Customer surveys and interviews: How to get to know your customers better

How well do you know your customers? Do you have a close relationship, or is it limited to the basics like age, gender, purchasing frequency, etc.?

Building a strong base of repeat customers is an incredible achievement, but understanding what drives their actions or makes them put the brakes on is the secret to growing a business that connects deeply with your ideal audience.

Thinking you know your customers isn’t enough. To understand your customers, you need to conduct thorough research into their needs, motivations, job-to-be-done, and pain points. You have to speak directly with your customers, gather qualitative data, and turn that information into actionable insights that’ll improve your customer experience.

If you were buying a house, for example, you wouldn’t make a blind decision and cross your fingers hoping it was the right one. You’d likely start by researching houses to see which might best fit your current circumstances. Then, you’d visit a few houses to take a closer look at the property, essentially getting to know the house before making an offer.

Conducting customer research is similar to this process. You might have some preconceptions about your customers and whether you’re their perfect fit, but it isn’t until you get up close and personal that you learn about them on a deeper level.

Once you achieve this understanding, the results will resonate throughout your entire business. That includes knowing chat channels to invest in, how to approach leads, and more.

Customer research helps you forge strong relationships that benefit your users, your team, and your company.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the importance of getting to know your customers and how to carry out customer research effectively. We’ll cover:

• Why it’s important to know your customers
• Key components of a customer survey
• Customer survey questions
• How to distribute surveys
• How to conduct customer interviews
• Customer interview questions

Why it’s important to know your customers

When you understand your customers, you understand how to better serve their needs.

As we move into a cookieless age, you can no longer rely on third-party tracking to gather information about your users. This kind of covert tracking (which I like to refer to as “creeper tracking”) is going away. So, you need to get smart about your data sources — and speaking directly with your customers is a rich and reliable source of first-party data.

Your customers are more than numbers on a screen. They are real people, so you need to speak to them like people. Your analytics and revenue only tell one part of the customer’s story. This numerical data might show your customers’ actions, but it won’t reveal the reasons behind their decisions.

Examples of quantitative data include:

• MQLs and SQLs
• Sales transactions
• Pages visited
• Session duration
• Traffic sources

Making assumptions based on that data could damage your brand if they’re unfounded claims. Customer research gives you the chance to gain valuable, qualitative insights into your users.

Examples of qualitative data include:

• Customer surveys and interviews
• Case studies
• Customer support transcripts
• Website session recordings
• User reviews

The results of this research helps you understand the motivation behind customers’ actions, instead of making inferences about what you think was driving them. This information will also strengthen your quantitative data and allow you to make data-driven decisions moving forward.

Plus, qualitative data that comes directly from your customers is a great method of collecting valuable first-party data.

Tip: Hold customer interviews regularly and use the information from them to verify or disprove your assumptions. Don’t worry about being wrong — these interviews present a rich learning opportunity and a great way to grow your business.

2 Important ways to get to know your buyers

Two of the best ways to learn more about your buyers are by conducting customer surveys and interviews. Although other customer research methods can effectively gain insight into user behavior, these two methods are key for gathering accurate information straight from the source.

If you want to know what your customers honestly think, pick up the phone (or send an email) and chat with them.

1) Customer surveys maintain a degree of anonymity as buyers can complete these in their own time. They may feel comfortable answering truthfully when filling out an online survey. However, their answers will often be limited based on the questions asked, so take care to be clear and specific when crafting survey questions.

2) In contrast, customer interviews require face-to-face interaction either online, over the phone, or in person. This more personal method often reveals more emotional insights as a result. You can also expand on questions and take the interview in a new direction depending on what comes up during your conversation.

Let’s take a closer look at each method to see how you can deliver effective customer surveys and interviews.

Key components of a successful customer survey

Customer surveys can take many forms — pop-up surveys, customer support surveys, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, churn surveys, etc. The most common type, though, is the customer satisfaction survey.

Whatever type of survey you create, you need to include a few key components. Follow the below steps to avoid sending a survey that irritates customers or misses the mark.

1) Make it easy to answer

One of the most important tenets of survey creation is to make it easy to answer. Remove any barriers to entry and avoid complex instructions. One option is to include a short survey in an email.

Some survey tools allow you to embed survey questions directly into your email. MailerLite, for example, lets your customers answer surveys without leaving their email app. Other tools have the ability to embed single-question surveys or the first question of longer surveys in email campaigns.

You could also use Google Forms to insert a short survey in your emails, but the process is more complex.

2) Keep it short

To improve the chances of customers completing your survey, keep it short. If your survey is too long, your customers will either leave it unfinished or provide false answers to get it done as quickly as possible. This phenomenon is known as “satisficing.”

According to SurveyMonkey, the ideal survey should take less than eight minutes to complete and should feature fewer than 30 questions. After eight minutes, the survey completion rate drops 5%–20%.

