With the increase in customer expectations and the need for organizations to differentiate themselves, the use of customer feedback has never been more important in ensuring success.
Voice of the Customer (VoC) surveys provide a structured way to capture customer feedback and identify areas of improvement.
When designing a VoC survey, it is important to consider the information you want to obtain and how you will use it. This article provides an overview of some essential VoC survey questions, with examples for different types of businesses.
Let’s get started!
What is a voice of the customer survey?
A Voice of the Customer survey (also known as a customer satisfaction survey) is a tool used by businesses to collect feedback from customers.
These surveys aim to understand customer needs and expectations, identify areas of improvement, and track changes over time.
Also, by understanding what customers think and feel about your product or service, you can take steps to improve their experience. As a result, you can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
What are the benefits of VoC surveys?
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: By understanding what customers want and need, you can make changes that improve their satisfaction with your product or service.
- Increased Customer Loyalty: When customers feel that their needs are being met, they are more likely to remain loyal to your brand.
- Improved Product or Service Quality: By understanding customer expectations, you can make changes that improve the quality of your product or service.
- Higher Retention Rates: Customers who are satisfied with your product or service are less likely to switch to a competitor.
- Greater Insight Into Customer Needs: VoC surveys provide detailed information about customer needs, which can be used to inform product or service development.
- Increased Sales: You can increase sales and revenue by making improvements based on insightful customer feedback.
What Are essential elements of a VoC survey?
- The Right Questions: To get useful insights, it is important to ask the right questions. Consider what information you want to obtain and how you will use it before designing your survey.
- A Representative Sample: Your survey should represent your customer base to get accurate results. Make sure to include a mix of customers from different segments, locations, and periods.
- High Response Rate: To get reliable results, you must have a high response rate. To encourage responses, offer incentives and design a survey as short and easy to complete as possible.
- Analysis And Action: Once you have collected the data, it is important to analyze it and take action based on the insights. Share the results with relevant stakeholders and use them to inform decisions about product or service development, marketing, and customer service.
How to design VoC survey questions?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach as it depends on your organization, your products or services, your customers, and your goals for the survey. However, you can follow some basic principles to ensure that your questions are effective.
- Keep It Simple: Make sure to ask questions that are easy to understand. So avoid the use of jargon and other technical terms that are not commonly used.
- Be Specific: Be as specific as possible in your questions. This will help you get more accurate results relevant to your needs.
- Avoid Leading Questions: Leading questions suggest a particular answer or response. Avoid these questions in your survey to get more honest and unbiased feedback from your customers.
- Give Adequate Response Options: Provide adequate response options for each question. For example, if you’re asking about customer satisfaction, don’t simply give two response options (satisfied or dissatisfied). Instead, provide a range of options that allow respondents to express their level of satisfaction accurately (e.g., very satisfied, satisfied, neutral, dissatisfied, very dissatisfied).
- Pretest Your Questions: Before you launch your survey, pretest your questions with a small group of people to ensure they are clear and easy to understand. This will help you avoid confusion or misunderstandings when the survey is sent to your larger customer base.
- Questions Should Be Unbiased: Bias can creep into survey questions differently. For example, a question may be biased using loaded language that suggests a particular answer or response. Use neutral language in your questions and give respondents ample opportunity to express their opinions and views.
Common VoC question examples
The questions you include will depend on your business goals, objectives, and customer journey. However, there are some approaches include:
1. Value or Results-Based Questions
The main questions you may want to include in your survey focus on value or results. These questions can help you understand how your customers feel about the results they are getting from your product or service. For example, you might ask:
- How has our product/service helped you achieve your goals?
- What problem does our product/service solve for you?
- How would you describe the value you’ve received from our product/service?
- Would you recommend our product/service to others? Why or why not?
- Is there anything else you feel we could do to improve the results you’re getting from our product/service?
Also, consider asking customers to rate their satisfaction with specific aspects of your product or service on a scale from 1-10. This can help you identify areas where you’re excelling and areas where you may need to make some improvements.
2. Brand Loyalty Perception Questions
With brand loyalty perception questions, you’ll want to ask your customers how they feel about your brand compared to other brands in your industry. It’s important to understand how customers perceive your brand and whether they would recommend it to others.
It will help you gauge how strong of a connection your customers have with your brand and where you may need to improve.
Some examples of brand loyalty perception questions include:
- How likely will you recommend our product/service to a friend or family member?
- What comes to mind when you think of our brand?
- Do you feel our brand offers good value for the price?
- What other products or services do you purchase similar to ours?
