How to Write Great Customer Feedback Questions: 5 Samples to Copy

Trustmary teamTrustmary team
Last edited: October 17th, 2023
customer feedback questions

There’s a high chance that you’ve taken some surveys in your life. You’ve probably abandoned a few forms, too. Some asked questions that made no sense to you, others were too long, and the rest were simply poorly written.

If you want to create a quality customer feedback survey, you need to view the question creation process as an art. You probably have many questions to ask the customer regarding your upcoming products, your current features, your rates, and whatnot. 

But, you can’t really ask the customer everything all at once. Even when you do, you can’t expect them to use their valuable time to answer endless questions about your product or service, can you?

That’s what this post is all about. This article:

  • Teaches you how to create the perfect customer feedback questions to get accurate, actionable, and informative customer feedback
  • Shows you options you have to collect customer feedback and our
  • Guides you on asking the right questions
  • Inspires you with some brilliant customer feedback form examples.

Enjoy!

how to ask right customer feedback questions

The Importance of Asking the Right Customer Feedback Questions

When we create products or offer services, we all think of the buyer persona. The buyer persona represents our target audience, the people who need and can use our product or service. 

This is why, whenever you want to create something that will be a success, you need to research and better understand the customer. 

This is only the first step of many, though. Even if you create the best product and implement a very successful marketing strategy that reels more people toward buying your products, your job is only half-done at that point. 

The success of a product and the brand that offers it revolves greatly around customer satisfaction. This is how a one-time customer becomes a regular. It is how the word spreads around about your brand, and more people are prompted to buy from you.

Customer satisfaction is measured from the start of their experience to long after they buy from you. 

Let’s say that a customer finds your website. Their satisfaction will be affected by everything – the quality of your site, the simplicity of the order process, the customer support quality, and finally – the quality of what they purchased.

You should definitely know what people experience when they do all this since it can greatly affect your success. If you want to know this, you need to ask your customers.

What Can You Do?

When we see a ready survey or feedback form, we think: “well, this is very simple”. The good ones are short and to the point, and it looks like they can be created within minutes. However, this is far more challenging than it sounds, especially when you have many questions to ask and little room to do so.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to learn why some of your customers are not satisfied with your product. There are tons of reasons for this, so you must cover all potential bases in your questions to uncover why customers are not coming back to buy more. Here are some of the things that can impact customer satisfaction negatively.

reasons for low customer satisfaction

In order to obtain all this important information, you need to ask just the right survey questions. Without them, you cannot take the appropriate action to boost customer satisfaction. 

The Impact of Weak Questions on Your Survey’s Results

Good customer feedback questions will assist you in achieving your goals. Bad or poorly written questions won’t just be ineffective, but can actually harm your reputation and your brand in general. 

A weak question can confuse the respondent. If this is the case, chances are your customer will leave the form blank and move on. 

However, if your question is hampered by bias or somehow offends the customer, you’ll lose your good reputation with them.

Types of Customer Feedback Questions You Can Ask in Your Survey

There are many categories of customer feedback questions you can ask in your survey these days. Getting the right information is seldom easy. 

Since you’re expecting constructive criticism and honesty from your customer, as well as a portion of their time, you need to dedicate some time yourself to making this great. 

It all starts with the type of customer feedback questions you will choose to ask your customer. Let’s take a look at some of your options.

Feedback Questions Related to Product Usage

All businesses want to know how well their products or services work for the customers. The best way to learn about this is to ask your customers directly. Still, you need to ask the right feedback questions to obtain this information.

Some Examples for Product Survey Feedback Questions

  • How long have you been using our product or service?
  • How often are you using/ are planning to use our product or service?
  • Did you consider any alternatives before you chose this particular product or service?
  • Did our product meet your expectations/ help you achieve your goal?
  • If you could, what would you improve about it?
  • What’s your favorite part about our product or service?
  • Have you encountered some points of friction while using our product or service? What are they?

We also have an extensive post solely about the do’s and don’ts of product surveys.

Feedback Questions Related to Psychographics

Psychographic survey questions will dig deep and uncover the preferences of your customers, as well as their habits, tendencies, and behaviors. If you ask this type of customer feedback questions, you are not exploring who your customer is, but what they want and why they do what they do.

These feedback questions are more intrusive in nature, so you must be extra careful when asking them. 

Getting the answers to them will give you a clearer picture of why your customer bought your product, what their buying habits are, and how they will react to your selling strategies in the future.