3) Avoid biasing questions

When formulating your survey questions, take care to avoid biasing your respondents through your questions.

Asking leading questions can cause customers to respond with what you want to hear, rather than their genuine thoughts.

Even seemingly innocent questions like, “How much did you enjoy the product you purchased?” can be considered leading as it assumes customers liked your product.

Instead, ask open-ended questions that make no assumptions, and use neutral language. Your questions should not frame or position your customers’ responses favorably or negatively toward your product or service.

4) Incentivize respondents

Reward people for completing your survey. An easy option is to offer a monetary incentive such as cash or gift cards. Alternatively, you could provide respondents with a gift to say thank you, or enter all respondents into a raffle draw.

When deciding an incentive for your customer survey, choose something that interests your customers. The offer needs to be enticing enough that people feel compelled to complete the survey. Similarly, you don’t want the reward to be so high that it skews your results or impacts the reliability of your data. Finding the right reward is a careful balancing act.

Tip: Your incentives should match your audience. Offering $100 for an hour of time from an enterprise C-suite decision-maker won’t even get them to open an email, but $1,000 might.

5) Make plans to follow up

Before closing your customer survey, make plans to follow up with any respondents who are open to hearing from you. This post-survey communication is a valuable opportunity that many miss.

If a respondent is open to hearing from you post-survey, you can schedule a call with them and discuss their responses further. This allows you to dig deeper into their opinions and offers your customer the chance to expand upon their responses freely.

Avoid simply asking more questions. Your post-survey follow-up is a great way to inform customers of any changes you’ve made thanks to customer survey results, for example. Turn it into a discussion that invites the customer to share even more insights and feedback.

6) Always say thank you

While survey responses are powerful for finding ways to improve the buyer experience, customers don’t have to complete them to benefit from your product or service. So, end your survey on a positive note by saying thank you. This shows your customers you genuinely care about their experience and your relationship.

Customer survey question bank

If you have a customer-only portal or app, consider sending these questions to learn more about the people who have already entrusted you with their hard-earned cash. At 8 questions, it’s a little long to send via a text or ask in social, but a great way to gather more information from your app users.

1. Before [BRAND], how did you [FUNCTION]? What tools and methods did you use? – Find out where your customer journey began. What was their starting state? Were they ignoring the function you provide? Were they using a competitor? Were they doing it manually?
2. When did you realize you needed a solution like [BRAND]? – What is the trigger to start looking for you? Find their pain points and what propels them to action.
3. How did you find out about [BRAND]? – What channels do they frequent and trust? Was it your blog, a referral, or a webinar?
4. Why did you choose us over other options? Did anything in particular appeal or stand out? – What strengths do you need to highlight in your messaging?
5. What dealbreakers would have prevented you from choosing [BRAND]? – What do you need to avoid doing?
6. When you signed up for [BRAND], what happened that made you feel certain it was right for you? – What are you doing that increases retention? How do you onboard so that customers see the true value of your tool/service?
7. Now that you have [BRAND] in your life, what’s the #1 thing you’re able to do that you weren’t before? – What is their JTBD? What solution should you build more case studies out of? What end goals do you need to produce more content around?
8. Optional: Would you be open to discussing your experience with [BRAND] further on a short 1:1 call?

Tip: Consider incentivizing the survey in a way that will help boost retention further. For example, instead of 1 month free, you can offer 6 months with a 10% discount for survey respondents.

Bonus: Website visitor survey questions

Alternatively, if you want to survey your website visitors (who won’t all necessarily be customers), you can ask the following:

• I’m considering using a [FUNCTION]  for the first time.
• I know I need a [FUNCTION] tool, I’m just trying to find the best option.
• I know exactly what I want, I’m here to sign up for [BRAND] right now.
• Other (click to type details)

• Small business (<$X / month)
• Growing business ($X – $X / month)
• Enterprise (>$X/month)
• Other (click to type details)

• [Open text field]

• Yes, specifically (click to type details)
• No, my current solution is fine.

• [Open text field]

Tip: Consider offering a free month or discount to survey respondents, to encourage sign up alongside responses.

How to distribute surveys

We’ve covered the elements that make up an effective customer survey, but it’s also important to determine the best way to deliver your survey.

You can send surveys to your customers through several channels. Which one to choose should be based on the answers to the following two questions: 1) Where are your customers most likely to be, and 2) How long will the survey take?

• Texts: SMS is one of the best channels for sending out short, simple surveys. You might find SMS surveys especially effective if they’re sent to customers as part of the post-sales marketing process.
• Social media: Another channel that’s great for short surveys is social media. Most social media channels let you host polls to create fun, engaging surveys that gauge buyer opinions and interests.
• Communities: If you have a tight-knit community on Slack or in a Facebook Group, you could also use these channels to share polls and gain insights from an engaged audience.
• In-app or website: For longer surveys, we recommend hosting the survey on your website or app. The interface of these platforms is better suited to surveys with more questions.
• Email: Leverage your newsletters and email communications with customers. You can embed a short survey in your post-purchase email or use it to direct people to an online form.

