Customer feedback is at the core of good CX.
When capturing customer feedback, asking the right questions is paramount — without the right questions, you'll end up with tons of data that you can't act on. Furthermore, not acting on customer feedback will surely deteriorate relationships with customers.
That's why we put together a rundown of the most effective question types that will help you uncover more data and insight into the customer journey.
So you can focus on your business goals and drive the most out of your CX measurement program.
CSAT - Customer Satisfaction Score
Customer satisfaction questions are great to gauge the overall sentiment of customers. As one of the simplest types of CX measurement questions, CSAT enjoys high response rates. Enabling high amounts of experience data points.
A caveat to watch out for is the potential for getting skewed based on cultural biases. So it might be a good idea to keep the results from different countries and regions isolated.
CSAT questions are generally asked during experiences. Right after a purchase, a customer support call, within online content and during a store experience — all are popular moments to ask for satisfaction based feedback.
The in-the-moment nature of this type of question makes it best to try to map out the customer journey before deciding on when and where to ask customers satisfaction questions.
NPS® - Net Promoter Score
The Net Promoter Score is a system that is highly effective in separating or segmenting, promoters and at-risk customers, namely detractors.
Similar to CSAT, it is a super simple way to get feedback with high response rates. Helping to capture large volumes of feedback from customers.
As one of the most popular customer experience metrics, it enables you to easily benchmark yourself against competitors.
NPS is also quite versatile in terms of its use-cases. By modifying the wording of the question you can measure a spectrum of experiences from individual transactions to general customer loyalty.
Making it great for transactional feedback measuring stages of the customer journey. Also for periodic measurement to gauge the relationship with the customer. As an example, by implementing a quarterly NPS survey.
CES - Customer Effort Score
How easy is it to buy from you — or having a frictionless experience — has a huge impact on whether someone buys from you again.
Customer Effort Score is a great way to identify points of friction in your customers' journey. Uncovering key pain points and bottlenecks in the customer experience itself.
Enabling you to improve the customer experience. Additionally, to boost your organization's performance across a variety of metrics such as revenue, LTV and retention.
Businesses utilize CES at key stages of the customer journey. Like after an e-commerce website checkout flow or opening a bank account.
It's also used in online knowledge-base articles. By modifying the wording of the question to something like "How much effort did you have to put forth to find this article?".
As a last note, because CES asks customers specifically to evaluate the amount of effort they put into solving a problem or getting something done. It's not suitable to be used on a regular basis. It's best to consider NPS or CSAT for these cases.
Product / Market Fit - "Must-Have" Score
Another method that has gained popularity recently is the Sean Ellis Test for measuring product-market fit. This method is great for testing new products and services.
It's also great for evaluating the value provided to customers. Giving important insight that can influence pricing and more.
Although the Sean Ellis Test tends to reveal somewhat subjective results, a good score to strive for is 40%.
That is if over 40% of your customers say they would be "very disappointed" without your product, it's a good indicator that you've achieved a solid product/market fit. Additionally, a good sign that you should put, the pedal to the metal, in your marketing and sales efforts.
Qualitative / Open-ended Questions
Asking open-ended questions are great for getting raw and direct customer insight.
Helpful in finding out more about a person, situation or issue in your business — gaining qualitative data into the root causes of problems.
Open-ended questions are usually paired with other quantitative, score based questions to make analysis simpler.
One of the major caveats to these types of questions is the need to manually sift through and read them. Which can be quite time-consuming.
That's why if you're planning to implement these types of questions in your CX measurement you should consider using products that offer AI based text analysis.
Personalization Questions
Customers expect businesses to provide personal experiences. That’s why it’s a good idea to ask customers questions about their preferences and interests that help personalize their experience.
You can ask customers anything from their notification preferences to product categories which they're interested in. Moreover, streaming this data to your marketing automation or CRM systems to personalize your outreach.
It's important not to overwhelm customers with these questions though. You want to infer as much information from customer behaviour and activity history as possible.
So asking these questions only when you need to and making sure you'll be able to positively impact the customer experience with the responses is crucial.
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There is no one question to rule them all. That's why when considering your customer experience measurement strategy you should mix, match and test different approaches based on your business objectives.
Finally, be mindful of the customer feelings and keep your questions short and sweet. Empathy is 🔑 when engaging with customers and always ask yourself if you're in a position to ask for feedback or not.
This article is based on Pisano CX Workshop workbook content. Contact us for more information on our workshops.
