Author: manas

11 top customer engagement metrics to track [2024]
In this digital age, customer engagement is the key to business success. Higher customer engagement can lead to sales growth and better profitability. 65% of consumers say they will remain loyal to the company offering a more engaging customer experience. The question is, what are some of the top customer engagement metrics, and how can they be measured?
In this post, I will outline the top 12 customer engagement metrics, dive deep into each of them, and provide you with the formula to measure wherever applicable. Let’s get started.
TL;DR
Customer engagement is extremely important for business growth and profitability. It’s about building a long-term relationship with your customers so that they keep using your products or buy from you repeatedly. Here are some of the top customer engagement metrics categorized into specific buckets.
Measures of Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction: These customer engagement metrics measure how loyal your customers are to your brand and how satisfied they are. The important metrics in this category are Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). These metrics can be measured after receiving responses from customer surveys.
Measures of Customer Value: This category of customer engagement metrics measures how much value you get from an average customer, the frequency of transactions, and churn. The key metrics are Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Churn Rate, and Customer Retention Rate.
Website Engagement: This category of customer engagement metrics measures how engaged are customers with your website. The key metrics are – Average pages per session, Average Session Duration, Bounce Rate, Conversion Rate, etc.
Social Media Engagement: The important metrics to measure in this category are the number of comments, questions, and feedback received per social channel.
Email Engagement: Email is one of the most important channels of communication with your customers. The customer engagement metrics for email are – Email Open Rates and Email Click Rates.
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1. Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
Invented at Bain & co, Net Promoter Score, or NPS is one of the top customer engagement metrics. It measures customer loyalty for your brand, product, or business.
The NPS survey question typically looks like –
How likely are to recommend <your business/product/brand> to a friend or colleague?
The response is an 11-point numeric scale with options ranging from 0 to 10. Customers selecting 0-6 are called detractors, meaning these customers are not happy with your business. They are not likely to buy from you or recommend anyone to your business.
7 and 8 are called passives – these customers are neutral about your business. Customers selecting 9 and 10 are called promoters. These customers are highly engaged and very likely to recommend others.
The Net Promoter score is calculated as (%age of Promoters – %age of detractors).
NPS Formula – (% of Promoters in the Response – % of Detractors in the Response).
An example of how to calculate NPS is as follows. Let’s say 100 customers respond to your NPS survey. Out of them 70 were promoters (Score of 9 and 10), 20 were Passives (7 & 8), and 10 Detractors (0 – 6). In the above example, Percentage of Promoters = 70%, Percentage of Detractors = 10%. So the NPS is (70 – 10) = 60.

An NPS tool like Affiniv can help you create an NPS Survey. You can then send the survey to your customers over email or embed it on your website. Also, you can analyze the result with automatic NPS calculation. To know more, visit this Net Promoter Score page.
2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT is one of the customer engagement metrics, which measures how happy your customers are. For example, let’s say you are into e-commerce business. You can conduct a CSAT survey 10 days after a product is purchased to understand how satisfied the customer is with your product.
You can also show a CSAT survey on your site asking the customer about their website experience. Also, if the customer has raised a query or support issues, you can ask about their experience after the resolution of the same.
Typically, CSAT survey questions look like –
How satisfied are you with the product that you purchased from our site?
The response is a 5-point scale ranging from 1 to 5.
1 – Not at all Satisfied
5 – Extremely Satisfied
Please rate your experience with our customer support.
Customers selecting 1 and 2 are unhappy or dissatisfied. 4 and 5 are Satisfied.