3 Awesome customer survey tools

We’re spoilt for choice when it comes to survey tools.

Everyone has their opinion on the best survey tools for collecting customer feedback. From my experience, the best tool makes it easy for you to collect customer insights and for your customers to provide feedback.

Here are some top-notch survey tools you can employ to collect qualitative customer data.

Google Forms

Google Forms is a free online form creator that’s a great choice for small start-ups or businesses wanting to keep costs low.

It’s not a flashy or aesthetic form builder, but it gets the job done. You can easily create a customer survey and send it to your buyers, subscribers, and audience for their feedback. Any results will be visible on the “responses” tab, and you also have the option to auto-export responses to Google Sheets for further analysis.

Typeform

If you’re after an intuitive survey tool that’ll keep respondents engaged, look no further than Typeform.

Typeform lets you create branded surveys that hook (and hold) your audience’s attention. The surveys’ single-slide layout effectively keeps your audience engaged by showing them one question at a time. This tactic has been shown to increase the response rate and encourage more thoughtful replies.

As for price, Typeform offers a tiered pricing structure, so there’s a plan suitable for businesses of all sizes.

Airtable

Airtable is my favorite curveball response when people ask for my customer survey recommendations.

While Airtable is generally a collaborative tool for organizing team workflows, it’s also a powerful app for designing and sending out customer surveys. You can use Airtable’s customer survey template or create your own.

The beauty of this tool is that it saves all responses in your Airtable database, where you can automatically label any brand promoters or detractors. Mark up responses with various tags and glean valuable insights from the Airtable survey responses. Airtable offers a data-driven method to analyze customer survey responses and share them with your team.

How to conduct customer interviews

Customer interviews are an invaluable way to build strong connections with your audience and understand how to better serve them.

Before jumping into customer interviews, start positioning it as a casual conversation in your mind.

Interviews can be stuffy, intimidating, and boring. Meanwhile, conversations flow naturally and create an environment of trust. When customers feel at ease, they’re more likely to engage with you and respond honestly.

1) Avoid cold outreach

When conducting customer interviews, get a warm introduction from customers’ main point of contact within your business.

Cold outreach makes it harder for you to build rapport with customers, so getting your sales or onboarding team to loop you in via email can help get customers to actually read and consider your ask.

2) Set a time limit

Keep your requests short and sweet. Kick-start your interview request by sending customers a short email that introduces your request to interview, highlights how it would benefit them, and clarifies the steps to move forward in the process.

Be cautious of time when interviewing customers too. A healthy amount of time for a customer interview is 30 minutes. Any longer and you run the risk of people disengaging; too short and customers may not be comfortable enough to give thoughtful answers.

3) Make it convenient

The interview process should be as easy as possible for your customers. Use a calendar booking tool to make it convenient for customers to book an interview time in your diary.

With Calendly, respondents can easily check their availability against yours, book time in your diary, and receive a meeting invite link via email. You can also design your meeting page to share pertinent information before someone signs up. For example, if you are doing in-person interviews, you can put a note about where participants can park.

Send reminder emails ahead of the interview as well and clearly explain where the interview will take place. These reminders should include all of the information needed to join the interviews, such as a meeting link or Google Maps location pin.

4) Set expectations

Don’t let your audience walk into an interview blind. Help your customers prepare for the interview by establishing the context and expectations beforehand.

When onboarding customers to interviews, make sure you provide the following information:

• Where the interview will take place
• How to join the interview
• Video call link (if the interview will be hosted online)
• Whether they need to prepare anything for the interview
• How long the interview will be
• What the interview will cover
• How you plan to use their responses
• Reminder that it’s a safe space for them to respond honestly and openly without judgment or retaliation

The onboarding stage is crucial for detailing what your audience should expect during the interview. It’s also your opportunity to help ease their nerves so they are calmer and more responsive during the interview.

5) Don’t stick to a script

Although I’ll share some customer interview questions below, don’t stick to a script. The benefit of doing an interview over a survey is that you can build discussions around whatever you pick up on that is important context for your business. It might be a passing thought that you wouldn’t have known to ask about, or a casual tangent that reveals a new use case for your product.

6) Show appreciation

Finally, show your customers you appreciate their input!

Just like surveys, you can offer your buyers an incentive as a way of saying thank you for participating in an interview. This could take the form of exclusive company swag, a special discount code, or a gift card they can redeem online.

Be sure to reward all customers who participate, not just those who respond positively. Insights from detractors are equally as important as feedback from promoters. Negative input helps you uncover potential blockers and other areas of improvement in your current customer experience.

