Your business revolves around delivering what your customer needs and value––a product, service, or experience. If you’re not giving your customers what they want, then they will look elsewhere for solutions that fit their needs. But how can you tell if your customers are truly happy with what you’re delivering? How can you figure out what’s not working well, and what you can do to improve?
That’s where the customer loyalty survey comes in. But it’s not enough to just ask customers if they’re happy––you should tailor your survey with the right questions to get actionable feedback. Not sure what to ask in your customer loyalty survey? We’ve got the most essential questions for you right here to ask your valued customers so you get the feedback you need.
What is a customer loyalty survey?
A customer loyalty survey is used to measure how your customers feel about your business or the experiences they have with your business.
While your customer feedback survey won’t cover every aspect of the customer experience, it should give you a good gauge of how happy or unhappy your customers are after they interact with your business at some point in the customer journey.
Why are customer loyalty surveys important?
Happy and loyal customers are vital to the success of your brand. In today’s heavily saturated business world, you have both well-established competitors as well as new and hungry young startups to vie with for customers. One of the biggest differentiators businesses can offer is an excellent customer service experience. If your company offers the same product as a competitor, but their customer service goes above and beyond yours, they will stand out and you might get left behind.
Most companies understand this––it’s pretty logical! But too often, they assume they know how satisfied their customers are already without having to ask them directly. It’s often harder than you think to guess what new features, services, or products your customers would truly value.
Customer feedback surveys allow you to listen to your customers. You can ask customers directly and precisely what they think about what you offer. There is a range of kinds of customer experience surveys, so you can choose the one that fits your needs. For example, you might want to focus on a potential new product launch, the experience a customer had at their last appointment, or how likely they are to recommend your business. There’s a survey type for each of those scenarios, and many more too.
Types of customer experience surveys
There are three main types of customer experience surveys. Each popular type uses the “one question” format and asks customers to rank your brand on a scale. These three forms are:
All three of these customer survey methodologies measure customer satisfaction and loyalty a little differently, so it’s vital to know which one suits your needs best before you launch your survey.
CSAT is the most straight-forward of the three––it’s right there in the name. The Customer Satisfaction Score measures how satisfied your customers are with their overall experience with your company, or with a particular interaction or experience. However, happy customers don’t always lead directly to growth in revenue, so this isn’t always the best option for all surveys.
NPS is a very popular type of customer loyalty questionnaire. You’ve likely seen it many times even if you didn’t know the name––it asks “how likely are you to recommend this company to your family and friends?” The answer measures customer loyalty and likelihood for referrals. You calculate your NPS by subtracting your percentage of Detractors (those who rate you a 6 or below) from your percentage of Promoters (those who give you a 9 or 10). This score is easy to track over time so you can check on your progress regularly.
CES measures a slightly different portion of the customer experience––how easy was their last experience with your company? That’s because making interactions easy and frictionless at key points of the customer journey can lead to greater customer loyalty. You can measure Customer Effort Score after touchpoints like customer service experiences, website visits, purchases, and more.
You don’t need to pick just one of these types of customer feedback surveys––you can use more than one at different times to really narrow down what’s going right and wrong in your customer journey. For example, you could use a CES-style survey to determine how customers are responding to your customer service team while using the NPS framework after they make a purchase. Together, these kinds of surveys can give you the complete Voice of the Customer (VoC) perspective.
Examples of customer feedback questions
If you’re wondering what kinds of questions to include in your customer feedback survey, look no further––we’ve got plenty of feedback survey questions for you to consider.
You should begin selecting questions based on your goals for the survey. What elements of the customer lifecycle and journey do you want to know more about? This will help you narrow down the questions that are right for your survey needs. If you need more help deciding which questions to include and how to send your surveys, just ask GetFeedback for help.
1. How well does our product meet your needs?
This is a broad question, but it will give you specific and actionable results. If your products aren’t meeting the needs of your customers, you’ll need to identify the gaps and make changes. You can also include an open-ended space for answers after to get additional context.
2. How would you describe our products?
Knowing how successfully you communicate your value proposition and your product vision to your customers is important––are they seeing the same qualities you intend them to see, or are there gaps here? This question can be open-ended if you don’t want to direct answers, or you can make it multiple choice if you’re interested in specific qualities.
3. How would you rate your experience with our product?
This question is how you get your CSAT number––just take the number of satisfied respondents and divide it by the total number of responses.
4. If you could change just one thing about our product, what would it be?
Knowing what your customers feel is missing from your product (or service, if you prefer) is important so that you can fix the issue. It might be something small, or it could be a major issue at play. But you won’t know until you ask.
5. What is your favorite portion of the product, service, or tool?
This question can help you assess what’s working really well with your customers already. You can use this information to surface effective parts of your products and services and use those high points in your marketing and sales too.
6. Does the product help you achieve your goals?
Typically, customers don’t just make a purchase because they like something––they do it because they hope it will help them achieve something in their lives. That could be a small task or a large life change. Knowing what those goals are for a large part of your customers will help you write more effective marketing campaigns to gain even more customers.
7. How often do you use the product or service?
This question can help your product team determine how your customer retention efforts are going. Are customers using what you offer once and then leaving? Or are they coming back again and again because they love what you do?
8. How would you rate the value for money of the product?
Asking how the value of your product matches your prices can yield valuable information about how customers view your products. Would they pay more because they love your offerings so much? Or are you priced too high? This question is best asked at least two weeks after a customer purchases a product, so they’ve had time to get the full value.