CSAT score can be calculated as – %age of satisfied or happy customers. Or (Total Number of Happy Customers/Total Number of Customers) * 100
The difference between NPS and CSAT is that, generally CSAT is tied to a particular context – say a transaction. NPS is more generic and can capture the overall customer loyalty.
You can follow this post to understand CSAT vs NPS in more detail.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
The CES gained momentum as one of the top customer experience metrics after Gartner published the article – Effort is the strongest drive of customer loyalty.CES as the name suggests, aims to measure how easy or difficult it is to carry out certain actions on your website or app. For example, creating an invoice, raising a return or exchange request, and so on.The typical CES question looks like this –
It was easy to create a return request on the website.The response is a 7-point scale, with 1 being “Strongly Disagree” and 7 being “Strongly Agree”.
The CES is the percentage of customers choosing 5 and above (5, 6, and 7). This means the percentage of customers who at least somewhat agree that it was easy to carry out the specific action.
4. Website Engagement – Average Page Views per Session
Now that we have seen some metrics to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction, let’s understand how to measure website engagement. Pages per session is one of the top customer engagement metrics when it comes to website engagement.
The formula is – (Total number of Pages viewed for the time period/Total number of sessions during that time period)
If you are using a website analytics tool like Google Analytics, you can find this metric pretty easily. A higher page per session number indicates that customers are engaging with your website better. This can build trust and in turn, can lead to higher conversion.
Here are some ideas to increase the average pages per session.
– Create better and more engaging content.
– Explain the concepts clearly and in simple terms.
– Use internal links to have the user navigate across your pages.
– Have polls and quizzes to keep the user engaged

5. Website Engagement – Average Session Duration
Somewhat similar to the average pages per session, this customer engagement metric measures the average session duration. It can be measured as – (Total duration across all sessions / Number of sessions) for the time period.
If you use a web analytics tool like GA, this metric is pretty easy to find and keep track of. The ways to increase the session durations are similar to the increasing average page views per session. Additionally, you may want to have content like Videos, which can help increase the average session duration.
6. Website Engagement – Conversion Rate
If you are dependent on your website to convert your visitors into paid customers, the conversion rate is a critical metric to measure. Conversion can have different meanings depending on the kind of business. For example – a visitor places an order, or a visitor signs up with your product, and so on. Conversion rate is simply the percentage of customers who converted out of the total number of visitors.
Conversion Rate for a time period = (Total Converted Customers/Total Number of Visitors)*100
Various factors may influence the conversion rate. Here are some ways to think about improving this customer engagement metric.
– Have well-designed and well-tested landing pages
– Clear and simple landing page copy and CTAs
– Add live chat to your site
– Share testimonials and case studies
– Optimize for mobile, if a good percentage of your customers are using a mobile device.
7. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value simply indicates how much profit or value you are going get out of an average customer over a period of time. You can think of it as all profits across a time period.
Here are 2 examples to explain this concept better.
E-commerce: Let’s say you have an e-commerce business and your average order value is $100. Let’s say your margin per order is 20%. This means you are going to make a profit of $20 out of a single order. If your average customer places 6 orders in her lifetime, then the customer lifetime value is $20 * 6 = $120.
Some of your customers place only 1 order and some others keep ordering every month. But if you are running a business for a few years, you can calculate the average number of orders per customer for a time period. To calculate the same, you can simply divide the total number of orders by the total number of customers placing orders during that period.
SaaS: Here is the way to calculate CLV for a SaaS business. Let’s assume the retention duration for an average customer is 20 months. Average monthly revenue per customer is $100 with a margin of 60%. To arrive at the CLV, you can use the formula – (margin per customer per month * average customer retention duration in months). In this example, the CLV is ($60 * 20) = $1200.
How to increase CLV
A number of variables go into the CLV calculation. Here are some ways to improve your CLV.
Increase the margin per order or margin per customer. This can be achieved by an increase in the order value. To increase the order value, you can charge higher prices, sell higher-value products, or have more number of items per order.
Retain your customers for a longer period by offering good products and services. Increasing customer lifetime is one of the most obvious ways to increase the CLV. You should keep measuring and improving the metrics such as NPS, CSAT, and CES.
8. Churn Rate
Churn rate is a very important customer engagement metric for SaaS businesses. It measures what percentage of customers churn or leave in a given time period. The higher the churn rate, you have to acquire more customers to grow. If acquiring new customers is expensive for your business, you should look to retain your existing customers.
You can calculate the Churn Rate as follows. Say you started a year with 1000 customers. Say 100 customers out of this 1000 churned over the year. So you are left with 900 customers out of the 1000 customers you started the year with.
Your churn rate in this example is (100/1000)*100 = 10%
In general, the formula for Churn Rate is = (Number of Users left during the period/Number of users you started with for that period) * 100.
Measuring churn rate is essential for a business like Saas, especially for the customer success team. It helps keep the team focused on retaining the existing customers by providing improved products and services. It can also act as a feedback loop for the customer acquisition team. Sometimes higher churn rate may also mean you are not acquiring the right set of customers. Also, some segments like SMBs can churn faster than the enterprise. There is no right number when it comes to the churn rate. It may depend on your product and your customer segment.
9. Customer Engagement Metrics for Social Channels
As a brand, you may be using social channels for various purposes. For example: customer acquisition, getting customer feedback, engaging your users or followers, providing updates on new releases or offers, etc. Here are some metrics that may be relevant for social channels.
Post-wise Engagement: You can measure likes, shares, impressions, comments, etc per post. You can also classify these numbers according to the type of post. Done frequently, this can provide insights into the kind of content that your user base is engaging with.
Number of tickets created or feedback received per month: If your customers are active on your social media channel, you will get feedback, support tickets, etc.
10. Customer Engagement Metrics for Email
Like most businesses, Email could be the top channel for customer communication for your business. To keep your customers engaged with your business, you may be sending periodic newsletters, updates on new launches, feature updates and releases, offers and discounts, etc. Monitoring customer engagement over email is crucial for several reasons. When it comes to Email engagement, here are the top metrics.
Open rate: Open rate is calculated as (number of emails opened at least once/number of emails sent) * 100. This can be calculated for a particular period or particular content type. For example, you can measure open rates for your cart abandonment email, or your monthly product release email.
If you are using an Email marketing tool like MailChimp, metrics like open rate and click rate should be available to you upfront for every campaign.
A healthy open rate is an indication of good customer engagement with your email content. If your open rate is not good, there can be several reasons.
Your emails are landing either in folders like spam, promotions, etc. This can happen due to incorrect domain configuration. You should check for domain configurations like DKIM, SPF, etc., and make necessary modifications.
Your content may not be very relevant to the target audience. you should try more relevant content by checking which content types have better engagement or what are your audiences looking for.
Your subject lines need improvement. Users look at your subject line before deciding whether to open an email. If some of your campaigns have low open rates, it means you may need to improve your subject lines. You can also try doing A/B tests or use subject line evaluation tools.
Click Rate: Click rate formula = (Number of Emails where at least 1 link is clicked/Total number of emails sent) * 100. Email opening is the first step, but it is the click that truly matters for most types of emails.
If you use a tool like MailChimp to send emails, you can get the click rate for every campaign. A high click rate indicates your content is highly relevant to the audience.

