s level of satisfaction, followed by multiple choice answers to understand if their issue has been resolved and whether they’ve needed to contact us before. By using the logic function on the dropdown question, you can ask questions about each specific member of staff, allowing you to get more detailed feedback.
Try the survey here
6. Employee engagement survey
The anonymity of surveys makes them the ideal tool to listen to your team and get their honest opinions.
In the example below, we’ve used scale questions to measure how strongly your staff members feel about the statements presented to them. If the answer is particularly negative, you may want to add logic to ask further questions and understand why they gave that answer.
Try the survey here
Start asking the right questions with customer surveys
If you’re interested in finding out more about how customer surveys can help improve the retail experience and prepare your business for the future, get in touch with our team today.
