Within the hospitality sector, Customer Experience (CX) is becoming more critical than ever. Rather than just basing decisions on where to spend their hard-earned dollars on product and price, customers are considering:
- How good is your customer service?
- What COVID-19 health and safety protections have you put in place?
- How easy is it to make a reservation with you – and cancel if circumstances change?
- Is it straight-forward to contact you without too much effort – or are you using COVID-19 as an excuse?
- What innovations do you offer that will enhance my vacation?
You might believe you are offering the very best Customer Experience, and your strategy is working. But you will only honestly know if you ask them and measure the results.
Data analysis will help you understand how your customers view you, your property and your customer service. It will also identify what you need to change, what you need to do more of, and what you need to do to encourage more customers to your property.
There are many customer feedback and surveying services available, such as CustomerCount (whom you’ll find in our Supplier Network). But whether you use a customer feedback management platform or decide to implement a survey strategy in house, it is essential to ask the right customer experience survey questions.
Incorporating multiple question types into your customer feedback survey is the best way to provide the granular data you need for a real insight into your business. It also gives the appearance of a well thought out survey – and prevents survey boredom.
How many times have you received a survey where all the questions were the same? If the survey just has scaled answer distribution, it can lower completion rates, and the survey response results will reflect this.
Types of survey question for Customer Experience feedback
1 Close-ended rank order question.
These can be used to help you understand what that consumer views most important to them when doing business with your organization.
These questions allow respondents to evaluate multiple row items concerning one column item or a question in a ranking survey and then rank the row items. They are multiple-choice questions presented in a single-column format. An example would be:
Please rank the following in order of importance from 1 to 4, where one is the most important to you and four is the least important to you:
- Speed of service
- Ease of parking
- Cleanliness of facilities
- Friendliness of staff
2 Short answer questions.
Incorporate questions that require verbatim, unstructured, open-ended responses. With text analytics software in place (link to a most recent article on this), this question type provides qualitative data that allows you to hear first-hand from the consumer and get to the real meaning behind their answers. There is no character limit, so customers can write as much as they want.
3 Net Promoter Score (NPS) question.
This question measures customer happiness by separating your promoters from your passives and detractors. It also identifies customer loyalty and those that might need a little more attention.
This measurement is one of the most critical customer experience questions because it helps you track the likelihood that your existing customers will bring in new customers and help those looking to retain customers. You should monitor this metric over time because a sudden drop suggests that something has gone wrong.
4 Customer Effort Score (CES) question.
This question is a powerful metric to measure service satisfaction by measuring how much effort their customers have to put into getting a problem solved, or question answered. It is an excellent indicator of customer loyalty. Remember that if your customers are struggling to buy from you, get in contact, or navigate your website, they’ll go elsewhere.
5 Multiple choice questions.
These are the most straightforward survey question type where a customer is presented with a limited set of answers from which to choose. Customers can be limited to one answer or multiple. It is an excellent way to determine personal preferences, ask yes or no questions or learn about product or service usage.
6 Rating questions.
These questions help gather feedback on the customer’s experience with a product, service or event. The results indicate how well your company did on a scale of X to Y, usually represented as a series of numbers (1 – 5/7/10) or shapes like stars or emojis. Usually, the more stars or, the higher the number, the better you did. These questions are beneficial to determine:
- How much they like your product or service
- The friendliness of the customer service agent
- The value for money offered
7 Slider questions.
These are very like rating questions, but instead of answering with a number of stars, the customer slides a bar that indicates their preference. The far left represents the lowest rating, the right the most positive.
8 Grid questions.
These can be in the form of a multiple-choice or a rating grid and allow you to ask the same question about a series of different items. They are particularly helpful for customer experience surveys when you want to rate the performance of a particular function, such as a hotel/resort reception, on a variety of factors.
When developing these types of questions, make sure that you avoid negatives and keep the sentence structure simple.
9 Like/Dislike questions.
This question type allows customers to choose from the unhappy and happy face quickly, thumbs down and thumbs up, or X mark and checkmark questions to express sentiment about a specific experience or piece of content.
10 Form questions.
These collect specific information from customers, such as their details and demographics.
If you’d like help with your Customer Experience strategy, CustomerCount can help. With over 20 years of experience in customer feedback management, the team certainly knows a thing or two about customer experience surveys. You can find out more about CustomerCount on InsideHS Supplier Network listing.