Here are some ideas to help you improve your email click rate.
Content should be relevant to your audience. Not every content will be suitable for all your users. In that case, you should send the content only to the relevant segments.
Use clear and simple language.
Use a well-designed template. It should be responsive so that it renders well on mobile devices.
Have clear CTAs
11. Measuring Average User Activity
For businesses like SaaS or mobile apps, measuring user activity can be critical to measuring the level of user engagement. There are several tools like Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Hotjar, etc, which can track user activities like login, inviting users, using certain features, etc. An average activity score can be created per user and tracked every month.
Average user activity can be measured as (Total number of activities/Total number of Users). This can be extended to the account level as well. For example, accounts can be ranked based on their activity. The accounts with the least number of activities can be identified to be at risk of churn.
Benefits of Tracking Average User Activity:
This can lead to better product usage and continuous product improvements. For example, a lower user activity score should lead to introducing more relevant features and using better UX for the existing features.
Accounts at risk of churn can be identified by tracking the user activity numbers for the account. The customer success teams can then take action based on the score.
Conclusion
In this post, we have seen various customer engagement metrics, the benefits of tracking them, and how to measure each of them. You may not choose to measure and track each of these metrics to begin with. You can start measuring the ones that are the most relevant for your business and put the tracking in place. Once you cover your core metrics, you can then move towards implementing the others.
You can use a customer experience tool like Affiniv to track customer loyalty metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES. With Affiniv, you can create a survey, send the survey using email, embed it on your site, and analyze the responses on the dashboard.