Tip: Looking for tools to help you record and transcribe your interviews? Check out my list of 200+ content creation tools.

Customer interview question bank

Below you’ll find some customer interview questions to help you set the scene, dig into their pain points and motivations, and unlock insightful discussions. At any point, remember to follow your instinct if you feel there’s an important tangent to go off. As you conduct more interviews, your most useful question will be “could you elaborate on that?” whenever you hear something interesting. Get the full 60+ question list here.

Setting the scene

Use these questions to learn about your customers’ day-to-day lives and what their current concerns are.

• What is your job title or role at your company?
• What do your day-to-day responsibilities look like?
• How often do you use our product/service?
• What are the main areas in your role that our product/service helps with?

Motivations

Use these questions to learn what problems or situations prompted them to start searching for your product or service.

• Why did you start looking for a product/service like ours?
• How did you handle [product function] before us?
• How long did you use your old solution? What did you like and dislike about it?
• Is there anything you miss about your old solution?
• When did you first think you needed something new?
• What were the most important features you were looking for when you started your search?

Discovery

Use these questions to learn how your customers found you and which marketing channels deliver the best results.

• How did you hear about us?
• Where do you usually learn about industry news? What blogs/podcasts/newsletters do you follow?
• How did you first reach out to us? (Social DM, website contact form, email, webinar Q&A, something else?)
• Did you check any review sites when researching our product? What were they?
• Have you visited our website? Did you find any sections of our website difficult to use or understand?
• Are there any questions you had that our website left unanswered?
• Is there anything that stood out in particular about our website that you liked or disliked?

Selection

Use these questions to figure out who your competitors are and the alternatives your customers were considering you against.

• What other solutions did you try?
  • How did you discover them?
  • What did you find interesting about them?
  • Why did you decide against them?
• Was there anything you were skeptical, nervous, or had questions about with our product/service?
• Why did you decide to try us?
• Did you talk to anyone from sales during your research?
• Was there anything you particularly liked or disliked about your sales interactions?
• Did you have any unanswered questions from our sales team?
• Did you find our pricing affordable, right in your budget, or on the expensive side?

Activation

Use these questions to learn about how well you convert new customers to loyal fans.

• How long did it take you to feel comfortable using our product/service?
• How could we improve our onboarding process?
• How do you prefer to get tips on how to better use our product/service? In-app walk-throughs, live webinars, videos, text, etc.
• Was there a particular “aha” moment when you realized our product/service was the right choice for you? What solidified your choice, or reassured you that you made the right decision?

Use cases

Use these questions to uncover how customers use your product/service and find the most value from it.

• Is the reason you signed up initially still the reason you’re using our product/service? How have your needs evolved?
• What features of our product/service do you use the most? What about the least?
• What does our product/service enable you to do today that you weren’t able to do before?
• What team members use our product/service the most?
• What aspects of our product/service could you not live without?
• How do you measure the success of our product/service? What internal KPIs do you use related to our product/service?
• How long did it take to see results with our product/service?

Retention

Use these questions to get a sense of how useful your customers find your product and how likely they are to churn.

• Are there any areas of our product/service you struggle to use?
• How easy is our product/service to use compared to any alternatives/competitors you’ve tried?
• Since you signed up, have you ever considered leaving? Why?
• What could we do or add to make our product/service even more useful for you? What feature would make you use it more often?
• Are there any initial expectations that we didn’t meet?
• If you could describe the ideal customer of [product], what would they look like?
• How likely are you to recommend us to someone you know?

Communication

Use these questions to get a better understanding of how your customers interact with your team and how they prefer to be contacted.

• How often do you feel you hear from us? What is your ideal communication frequency?
• How do you prefer to hear from us? Email, SMS, social, etc.
• How do you prefer to submit customer service tickets? Email, live chat, social, etc.
• What are some of the reasons you contacted our customer support?
• Were you able to reach a resolution? How long did it take?
• How can our customer support process be improved?

Wrapping up — Use customer surveys and interviews to learn more about your audience

Customer interviews and surveys are irreplaceable methods for getting to know your audience.

The insights gained from these direct conversations with customers can improve your user experience, increase customer satisfaction, and optimize your products and services.

Customer research is just one aspect of your wider consumer analysis. On a bigger scale, your consumer research should analyze user behavior at every stage of the journey.

Don’t use customer research in silos. Combine multiple data collection methods to obtain more valuable consumer knowledge. Pair customer surveys and interviews with trend analysis, industry research, and audience behavior analysis to gain a well-rounded picture of buyer behavior. Use qualitative and quantitative data side by side to gather deep insight into your user experience and behavior.

Don’t shy away from customer surveys and interviews. They’re a powerful tool for understanding how to build your brand in a way that satisfies your customers and streamlines operations for your team and business.