With the customer driving today’s business practices, a good customer service survey is a necessity.
Given its importance, how do you know what quality assurance questions for customer service exceed expectations?
It all starts by asking the right ones.
Your customer service surveys should always be short and to the point. Your customers are happy enough to help you if it only takes a few seconds of their time.
Therefore, don’t stretch it unnecessarily. When you prepare the questionnaire, have a reason in mind, such as one of the following examples:
- Improving the customer experience
- Setting performance goals
- Measuring customer loyalty
How Long Should the Survey Be?
Keep it short and sweet — under four questions is best if you want a completed survey.
Multiple-choice is a good option but the
Likert Scale is the most popular way of scoring answers. It’s easy to read and understand while still providing enough detail to get an accurate reading of the customer’s feelings. You’ve seen it — the 5-stage scale ranging from “strongly agree” to ‘strongly disagree.”
You can tailor the answer scale to suit the question. For instance, if you’re asking about your customer service staff’s manners when dealing with customers, it could range from “very polite and agreeable” to “rude and unpleasant.”
Open-ended quality assurance questions for customer service give you a great opportunity to get specific, actionable feedback from customers. However, they take more effort and brainpower to complete. If you include too many, you risk the customer abandoning the process altogether. One or two targeted questions per survey are about all most customers will tolerate.
It’s a good idea to use short questionnaires and survey often (but not too often).
Not to mention, choose your timing wisely.
For instance, you can send a survey just after the customer has completed an interaction with your company or purchased a new product. If the customer can see the purpose behind the survey, they’ll be more likely to want to help. You might also consider offering some incentive for completion, such as a discount code or free giveaway.
If You Only Ask One Question, This is it
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a proven metric that measures how satisfied your customers are and how well your business is doing. The NPS measures the answer to a simple, yet telling, question, “How likely are you to recommend us to your family and friends?”
It’s measured on a scale from 1 to 10, from “Not at all likely” to “Extremely likely.” Customers answering 9 or 10 (extremely likely) are considered promoters, while those answering 0 to 6 (not likely) are detractors. Customers who score in the middle range (7 to 8) are passive customers who don’t complain but might easily drift off to a competitor.
Promoters are loyal customers who would happily recommend your company, while detractors are unhappy and likely to badmouth you to others. You get the Net Promoter Score by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. It gives you a good understanding of how loyal your customer base is and how customers view your brand with just one customer service survey question.
Basic Quality Assurance Questions for Customer Service
These are the fundamental questions — the screwdrivers in your survey toolbox.
- How would you rate the quality of your customer service experience?
- Was the customer service agent knowledgeable?
- Was the customer service agent polite/friendly?
- How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or family member?
- How many times did you have to contact us regarding this concern?
In-Depth Questions
These are questions you can ask when you want to find out more detailed information about your opening hours, agent’s conduct, and other aspects of the customer service experience.
- How did you contact us? (Telephone, email, live chat, in person, via social media)
- If you had to contact us more than once, were the agents already familiar with your issue when you contacted us again?
- Was the customer service agent well-trained?
- Was the customer service agent adequately supervised?
- How professional was the agent’s conduct?
- Did the agent treat you with courtesy and consideration?
- How well did the agent understand your question?
- How clear was the advice the agent provided?
- How long did you have to wait for an agent to answer your query?
- Was the customer service opening hours convenient for you?
Questions for B2B companies
These quality assurance questions for customer service target concern specific to B2B companies, which may handle things a little differently from retail or B2C businesses.
- Is your account manager knowledgeable and helpful?
- Does your account manager maintain a professional demeanor?
- Does your account manager make a positive contribution to your business?
- Does your account manager respond to your concerns in a timely fashion?
- Overall, are you satisfied with your account manager’s performance?
Open-Ended Questions
Think of these quality assurance questions for customer service as the special spice of your survey — a little goes a long way. Depending on your service, a great way to use open-ended questions is to program the survey so customers only see questions that apply to them.
For instance, if the customer talked with your customer service staff in person, they would ask a different series of questions than someone who telephoned, chatted, or emailed. You can also assign different questions to different demographics, or just randomly, in order to get a broad view of your customer’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions.
- What did you like best about our customer service?
- How could we improve our customer service?
- Is there a staff person you would like to commend? Why?
- What suggestions do you have for improving your experience with our company?
- If you could change one thing about our service, what would it be and why?
- Why did you choose our brand rather than a competitor’s?
- What are a few words you’d use to describe our service?
With plenty of quality assurance questions for customer service to choose from, you’ve got the tools to ask the right questions in order to get the most out of each customer and improve their experience.