9. How easy is it to navigate our website?
You might think your website is easy to use and find what customers are looking for––but they may have a very different opinion. Knowing how user-friendly your web presence is can help reduce user churn from frustrated customers.
10. What was the reason for your visit to our website?
Knowing why customers come to your website is valuable and can offer additional ideas for new content or features. Maybe they’re hunting for more info on how to use your products, and you can build new user guides. Or maybe there’s a common follow-up question they have after a service, and you could proactively begin providing that in an email.
11. How easy was [feature] to use?
If you’ve recently built a new feature or tool on your website, you might be wondering if it’s working as you intended. Ask your customers to find out! That way, you can work out the bugs early on.
12. How likely are you to recommend us to your family and friends?
This is the Net Promoter Score question––it’s very effective in gauging how much customers enjoy your products or services. If they’re making the effort to tell people about how great you are, that’s great for getting word of mouth referrals. But if they’re likely to spread negative feedback, you need to know what’s going on, so be sure to give an open-ended option for verbatim feedback too.
13. Will you purchase more products from us in the future?
One vital measure for the success of your business is how many customers return over and over, which is your customer retention rate. If most of your customers make one purchase and don’t return, you should find out what’s driving them away after making the initial purchase decision.
14. How would you feel if you could no longer use our products or services?
This question can help you measure customer loyalty as well as satisfaction. If customers are satisfied but wouldn’t be disappointed if they couldn’t use your products or services any longer, what can you do to increase that loyalty level?
15. Did your representative make you feel valued as a customer?
Setting up a customer service survey after a customer has an interaction with a customer support representative can help you evaluate how effective your customer service is. This question can help you get extra depth from the CES––are your customer-facing reps treating customers like items on a list to check off as fast as possible, or like valued individuals?
16. Was your problem or inquiry resolved quickly?
It’s unavoidable––customers will have questions for your customer service reps or problems with a product on occasion. Measuring how quick and pain-free it is for those problems to get resolved is one of the best customer service survey questions.
17. What can our employees do better?
Including open-ended questions about satisfaction with your customer service or in-store shopping experience can yield valuable insights you might not have been aware of. If you notice patterns in the verbatim feedback you’re getting, you can reinforce positive trends or fix ongoing issues faster.
18. How can we improve your experience with the company?
Another great open-ended question for your customer survey is asking customers what they feel your company is lacking, without any guidance on the answers. This can surface surprising insights as you ask customers to be candid about what they feel you’re lacking right now.
19. What’s working for you and why?
While open-ended questions to surface negative issues are great, don’t forget to ask customers what’s going well so you can build on your strengths! This is an especially great question because it asks for additional context––why customers like what they like about your business.
20. Do you have any additional comments or feedback for us?
You don’t know what you don’t know––so giving your customers a completely open-ended question gives them the space to tell you anything. It can give you insights you didn’t even know you were missing so you can take quick action.
Best practices for customer loyalty surveys
Deciding to ask customers for their open and honest feedback is just the first step in setting up a successful survey. Following the latest best practices when developing your customer survey questions will help you get more responses and highly actionable information to continue improving the overall customer experience.
Keep it simple. If you’re looking to get valuable information from your customers, your survey needs to be carefully designed to ask them the right questions. After all, it’s not their responsibility to provide you with constructive criticism.
Instead, it’s your job to ask questions that engage the respondents to provide thoughtful feedback. That means making your questions clear to be sure you’re not confusing customers, who have plenty of other demands on their time. It also means keeping your survey short and concise to increase the odds customers will take the whole thing.
Monitor your data. Tracking your metrics over time is also important. While a survey is a good snapshot of one moment in time, what you really want to be tracking is how your results are improving (or decreasing) over time. This will tell you if the changes you’ve made as a result of your survey questions are working, or if further tweaks are needed.
Don’t forget the positive. When you’re working to improve customer loyalty and satisfaction, it can be tempting to only ask customers about what they don’t like and what’s going wrong so you can fix issues. While that’s certainly important, you should also sprinkle in questions about what’s going well so you can create a plan that builds on your existing strengths as well.
How to send a customer loyalty survey?
There are many ways to get your customer feedback survey questions in the hands of your customers. You can use just one method, or a variety to get information on a series of different customer touchpoints.
Web-based surveys are surveys that live on your website, and they’re a great option for questions that deal with your website experience or ecommerce capabilities. Customers can take these quick surveys without ever leaving your webpage, which leads to higher response rates.
Email surveys are great for measuring post-purchase satisfaction and value, as well as checking in after a service experience. Customers can respond in their own time, and they don’t need to be browsing your website to get a targeted survey.
Whichever method you use, you’ll need to find the right survey vendor (like GetFeedback, the customer satisfaction survey experts).
Customer loyalty survey template
Looking for a ready-made way to start creating your own customer satisfaction survey, filled with the most effective questions? Look no further––the experienced survey gurus at GetFeedback have a customer survey template for you.
Create your custom survey for customer feedback
Starting with a survey template can be great for your first survey, but designing a customized, complete survey solution that measures every aspect of your customer experience to ensure you’re delighting and retaining your customers is essential. Fortunately, there’s a survey solution that can do just that.
Learn how GetFeedback can help you exceed customers’ expectations—start your free trial today.