These Three Powerful Questions Will Spark Helpful Customer Feedback

When your company is ready to gather feedback from customers, there are three simple and pointed questions to effectively surface helpful insights for making your company better. And these three questions are ones you'll want to quickly integrate into your customer feedback loop.

Would You Buy Again? Why?

Assuming the answer is honest, this question gets right to the heart of the matter. 

There’s a peri-peri hot sauce I purchased last year made from an African chili pepper. It had an interesting flavor but not one I enjoyed enough to purchase again. While I don’t regret making the purchase, I don’t intend to ever buy another bottle. If the company asked me this question, they could learn from me and likely understand who is not their audience. Maybe another hot sauce they sell is up my alley. 

In 2003, I purchased a slightly used 2003 Hyundai Elantra. Almost fifteen years later and 230k miles along, and I’m still driving this vehicle. It’s been incredibly reliable and other than normal maintenance issues, it’s been a terrific car. If Hyundai were to ask me this question, they’d get a yes because the ROI was huge. 

Would You Refer Your Closest Friend? Why? 

What’s interesting about this question, especially when paired with the first is how it illuminates answers that may not have come up otherwise. Some people will settle for deficiencies when they purchase for themselves, but when it comes to telling a friend to buy, they won’t accept anything less than the best. 

By referring someone to a company or product, I’m also putting my reputation at stake. So, you better be awesome if I’m going to take that risk. 

I’m currently using the financial management tool for my freelancing business called Harpoon (affiliate link). It’s terrific software that closely aligned with how I approach my freelance consulting business. I’ll refer any freelancer or marketing agency to this tool because of how great it is, and the undergirding philosophy driving it. Now I’m their part-time salesperson. 

The Kia dealer we bought our minivan from in North Carolina is not a place I’d recommend buying from. While the people were fairly nice and we got a good deal, the experience, lack of attention to detail and the amount of work I had to do to finish the purchase was unpleasant. Their incompetence led to me doing half their job for them just so I knew we’d be taken care of properly. If they asked me this question, they’d get some honest feedback on how to transform their business. If they don't ask, they're going to eventually hit rock bottom. 

How Could We Improve?

While the first two questions elicit a response to their experience, this question opens up the possibilities for them to share new and creative ideas to make the purchase and experience better. If you’ve missed the basics in their experience, you can expect to receive feedback on those. If you mastered them, you’ll collect innovative ideas in this field. 

No company is perfect, so asking how to make the company, experience, service or product better will generously serve up suggestions, ideas, and problems you may not have thought about, known or cared for. 

Two Side Benefits of Requesting Feedback

As a quick side note, there are two interesting benefits I've discovered from inviting customer feedback from everyone. First, is this request curbs negative reviews. When we feel heard, we're less likely to go off and rant about our negative experience. In many cases, this invitation and the customer filling out the form act as a sponge for the legitimate and illegitimate client feedback.

And for customers who found the experience positive, their written survey feedback helps them quantify, articulate, and anchor what they value about working together. It's a great step towards fostering raving fans. 

Don't delay, get those client surveys going, and add these three questions to your customer feedback cycle. 

Photo by Lucy Heath on Unsplash