Some Examples for This Type of Feedback Questions

  • What’s your priority when it comes to choosing X product or service?
  • What do you use for shopping more often:  your phone or your laptop?
  • How much time do you spend on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (or any other social media network you’re using to target the customers)
  • How do you feel about our product?
  • Is sustainability important to you when you’re choosing a product or service?
  • How many times in a week are you using X product or service?

Feedback Questions Related to Demographics

Demographics are a very important thing for your marketing strategies. This is how you uncover the buyer persona and segment your customers in your marketing plans. To attract and convert more leads, businesses often group customers based on their characteristics i.e. their demographics. 

If you succeed in collecting customer feedback about the demographics of your audience, you can find out more about who you’re targeting and what they want. The goal here is to extract as many honest answers as possible, but not make your customers uncomfortable with the questions you ask.

Some Examples for This Type of Feedback Questions

  • How old are you?
  • Are you employed or unemployed?
  • What industry do you work in?
  • What’s your job title?
  • Do you have children?
  • What’s your marital status?
  • What is your current location?
  • What gender do you identify as?
  • What’s your education level?

Open-Ended (and Closed-Ended) Customer Feedback Questions

When creating a customer feedback survey, most will focus on closed-ended questions. These are simpler to analyze and capture, and take far less time because they are very specific. However, there are some situations where you simply must ask an open-ended question. 

When to Ask Open-Ended Questions

In the cases where you need to obtain more detailed information, or where there are too many options in terms of what the customers can say, open-ended questions are the better choice. 

Open-ended questions are survey questions that give the respondent a chance to write whatever they want, usually in a text box. They can fully express their opinion in their own words. 

When to Ask Closed-Ended Questions

If you are familiar with what they might say, or if there are limited responses to your question, then you should ask a closed-ended question. 

Closed-ended questions are the opposite of open-ended questions. In these cases, you’re giving customers some options to choose from to answer the question. These can come in many forms. Customers might be asked to mark the response that best fits their opinion, pick a satisfaction level or number from a scale, etc. 

Some Examples for Closed-Ended Questions

When asking closed-ended questions, you can give your customers options for questions such as:

  • How did you hear about us? (social media, friend, ad, etc.)
  • On a scale from 1 to 10, how much did you like our service/ product/ customer support?
  • How likely are you to buy from our company again? (very unlikely, unlikely, neutral, likely, very likely)
  • Do you think that we answered your questions promptly? (yes/ no)

Some Examples of Open-Ended Questions

We’ll be discussing some closed-ended question survey forms a bit later in this post. Now, let’s take a look at some examples of open-ended questions you can ask.

  • What can we do to improve your experience with our brand?
  • In your own words, tell us what about our product appeals to you and what doesn’t.
  • What can we do to improve your experience with our brand?
  • What can we do to improve your experience with our website?
  • Do you think that our employees can improve to provide you with better customer service?
  • In your own words, tell us how you feel about our product or service.
  • Do you have additional feedback, remarks, or comments you’d like to share with us?

Longevity Feedback Questions 

These types of feedback questions usually belong somewhere at the end of the survey. Before you finish your survey, you might choose to add questions about what will happen after the customer submits their answers. 

This type of question allows you to follow up with the respondents in the future and potentially send more customer feedback surveys.

Some Examples for This Type of Feedback Questions

  • Would you be willing to take another survey in the future?
  • May we reach out to you to follow up on your responses?
  • Can we connect you with one of our customer success managers via live chat?
  • Do you want us to send you a list of useful resources about our product or service?
  • Would you be open to discussing more products or upgrade options for the ones you’ve purchased?

Top Metrics for Measuring Customer Satisfaction through Feedback Questions

There are many ways to measure customer satisfaction when you have the feedback ready. Here are the top metrics used today:

CSAT Metrics

The customer satisfaction score or the CSAT offers simple measuring and grand results. In other words, you’d be asking the customers very few simple questions, giving them some choices, and as result, you’ll get actionable insight. 

How to Calculate the CSAT Score

The CSAT score is determined by asking the following question:

“How would you rate your experience with X”?

Here you can ask generally about your brand or a specific product or service, but you’ll be giving the respondents options to choose from. 

calculating CSAT score

Once you have this information, you’ll take the number of the people who chose “satisfied” and divide it by the respondents. Then, you’ll multiply your result by 100. This will give you a percentage of how good your product or brand is. The higher the percentage is, the better.