- Would you say that our brand is superior, average, or inferior to other similar brands?
- Why do you prefer our products/services over our competitors?
Also, consider asking customers how they feel about your brand’s specific aspects, such as customer service, product quality, or value. This will give you a more detailed look at where your brand excels and where it may need improvement.
3. Customer Satisfaction Survey Question
With customer satisfaction surveys, you’ll want to ask your respondents how they feel about various elements of their experience with your company. This can help you identify areas where you’re excelling and areas that need improvement. Some examples include:
- How satisfied are you with the overall quality of our products or services?
- What did you like most about the product or service?
- What did you not like about the product or service?
- Would you recommend the product or service to others?
- Was the quality of the product or service what you expected?
- Did the product or service meet your needs?
- How easy was it to use the product or service?
- How affordable was the product or service?
- How soon after using the product or service did you experience results?
- Would you like to see more products or services from us in the future?
- Did our staff treat you with courtesy and respect?
Also, don’t forget to ask your respondents if they have any suggestions on how you can improve. This can be done either as a question or as part of a follow-up question. For example, you could ask:
- Is there anything we could do to improve our products or services?
- What other products or services would you like to see from us?
- How can we make your experience better?
Asking for feedback shows that you care about your customers’ satisfaction and always look for ways to improve. This can help build loyalty and trust, which are important for long-term success.
Different styles for asking VoC questions
You need to choose the right type of question for your needs. Different questions can be used in surveys, each with its strengths and weaknesses. They include:
1. Open-Ended Questions
These are questions that allow respondents to write in their answers. They can be used to collect qualitative data about people’s opinions, thoughts, and feelings.
They can provide detailed and rich insights into people’s views. They can also be used to probe deeper into someone’s answer to a previous question.
But, they can be time-consuming to analyze and may not be suitable for all surveys (e.g., if you’re looking for quantitative data).
Examples:
- What are your thoughts on the new product?
- How did you feel after using the new service?
2. Multiple Choice Questions
These questions offer respondents a fixed set of answers to choose from. They can be used to collect both quantitative and qualitative data.
They are easy to answer and quick to analyze. They can also ask complex questions (e.g., those with multiple parts).
Respondents may feel limited by the provided answers, and some answers may not be covered.
Examples:
- Which of the following best describes your experience with the new product?
- Very Satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Unsatisfied, Very Unsatisfied
3. Likert Scale Questions
Likert scale questions are one of the most common survey questions used to collect customer feedback. They typically use a 5-point or 7-point scale, with higher numbers indicating higher satisfaction levels (or agreeableness, etc.).
Here are some examples of Likert scale questions that could be used in a customer satisfaction survey:
- How easy is it to use our product?
- Very Easy, Somewhat Easy, Neutral, Somewhat Difficult, Very Difficult
4. Yes And No Questions
For close-ended questions that only require a yes or no answer, you can use one of these templates:
- Are you satisfied with the quality of the product?
- Did our service meet your expectations?
- Would you recommend us to your friends or family?
Build Your VoC survey?
When it comes to surveying your customers, there are a lot of different options out there. But which one is the best for your business? That’s where JustFeedback comes in.
We provide a simple, fast, and customizable solution to help you get the most out of your surveys. Our detailed reports and real-time results will help you identify what’s working and what needs improvement.
The top features include:
- Net Promoter Score: Measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s a great way to get feedback on your products or services and can also be used to identify areas for improvement.
- Feedback Management: The tool helps collect, track, and manage customer feedback and online reviews. This can be useful for identifying trends and improving your products or services.
- Customer Effort Score: Get feedback on how easy it is to do business with you. This can help you reduce customer effort and improve the overall customer experience.
- Customer Satisfaction Score: Get a pulse on how satisfied your customers are. This is a great way to identify areas of improvement and make sure your customers are happy.
- Target Filters: You can target specific groups of customers with your surveys. It will segment your customer base and get feedback from those who matter most.
- Analytics and Reporting: The tool provides detailed reports and real-time results. Thus, identify what’s working and what needs improvement.
With accurate data collection, powerful analysis, and actionable insights, JustFeedback is the best tool for surveying your customers. Get started today and collect customer feedback and valuable insights.
Conclusion
With the help of a few well-crafted voices of customer survey questions, you can get valuable feedback from your customers that can help improve your business.
Asking the right questions is essential to getting useful feedback, so carefully craft your questions. And, don’t forget to offer an incentive for completing the survey!
Do you have any experience conducting customer surveys? Contact us today, we’d love to hear your thoughts!