On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that your own website experience is meeting customer expectations? đ¤
If you donât immediately think, âIâm definitely in the 8-10 range for confidence,â then you need to do customer discovery.Â
When completing customer discovery itâs important to gather a combination of qualitative and quantitative feedback for making the best product decisions. Â
Earlier in my career, I joined a new company focused on delivering a new reporting tool. They knew that this product would increase sales and customer retention. They were so confident because prospective customers were choosing a competitor for their advertised reporting features.Â
I wanted to be on board with the team around the confidence they had in this decision but there was no quantitative feedback to support their assumption, just a handful of lost prospect conversations calling out the competitorâs reporting functionality. No one had gathered WHY reporting was important and what value these features would provide for customers.Â
Acknowledging this, I quickly crafted a customer survey and persuaded our Head of Sales that this would be worth including on our website and in-product to gather the quantitative data we were missing to prioritize this work.Â
Within just a few days of polling our customers and prospects, it was clear that certain reporting functionality was important but it wasnât a direct copy of what our competitor had, in fact our competitor was missing some important parts too!Â
We used that feedback to craft a better prototype for reporting and got our customers even more excited than before!Â
Website feedback surveys are a great tool for gathering both of these types of feedback and testing those types of assumptions.Â
Surveys can gather general customer satisfaction or specific opinions on product features or functionality to help product teams create better experiences.Â
Surveys can also be a combination of data collection and open qualitative comments, giving more details to the customer story, problem or opportunity.Â
In addition to gathering great insights, website surveys are affordable and quick, making them an attractive option for most teams.Â
To design a strong website feedback survey, you first need to decide why youâre conducting a survey with what you hope to learn and then select the right questions to achieve those learnings.Â
Never issue a survey just to say you did. Surveys are a great tool, but they must have a purpose.Â
A few good purposes for running a survey include:
Whatâs important to call out is itâs difficult to cover multiple purposes in one survey so identifying specific learning objectives along with your feedback survey questions is key.
Learning objectives are the goals you have for performing the survey.
For example, letâs say your survey purpose was to gather feedback on âUnderstand website visitor intentâ. In this case, a few learning objectives may be:
Now that youâve outlined your learning objectives, you can focus your survey questions there.Â
This will help you quickly recognize that a question about market changes or onboarding issues wouldnât fit with this survey.
Now that youâve established why youâre running a survey and the goals, itâs time to design your survey questions to ask about. This can be the hardest part because you want to ask everything! But remember to stay focused on your purpose and learning objectives.
Surveys can focus on one category of questions or pull a few across categories related to a specific topic.
Below are a few categories of questions for designing your next website survey.Â
This is probably the most popular type of survey question alongside user experience.
These questions aim to help you better understand whether the information on your website is valuable and presented in the right way.
Insight from these questions can help you and your design teams focus on information architecture, website layout, or accessibility.Â
UX questions are a great way to understand customer satisfaction and opportunities in your product.
These questions tend to be ranking/scale questions or open comments to allow customers to provide specific examples.Â
One of the first things people look for when visiting a website is the price. Grabbing the traffic and better understanding how your price compares is extremely valuable information to collect.Â
The performance of your product or website can be a silent killer of success. Most customers wonât reach out if your website isnât loading; they just wonât come back. Asking questions like these is valuable to determine if youâre missing expectations.Â
Understanding more about the people visiting your website can be helpful. This can help set your content strategy and ensure that youâre addressing this groupâs concerns. It can also be valuable if youâre seeing increased traffic in a group you donât currently support but could! Typically, these questions are standard drop-down select questions.Â
Depending on your product or service, it can be valuable to know more specific information about your own website survey visitors.
For example, a college website may want to better understand if its traffic is prospective students or parents of students so they know how to adjust or improve the content presented.Â
Another bonus question is giving customers a final open option to provide their thoughts.
There may be problems or ideas top-of-mind for a survey participant theyâd like to share that may or may not be related to the topic youâre asking questions about. By providing an open-ended question, ideally this is the last question of your survey, customers can write anything theyâd like to share.
Writing great surveys takes practice, itâs not easy!
Here are a few best practices for designing your next survey.Â
Donât feel like you have to go at this alone.
Usersnap has a survey template for any situation to get you started, and your next survey will launch fast!Â
Check out all survey templates here.Â
Usersnap focuses on engaging with users at the right time and by user behavior to get the most survey responses. Surveys have the greatest impact when you engage with users while a product or tool is top of mind. Which means surfacing fast, relevant questions for real-time information gathering.Â
A great example of this is the In-Product Rating survey, which quickly asks a website visitor or customer if the information provided is what they are looking for. This is a fast way to understand if users are happy with their search results and are getting the outcome they are hoping to achieve.Â
Another is the Feature Feedback survey you can put directly in your product when launching a new feature or gathering insights on existing functionality. This is a great tool for product teams to proactively understand if a problem is important to their users and prioritize solving.
Within the platform, you can collect, analyze, and uncover insights from your feedback surveys across your website or product. From there, you can gather, copy, and share actionable insights across one of their many integrations like Slack, Jira, or Azure DevOps to immediately start taking action on what you learned from your customers.
You can also reply directly back to your users and thank them for providing their feedback, follow up for more details or let them know youâre building/fixing what they wanted!Â
Related:
31 Best Website Feedback Software
Itâs important to continuously collect feedback from your website visitors and customers, and it doesnât need to be cumbersome.
Utilizing the tips, recommendations, and available tools shared here, you can create your first survey and collect responses in minutes.
Focus on what you want to learn, find the best tool for collecting those details, and put insights into actionable next steps to keep improving your customer experience!
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