Here’s an example of a CSAT survey:

NPS Metrics

The Net Promoter Score NPS metrics is a great way to understand customer loyalty for your brand. Very often, we come across surveys that ask the question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend our company to others”?

The respondent of this survey will be given the option to select a number on a scale, usually between 0 and 10.

net promoter score scale

As you can see, the answers you get to your net promoter score survey will put respondents into three different categories: detractors, passives, and promoters. These three categories represent three different types of customers you have at your company based on their satisfaction. Here is what this means for your brand:

customer categorization based on nps

How to Calculate the NPS Score

To calculate your net promoter score, you should use this simple formula:

NPS = Percentage of promoters – Percentage of Detractors

Here’s an example of how an NPS survey works:

You should also compare your NPS to other in your industry to know where you stand!

The Best Practices for Creating Survey Questions

It’s important to know how to use the customer feedback data you collected, how to measure the results, and how to use it to boost your brand’s quality. However, before you can apply these formulas, you need to collect customer feedback. 

That being said, we present you with some amazing tips for creating customer feedback questions. 

Find the Right Survey Tool

If you have little or no experience in crafting customer feedback questions, don’t rush and send out anything that crosses your mind. This is a tricky business that requires a lot of knowledge, great marketing skills, tons of research, and most importantly – experience. 

It would be a shame if you spent all that money to create and send out your survey and it ends up being a failure. This is why most brands today invest in tools when it comes to crafting the customer feedback questions, as well as gathering and utilizing the customer feedback. If you want the best help you can find these days, you should book a meeting with Trustmary. The company employs experts in collecting and utilizing customer feedback to promote and boost your brand. 

If you decide to do this on your own, you will still need a survey tool to get started. Coming up with the customer feedback questions is just the start. You need an attractive, yet clean design, as well as a tool that will help you examine the metrics. Then you’ll need to figure out a great survey subject line to get people to open your survey.

Trustmary has you covered with this, too. The website is full of templates that you can use to create your surveys, as well as lead generation forms, review widgets, and much more. 

Ask Relevant and Short Customer Feedback Questions

The right questions can help you measure customer satisfaction, but only if you don’t overwhelm or confuse the respondents. No one will jump at the opportunity to spend half an hour answering your survey and filling up empty fields with all the questions that popped in your head. 

The most important thing about customer feedback questions is to keep them simple and to the point. This makes it more likely that the respondent will fill out the form, which is the first and most important step of your data gathering.

Ask Neutral Customer Feedback Questions

The biggest mistake you can make in your survey is to ask a leading question i.e. put your opinion into the question. This can go two ways – it can annoy the respondent because they cannot share their own experience, or it can persuade them to make an answer they wouldn’t make otherwise. In other words, this is a sure way to damage the survey data.

One example of a leading question would be:

“We believe that our support agents are amazing. How great do you think they are on a scale from 1 to 10?”

In this question, you push an answer to the respondent without giving them a chance to share their own opinion. However, if you ask a more neutral question, you are giving them a chance to rate their actual customer satisfaction. Here is an example:

“How helpful did you find our customer support agents?”

Here are five exampled of biased survey questions so you can avoid using them in the future.

Do a Test Run of Your Form

Too many surveys out there have mistakes in them. Even if they are unintentional, they make it seem like you didn’t put much effort into learning what people think of your brand or product. It’s even worse when you realize that you already sent out a survey with mistakes in it. 

Yes, you can always revise the survey and send it out again, but those who have already filled out the first one won’t like the idea of spending time to fill out another, very similar version. Not to mention, this can seem very irresponsible and annoy some of your customers.

In this case, it’s better to prevent than to resolve afterward.

Once you write those questions and create the form, make sure to proofread it and perform some testing on it. 

Some A/B testing can never hurt, and it costs very little to create more than one version of the survey with some small changes. Experiment with the wording, the number of questions, their order, and even the colors used in the design. Hubspot has a great guide on A/B testing that you can use to learn how to do this.

a/b testing to test feedback from

Figure Out the Best Time to Send the Survey

Great surveys won’t necessarily be opened or filled out – or yield the results you expected. They might not even reach the customers or the customers might be too busy to take a look at them. 

When it comes to sending out customer satisfaction forms, time is extremely important. 

It’s not just about when your target audience is online or where they spend their time on the Internet. Surely, sending it out to them when they’re not at work will increase the chances of them taking the time to fill out the form. Also, using the platforms on social media they use the most to implement your survey is always a smart idea. 

