What Questions Should You Be Asking Your Customers?

There are some key questions you should ask your customers that give great insight into their satisfaction with your company. In fact, the answers to these questions are so valuable, they are the questions that Shopper Approved uses when collecting data for a client.

1. How would you rate your overall shopping experience?

The obvious question encompasses their entire experience with your company. It’s valuable to evaluate this question over time, especially as changes are made to your product or processes. This is the question used for Google Seller Ratings and Reviews, and the average of this rating provides insight into what people think of you as a whole.

2. How likely are you to recommend our site to others?

The ultimate form of flattery in business is your consumers recommending you to others. If they’re willing to put the value of their opinion on the line for you, you’re doing something right.

3. How likely are you to buy from us again if you ever need a similar product/service?

Did you just gain a loyal customer? A study done in 2015 found that repeat customers make up 40% of a business’s revenue. Acquiring consumers is important, but convincing them to come back to you time and time again is crucial.

Three simple questions with straightforward answers that give valuable insight into the core components of your company. It’s great to have this data, but it’s not very useful unless you use it to improve your product or the process from your brain to the consumer.

Don’t Forget the Comments

The data collected from these questions is straightforward and easy to digest. Comments add another level of depth and complexity but are where key conclusions and improvements can be drawn. Comments ask the “Why” for each question. This allows consumers to give their opinion without the limitation of a single selection. 

The best way to aggregate data from comments is to post-code. This means that you create “buckets” (common themes) that come from the comments and put each consumer's answer in the bucket that best aligns with their comment. An example of post-coding can be found below:

Post-coding can be done in a simple excel spreadsheet. Because the data is entered manually, you can allow customers to be placed in multiple buckets, or only one.

Look for positive/negative trends from the data collected with these questions. In the example above, the checkout process is clearly an issue. For other issues, if few or unclear comments are available on it, conduct another short survey to pinpoint the problem.

Just collecting answers to these questions isn't enough though. Even after post-coding, if consumers aren't leaving quality reviews, they are unlikely to persuade other potential customers to make a purchase from you. 

Quality reviews go in-depth about a product or experience, fall under guidelines in terms of appropriate language, and provide insight into an experience or product that review-seekers couldn't find elsewhere. To learn more about quality reviews, check out this article!