Your business succeeds by offering the best products possible to your customers. That means they need to be high-quality, function excellently, and fill a need or a desire your customers have. And this is true whether your products are consumer goods, software, or apps.
But how can you know how well your products are satisfying your customers, and where you can make improvements so your customers consistently love what you produce? You need to ask them directly. And that’s where product feedback surveys come in.
What is a product survey? It’s a survey designed to gather feedback directly from your customers about product features, product development, and the customer experience of your products. You can use product feedback surveys for a variety of purposes to refine and improve your products so they delight your customers every time—and that’s what really builds strong customer loyalty for the long term.
Types of product feedback surveys
What are the types of product feedback surveys you can send to your customers? There are many types, so you can find one or more that work for your business goals. Here are a few of the most effective and popular types of product feedback surveys your business may want to use to gather customer feedback.
Net Promoter Score® (NPS®)
The Net Promoter Score System (NPS) asks customers one simple question: on a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our products/company to your friends and colleagues? NPS surveys are one of the most used customer satisfaction survey types for evaluating products, services, and overall customer experience and brand reputation. That’s because they’re highly effective at measuring customer loyalty based on the focus of the question.
NPS separates your respondents into three categories: Promoters rate their likelihood to recommend as a 9 or 10, Passives respond with a 7 or 8, and Detractors score you a 6 or below up to 0. To calculate your NPS score, you subtract the number of Detractors from Promoters, divide by the total number of respondents and multiply by 100. If your NPS score is positive, you’re doing pretty well - if it’s above 50, your customer experience is excellent.
Use cases of Net Promoter Score surveys
NPS surveys can be used in a variety of ways to measure how customers feel about your existing products. You can ask customers how likely they are to recommend your products overall to their friends and colleagues to see how your current products are impacting customer loyalty levels.
You can also use a transactional Net Promoter Score survey to measure the impact of a recent product purchase on customer loyalty and satisfaction. Don’t forget to include an open-ended question for users to explain why they rated your products the way they did so you can discover what’s driving product trends.
Advantages of NPS
NPS is a widely used metric in customer experience because it has many advantages for businesses. It delivers one easy-to-use metric that can be tracked over time to notice and adjust to trends. Since it’s such a simple and fast survey for users to take, NPS surveys tend to have a high response rate so you can get extensive, accurate data. And NPS surveys are easily automated—you can set them up to be sent two weeks after a product purchase or on a quarterly or yearly basis so you are collecting product feedback on a regular cadence without much manual effort.
Disadvantages of NPS
NPS surveys have many pros - but also a few cons as well. That’s why they should be part of your Voice of the Customer program, but they shouldn’t make up the entirety of the program or you’ll miss other valuable insights. Some of the downsides of NPS surveys include:
Oversimplifying complex customer relationships. Your business’s relationships with your customers are complex and based on many varied factors. While NPS is elegant in its simplicity, that simplicity also means that you can’t get the full picture of the relationship from this one metric.
Underdelivering detailed feedback. The singular and simple NPS metric makes it easy to track trends over time, but it also lacks a lot of detail that could be used to uncover issues and bugs in your products. You can easily learn what customers think about your products, but uncovering why they think that way is trickier.
Long intervals are needed for effectiveness. To truly understand trends and track your progress in creating an excellent customer experience, you need to conduct NPS surveys over a long period of time—years, not weeks. That means it takes significant time to see effective results and track the rewards of any product improvements as well.
Product roadmap surveys
When you’re designing a new product, you typically create a product roadmap plan - a structured plan to develop your product from beginning to end. New products can take months or years to develop, and you want to be sure you’re putting in all that work to create something your customers will truly love and value.
Product roadmap surveys can be conducted throughout the new product development process to ensure your product design team is on the right track. You can send customer feedback surveys to check if your concept for a new product is something your customers desire or checking on the demand for your product with certain audiences just before you send it to market.
Use cases of product roadmap surveys
Software development. You can ask current users to beta test new features you’re developing in your software, or survey customers to ask which features they would most like to see to enhance their user experience.
Manufacturing. Asking a select few of your customers to give feedback on a prototype or product design can tell you if you’re on the right track.
Consumer packaged goods. You can ask customers to offer feedback on an idea for a new product, or send free samples with a customer survey to test how a new product will be received before you launch it.
Advantages of product roadmap surveys
Product roadmap surveys have many advantages. They allow you to ensure your product design team is on the right track before you sink resources - months or years of development time, and huge design budgets - into a product that may or may not hit the mark. They also allow your organization to stay agile and respond to changing trends in the marketplace with products and features your users want today. And by asking customers what they want and creating products that match those desires, you know your products will be highly satisfying and drive customer loyalty.
Disadvantages of product roadmap surveys
Conducting product evaluation through surveys isn’t free of issues, however. These surveys require you to disclose new products and innovations to people outside of your business, which can make it harder to keep new product innovations a secret from competitors. Spending too much time and effort seeking and looking at feedback can also introduce noise and confusion into the new product conversation and make it harder for your product team to focus.
Product marketing surveys
Testing your marketing approach for new and existing products can help ensure your marketing messages hit the spot with your target audiences. Product marketing surveys can help you do just that by asking customers what they think about various aspects of your current or planned product marketing.