However, one more important matter here is which survey to send at which stage of the customer journey. If you send a product satisfaction form to someone who just subscribed to your site and hasn’t used your product, it won’t really make sense, right? 

You also cannot send a customer satisfaction form right after they received your product or service. For most products or services, you need to give the respondents some time to test them out and see what they like or dislike. 

But on the other hand, you cannot wait for too long since they’ll have forgotten a lot about their experience. 

As you can see, when you send out your surveys is very important and requires a lot of thought. Take a look at this image of the customer journey to get a better idea of the stages that you can test respondents in. 

customer journey map feedback form

Be Careful Not to Ask Two Things at Once

It can be tempting to ask every question we have about our product or brand, but making your survey short does not mean that you should fit more than one in a single question. If you ask two questions but phrase them into one to save space, this will be even more confusing for the respondent.

The most common culprit in confusing surveys is the double-barreled question. This is the worst question to ask because you’re basically asking the respondent to assess two things with a single answer, while they might have two different answers to give.

double-barreled questions

This is a good example of a double-barreled question:

“How would you rate our product quality and that of our customer service”?

These are entirely different things and as such, they should be asked in two separate questions. The respondent in question might like the product, but dislike the support quality or vice versa.

If you want to learn about the customer experience with your support and your product, you need to ask two questions. It would go like this:

“Based on your experience, how good is our customer service”?

“Please rate your satisfaction with the product quality”

Don’t Ask the Same Question Twice

This might sound a bit strange, but many surveys ask the same questions more than once. Why would you ask the same question twice if you already have limited space in your customer satisfaction form?

At times, we think that rephrasing the same question can result in a different answer. If the survey creator is in a hurry, they might ask the same thing in two different ways, which will annoy and confuse the respondents. Not to mention, this takes away the opportunity to ask another, different question.

For example, one survey can have questions like this, separated by a few other questions:

  1. How would you rate the quality of our product?
  2. X-x-x-x
  3. X-x-x-x
  4. Would you say that you are satisfied with our product?

These two questions are basically the same thing asked in different words. The answer will most likely be the same, too, which means that you’ve lost the opportunity to ask another important question because of it.

This can easily be avoided. You can book a demo with Trustmary and use their expert-written templates that have a ready variety of questions posed in different ways. You can choose between them and avoid this pitfall.

Give a Balanced Set of Choices for Answers

To make the task of the respondent easier and make it more likely for them to fill out the survey, we often create and send our short forms with ready answer choices. Whenever possible, you should practice this approach. 

When you give customers options to choose from instead of asking them to fill out the blank field with their thoughts, you’re saving them a lot of time and effort. 

If you do opt for the close-form questions survey, it is important to create a balance in your answer choices. The choices you give them cannot be another source of bias. This is why most businesses use the NPS scale or the CSAT form to get a response. 

Let’s say, for example, that you’ve given your customers the following form:

This doesn’t really allow them to complain about your product, does it? However, if you adopt a balanced set of options for them, as you’ll see below, you can get more accurate and honest answers.

how satisfied are you feedback question

Make Answering Optional 

Respondents are filling out your forms because they want to. If they took some of their valuable time to help you learn about customer satisfaction, you should definitely not push them to answer all of your questions. This applies even if you are giving them an incentive in return for their input. 

The respondent might not know the answer, or might not want to answer. You can add a choice “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” in your list of answer options, but regardless of what you do, always make the answer optional. 

5 Amazing Samples of Survey Questions by Famous Brands

Now let’s move on to the really fun thing – the actual samples of survey questions by the most successful brands of today.

1. Airbnb

Our first customer feedback questions sample is that of Airbnb. Let’s have a look.

About AirBnb’s feedback form #1

airbnb example feedback question

Source

Airbnb is a renowned website where people can book accommodation and different experiences across the world. Hosts on this platform, on the other hand, rely on customer feedback to impress potential guests and build a good reputation for their service. 

If you take a close look at this example, you’ll see that the platform has an appealing button that prompts the customer to take the survey.

When they do this, they are taken to a long-form survey that lists a series of concise and clear questions. Airbnb uses the answers to understand why people chose the platform to search and do their bookings.

In this survey, Airbnb combines different survey types and methods to collect information. All of their questions are to the point and clear, and it takes a very short time to complete them despite the survey’s length. Here is just a peek at what their form includes.

airbnb feedback form example

Source

As you can see, in these forms, Airbnb is asking about the customer satisfaction related to the service provided, as well as the reasons that might impact future decisions for returning users. 

