5 Customer Questions That Can Deliver Real Value For Your Business

Over the last few years the importance of customer experience and satisfaction has grown significantly. Many organisations even consider it to be more important than a product and its price. With that in mind, knowing what questions to ask your customers to gain the valuable insight needed to keep their experience and satisfaction levels high is crucial.

What’s interesting is that while businesses and marketers have never been more obsessed about measuring, benchmarking and striving to act on customer feedback, there is often more focus on acquiring rather than driving repeat sales and improving customer retention.

Retaining customers is fundamental to growth and a key element to achieving this is delivering value. Ultimately, if you can deliver huge value for your customers, not only will you naturally retain them, you will also acquire more through word of mouth recommendations and positive brand sentiment.

When it comes to writing a customer satisfaction survey it’s important to consider carefully the questions you’re asking. If you can include more value orientated questions, you can dig deeper, and can even understand how your customers perceive value and more importantly, see how they would like this reflected in your products and services, which you can then act on to further improve customer retention and acquisition.

Listening and then acting on the feedback you’ve been given has never been more important. Currently 52% of all people around the globe believe companies need to take greater action on the feedback provided by their customers. To help you get started on your own survey, we’ve outlined some great value-based customer satisfaction questions for you below. We have also provided some detail of the value that each question’s insight can deliver for your business.

Value oriented customer questions for your next survey

1) What could we do, to better serve your needs?

Although initially this may seem a bit too open a question to ask, the benefits it can provide in uncovering insight that you may never have otherwise considered is invaluable. When it comes to serving your customers, it’s important to ensure that you never leave any stone unturned.

This is also crucial when you consider it doesn’t take much for customers to leave your brand. According to a Price Waterhouse Coopers’ study, no matter how much people love a company or product, 59% will walk away after several bad experiences and 17% after just one bad one.

The great thing about this question is that it provides an ideal opportunity for you to act on the feedback you obtain. And there’s nothing more valuable to a customer than a company that listens and acts on their feedback.

Alternative ways in which you could ask this question include:

• What would you like to see us keep (and/or stop) doing?
• What is the one thing that we could improve that would help us to better serve you?
• What do you wish we could do but can’t?

2) How satisfied are you with our products/services?

Whether it’s good or bad feedback, it’s always useful to have more in-depth detail about what’s affecting your customers’ satisfaction levels. It could be a comment about a specific product feature or a customer service experience, or even general feedback about a customer relationship with an account manager.

Whatever it is, the insight it provides can put you on the first major step to making your customers feel more heard, understood and valued.

Related questions you could ask include:

• What part of our service makes you happy?
• Can you provide an example of where you have been delighted/wowed by a product or one of our services you’ve used at work and why?
• How likely would you be to renew at the end of your contract based on how you’re feeling at this very moment about the service/product you consume?

3) What value do we provide for you?

Whether you’re looking to perfect your value proposition, create a more effective pricing strategy or be better able to prioritise how you triage accounts and differentiate yourself from your competitors, knowing how much value customers are getting from your products or services, and how much they might be willing to pay for you to keep delivering that value can bring greater strategic clarity to many areas of your business.

Related questions you could ask alongside this include:

• What’s the main benefit you receive from our product/service?
• What value do we provide that makes you decide to stay with us?
• What features could you not live without?

4) What are your biggest challenges?

While consumers spend money in the pursuit of pleasure, they will typically spend more to help alleviate pain. So, asking questions that can uncover the challenges they are facing, which are causing their pain are invaluable.

Ultimately if you can better understand and empathise with the challenges facing your customers and be able to offer solutions in your products and services to some of their pain points, the potential increase in customer satisfaction and return business, can make a huge difference to your business.

Related questions you could ask alongside this include:

• What is the problem that if solved, would make the biggest difference to your life?
• How are you looking to transform your business over the next 18 months, and how could we help?
• What is currently your biggest challenge towards achieving growth?

5) Why do you continue to choose us over the competition?

When you consider the many options that most customers have, it can be very useful to know what factors could make them switch to another provider, as well as those most likely to make them remain with your business. With the insight this question can provide and enable you to act on, it can deliver real value for your business in terms of reducing the volume of customers that switch to another competitor, while converting more of your customer relationships into longer term ones.

Related questions you could ask alongside this include:

• How often have you considered switching to a competitor and why?
• If you had to choose one of our competitors, who would it be and why?
• What would you say to someone who asked about us?

Why customer questions deliver value for your business

Whether you’re looking to extend or adapt a product line or launch a new customer service strategy, whatever you are looking to expand or improve; your customers are ultimately your greatest source of insight in terms of helping you to decide what direction you should take.

While for some organisations such as those that work in e-commerce, data analytics and the ability to see which areas of a website are most visited, read, clicked on and have had the most material downloaded from them, can provide some insight into what your customers find the most interesting and valuable, it’s still not sufficient on its own.

To fully understand what they most want and value you need to ask them, as without adequate insight from your customers you’ll always be working to some extent in the dark. This is where the value of customer surveys and careful choice of questions really come to the fore, because as long as you’re asking the right ones, the insight it can provide can help put you on the pathway to greater success.