Use cases of product marketing surveys
You can use product marketing surveys to identify new opportunities for successful products among your ideal and current customers. You can also use these surveys to test packing designs, try out new ads or marketing angles for products, or determine what pricing range will be most successful for new products.
Product branding surveys
How do your new or current products fit into your overall brand image? Do they align together tightly and enhance each other, or is there a mismatch between what your brand promises and what your products deliver? Sending product branding surveys to your customers can help your business identify where your branding currently stands, and where you can improve.
Use cases of product branding surveys
You can use product branding surveys to ask your customers how potential new products would align with their current perception of your brand. Or you could ask them how your current product mix matches with their image of your brand.
Use cases of product feedback surveys
Product feedback surveys are flexible as well as valuable - they can be used for a variety of purposes to improve your products.
Existing products
If you sense something is off with how your current products provide customer satisfaction, but you’re not sure where improvements are needed, you can send product feedback surveys about your existing products to your customers to find out.
Adjusting features
Product feedback surveys can be used to get information on features of your products as well. If you’re looking at making adjustments to current features or wondering if there’s enough demand to add new ones, you can gather feedback so your business is making an informed choice and offering your customers what they really want.
New products and services
Developing new products is more effective when you know exactly what your customers and target audiences want. Sending out product feedback surveys to check if your new product ideas and designs resonate with your customers can save you time and money while allowing you to develop products that delight your users.
Mid-production research
Once your product development process gets underway, you should still check to ensure you’re on the right track along the way. Trends and customer desires change quickly, so using product feedback surveys to test your new products while they’re still mid-production can allow you to make needed adjustments before launching.
Usability testing
For products such as software or mobile apps, it’s vital that your new and existing products offer a user-friendly and customer-focused experience. Product feedback surveys can help ensure that your user experience is excellent.
A new market
If you’re looking to expand selling your products into new markets, you will want to conduct research to make sure those new audiences will want to purchase your products and that they will be satisfied customers once they do. Product feedback surveys can test the waters of these new markets before you invest your marketing budget in selling to them.
Pricing
Pricing your products correctly, so your business makes a profit and customers feel they get a reasonable value, will help your business sell more products. You can check to ensure your pricing is in alignment with what customers will pay and what value they feel your products provide by using customer feedback surveys.
Why is product feedback important?
Getting product feedback from your customers is essential to creating products your customers will love, repurchase, and recommend to their friends and family members. Product feedback surveys are important because they help your business tackle the following challenges.
Prevent failed products
When a product launch fails, it’s disappointing for your product team and damaging for your business. Asking for customer feedback from the beginning of the product design process all the way to the product launch and beyond can prevent these failures from happening.
Improve products
There is always room for improvement in your products, even when they’re highly successful. Customer feedback surveys can help you pinpoint the most important areas for improvement aligned with customer needs so you’re always exceeding customer expectations.
Stay on top of changing attitudes
Customer attitudes and trends change very quickly these days, and you need to be agile and fast to beat the competition. Regularly asking customers for their opinions and feedback on your products helps you stay ahead of the game.
Tips on writing an effective product feedback survey
Getting the most accurate and actionable data from your product feedback surveys begins by writing them effectively.
Be concise. You might want to collect lots of data on every product and feature, but your customers have limited time to spend taking your surveys. Ensure your survey language is as concise and short as possible to lower abandonment rates.
Be straightforward. Customers will quickly close your survey if they are confused by your question-wording. Get directly to the point so survey users can understand exactly what you’re asking of them
Use filtering questions as needed. Not every question will apply to every customer - for example, you don’t want to ask a happy customer why they dislike your products. Survey platforms like GetFeedback offer ways to filter customers via questions in your survey so you’re asking everyone only the questions they can answer accurately.
Know the information you want to collect. One survey can’t cover every aspect of your products, so you need to decide what specific things you want to focus on for each survey. Begin your survey design with your business goals in mind so you collect only the actionable feedback you need with each survey.
Product feedback example questions
A great product survey begins with asking your customers the right questions, and asking the right questions begins with setting the goal of your survey. Once you’ve selected one of the different kinds of product survey questions, you can use these example questions to write and create your own survey.
Different types of questions
Questions to help understand your customers
Product surveys that help you understand the needs and desires of your customers are very valuable because they allow you to gain insight into their priorities and preferences for current and future product design.
Questions to improve marketing efforts
Your marketing will be more effective if you understand exactly what about your products appeals to your most satisfied customers. You can ask your customers directly about what they love and include those points in your marketing so it speaks to your ideal audience.
Questions to improve a product
If you’re looking to improve product functionality but you aren’t sure where to start, begin with a question that asks about what is currently dissatisfying customers in your products. You can also ask them what features or improvements would increase their satisfaction and incorporate these suggestions into your feedback loop.
Example questions
How often do you use our products?
Which features are most valuable to you?
How would you compare our products to our competitors?
What features are we missing?
How easy is it to use our product?
How likely are you to recommend our products to others?
How could we improve our product to better meet your needs?
How did you hear about us?
Key takeaways
Incorporating product feedback surveys into your customer experience program can help your business create products that your customers love, enhance your brand perception, and build customer loyalty. And sending product surveys and analyzing your survey data doesn’t need to be difficult - in fact, with the robust and agile GetFeedback CX platform it’s easy, accurate, and flexible. It’s a vital part of any product team’s CX handbook - try it today.