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September 10, 2024
Post Purchase Survey: Examples & Best Practices
Summary
If your customers purchase from your online store, capturing their feedback is essential for many reasons. The feedback can help you improve your products, and services, which may lead to a better customer experience. Better customer experience also means better retention, growth, and revenue. What’s the best time to collect your customer feedback? After they have purchased from your store, of course. That is where the Post Purchase Survey comes into the picture. Post purchase survey, as the name suggests, refers to surveying the customers after their purchase from your store. In this in-depth guide, we will discuss why you should do it, what is the best time, and the questions you should ask. We will also explore how you can run the surveys to get the maximum response rate. Let’s dive deep.
TL;DR
Post purchase survey refers to surveying your customers after they purchase from your online store. The survey can be shown immediately after the checkout (on the thank you page). It can also be sent to the customer via email or SMS after say 15 days from the order.
Surveying customers immediately after the check-out has several benefits. This can provide insights into your website experience, ideas to optimize website conversions, check-out experience, etc. On the marketing side, this can give insights into how your customers found you and can help with marketing attribution.
The survey can also be sent over email 10-15 days after the order. Using a well-designed survey, you can understand your product feedback, quality, pricing feedback, delivery experience, and more.
The important questions can be divided into various categories.
– Understanding customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. E.g. How satisfied are you with your purchase experience?
– Open-ended question(s). E.g. what is the most important reason for choosing the score?
– Get feedback on Product quality and pricing. How satisfied are you with the quality of your product? E.g. Please rate your purchase in terms of value for money.
– Measure website experience, check-out experience, discover any technical issues or improvements to the website
– Delivery experience. E.g. How do you rate your delivery experience?
– Marketing attribution like – how did you hear about us?
You can use channels such as Web Popup, Email, SMS, etc. For emails, sending a gentle reminder can increase your response rate.
You can use a survey tool like Affiniv to help you create the survey, embed it on your thank you page via a web popup, or automatically send the survey over email with gentle reminders. Create a free account to start collecting post purchase feedback in a matter of minutes.
Want to create and send a Post Purchase survey in minutes?
With Affiniv, you can create beautiful surveys and send them instantly via Email or Embed in your website/app.
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What is Post Purchase Survey?
Purchasing from your online or offline store is the most important milestone in your customer lifecycle. Asking the customer for feedback after the purchase can be extremely insightful for your business. This is where post purchase survey comes into the picture. Post purchase survey, as the name suggests, refers to surveying the customer after the purchase. This can generate actionable feedback to improve products, services, website experience, and more. Post purchase survey form can be shown immediately after the customer has made the purchase, like say on the thank you page. It can also be sent to the customer via email a few days after the purchase. The feedback can help you learn about the website experience, check out experience, how they learned about your site, what should you do to deliver better products, services, etc.
What are the benefits of Post Purchase Survey?
Here are the key benefits of doing the Post purchase survey.
Understanding website/app feedback
Post purchase surveys can be a great way to understand what customers think about your website or app. When it comes to website experience, a few stages come to mind – finding the right product, information about the product, check-out experience, website bugs, and usability issues, etc. From this feedback, you can get ideas on what aspects need to improve to have a better conversion and user experience.
Insights for Product Improvement
Asking the customer for their feedback a few days after purchase can provide you with valuable information about your product. You can learn more about what customers think about your product quality, pricing, areas of improvement, and so on. You can also discover ideas around new products to launch in the future.
Improvement Ideas for Delivery and Customer Service
You can get ideas to improve your delivery process and fix the problematic areas in your customer service.
Marketing and customer insights
Post purchase surveys can also help you get an understanding of where your customers are coming from. You can get an idea of what percentage of your customers came from various channels – social, paid ads, referral, radio/TV ads, word of mouth, etc. You can also get an understanding of the demographic information like age, gender, profession, etc.
Increased reputation on social channels
With surveys like NPS, you can get to know your promoters or happiest customers. You can reach out to these customers to post reviews, and testimonials on social sites like Google, Trustpilot, etc, which can build greater trust.
As we see above, understanding your customer feedback can result in better products and services, ultimately resulting in better customer retention and brand loyalty.

when to do the Post Purchase Survey?
Generally speaking, you can do the post purchase survey twice after the customer purchase.
Immediately after the purchase
If your customer has purchased from the online store, asking about their experience immediately can help you gather important feedback. This survey can be shown either embedded on the thank you/order confirmation page or can be shown as a popup inside the website or app. The website feedback and the marketing insights are the top feedback you can gather at this stage. The website feedback includes the website experience, usability, checkout experience, etc. Marketing insights include information like how they heard about your website, why they purchased, etc.