About AirBnb’s feedback form #2

Airbnb explores tons of different things in their survey. In addition to customer satisfaction, they also have questions about demographics that would help them build the buyer persona:

demographic information feedback question example

Source

In some way, the survey can be considered too lengthy and many can decide not to fill it out because of it. However, this survey is an amazing example of how different customer feedback questions can provide you with different kinds of useful insight. 

2. Uber

Just as Airbnb caters to two target audiences, the host and the guest, Uber also has two different buyer personas. Uber caters to the needs of both passengers and drivers. One of the reasons why this platform is so popular is because it collects feedback from both sides, therefore optimizing the experience of different users. 

About Uber’s Feedback Form

Source 

It is very simple – the passengers rate the ride and the driver, while the drivers rate their passengers. Just take a look at what passengers get when their ride is completed. They can simply select the number of stars they want to give to the driver out of 5 options, and even leave a tip if they liked the service.

3. Slack

Slack is a business that’s become very popular in the last couple of years, especially during the pandemic when many people had to switch to online collaboration. According to a 2021 report, about 80% of workers were using collaboration tools like this one last year.

Let’s take a look at their survey email:

Source

Slack is greatly focused on customer feedback. There’s a command in this application dedicated to feedback that you can send to the Slack team and tell them what ideas you have that could improve their product.

About Slack’s Survey Email

In this sample, Slack invites the recipient to take a short survey. This is a great email to request this type of action. It’s short, to-the-point, and has an easily noticeable CTA where you can open the actual survey. 

On top of that, Slack made the message more personal because it explicitly says that it’s sent to a few people. Now, this doesn’t seem to be the case for real since many have received the same message, but it seems like a good idea to show people that you value their feedback. 

4. Netflix

Netflix is really trending these days and is available in 190 countries. This gives it a tremendous customer database to test and request customer feedback from. It can’t be easy and yet, they’ve done an amazing job at it.

About Netflix’s Customer Satisfaction Survey #1

Netflix customer feedback questions

Source

You’ll notice that the email Netflix sends to users is friendly and very personal. They even finish it with ‘Your Friends at Netflix’. This is a great example of how you can invite people to answer your feedback questions. Netflix emphasizes how important this is to them, but it also tells people that they appreciate the user’s time and feedback. 

About Netflix’s Customer Satisfaction Survey #2

Source

Well, there you have it – there are different kinds of questions and surveys that you should send at a specific time of the customer journey. This survey is sent after the user has viewed some of their movies and TV shows to evaluate the quality of their offers.

Netflix is amazing at understanding the user’s behaviors since they study the behaviors of users by their likes and dislikes, ratings, and past movies they’ve watched. However, they also collect feedback in this manner periodically in case they missed something. 

5. Amazon

Finally, we’d like you to see the form by Amazon. The most popular eCommerce website in the world frequently sends out forms for different purposes. Let’s take a look at the one we liked best.

About Amazon’s Customer Satisfaction Survey

amazon example feedback question

Source

As you can see, Amazon has provided the user with a neutral list of choices when it comes to rating the quality of customer support. They also wanted to know if the user understands the representative they spoke to, probably because the platform is used by people who speak different languages and are from all over the world. 

These questions are clearly differentiated. On top of all that, Amazon is giving users a chance to share something else that they’d want to say about the support, which they’ve clearly marked as ‘optional’. 

Final Thoughts

Feedback is an indispensable tool that can positively affect everything about your business. It can help you improve your products and services, better market them to the users, and build stronger relationships with them. 

Learning how to create feedback questions form is not easy, but it’s a work in progress. The important thing is to never take this lightly. Take your time, consider your options, and use this guide’s tips and samples for motivation. Good luck!

FAQ

When is it best to send a customer satisfaction survey?

There are different kinds of customer satisfaction questions that you can ask that depend on the customer journey. It’s sometimes better to ask about the quality of the product after giving the user some time to try it out, while it’s best to ask about their experience with the support right after their conversation.

What are the top customer feedback questions to ask today?

The best questions to ask depend on your brand and the customer journey. However, some are more frequently used than others, such as:

  • How satisfied are you with our products/ services?
  • What can we do to better serve your needs?
  • Why did you choose us over our competition?

Is it inappropriate to ask people about their education level or salary?

These questions are often asked in surveys because they help the company build the buyer persona. They are not inappropriate as long as you make them optional or add an answer in the following sense: “I’d rather not tell”. 


Trustmary team
Trustmary team


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