Days after purchase (Post-use feedback)
You can also survey your customer after a few days from their purchase, say 10/15 days. This survey can be done over an email. This survey intends to find out the delivery and product experience. The timing of this survey is important. If done too soon, the customer may not have time to experience the product. If done too late customers may not have the purchase experience fresh in their mind. This survey can give you an understanding of areas like delivery experience, product quality, pricing, support experience, etc.
What are the Post Purchase Survey Questions to Ask?
Now that we have discussed why and when to do the post purchase survey, let’s explore the questions you can ask.
The simplest Post Purchase Survey Template
Before diving deep into a detailed set of questions, let’s see a basic survey template that is also pretty popular as well. And for good reason. A basic post purchase survey template consists of just 2 questions. The first can be an NPS or 5-point scale question.
For example – how likely are you to recommend <Your_Brand> to a friend?
Or – how satisfied are you with your recent purchase experience from <Your_Brand>?
For these questions, you can use a simple numeric scale or a visual scale like the Star survey or Smiley face survey.
This question is followed by a long answer question (also known as an open-ended question).
For example: What was the most important reason for choosing that score?
You can also have 2 different questions, for promoters/happy customers and non-promoters. Promoters are the ones who have chosen a scale of 9 and 10 in an NPS question. Happy customers are the ones who have chosen 4 or 5 in a CSAT or 5-Star survey question.
Open-ended Question for Promoters: What did you like the most about your experience?
Open-ended question for Non-Promoters: What can we do to improve your experience?
Often having a simpler survey can help you get more insightful feedback. In fact, you can start with a simper survey and then gradually add more questions.
Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Question
Question: How satisfied are you with your recent purchase?
Question: How likely are you to recommend <Your_brand> to a friend?
Question: How would you rate your overall experience with <your_brand>

Open-ended Question
Please tell us the most important reason for choosing that score.
For Promoters: What did you like the most about your experience?
Non-Promoters (Detractors and passives): What can we do to improve your experience?
Ideally, you should have at least 1 open-ended question to get qualitative feedback.

Website/App Experience Questions
Please rate your experience with our Website/App.
[Follow-up for not satisfied customers] What issue did you face on our website?
Please rate our check-out experience
Product Experience
Please rate the quality of the product. Or How satisfied are you with the quality of the product? The first question is a numeric scale. The second one can have 5 options, 1 being Not satisfied at all and 5 being highly satisfied.
Please rate the product in terms of value for money.
What other products or categories would you like to see on our site? [Open-ended question]
Delivery and Customer Service Experience
Please rate your delivery experience
If you have contacted customer support, please rate your support experience.
Conversion and Marketing attribution
How did you hear about us?
What motivated you to buy from us?
In-store Questions
Please rate the helpfulness of our staff at the store.
How easy was it to find the product you were looking for at our store?
As part of your customer research, you can also ask for more information about your users, for example: their gender, age, profession, etc.
How to distribute the Post Purchase Survey
As we have already seen before, how to distribute the post-purchase survey depends on the time of the survey. For example, when you survey the customers immediately after their purchase, the best way to do the same is on the Thank You or the Order confirmation page. Similarly, when you want to capture the product feedback after product use, the best mode could be email. Let’s explore the modes of survey in detail below.
Web Popup or Web Embed
The best way to get feedback immediately after purchase is to show the post-purchase survey on the Thank You page after checkout. You can show the survey as a web pop-up, which appears at the bottom of the page after a few seconds of delay. You can also embed it directly on the page. Or can even have a button pointing to the survey that can open in a new tab.

Email Survey
When you send the survey a few days after purchase, say 10-15 days, you can send the survey over email. Some of the best practices for sending a post-purchase survey via email are –
Embed the first question rating in the email body. This helps improve the response rate as customers find it easy to respond.
To build trust, use your brand theme and send the email using your own domain.
Send a reminder email to the customers who don’t respond to the first email.
Personalize the survey email with variables like First Name, Order Number, etc. Personalization builds trust and increases email deliverability.
Here is a detailed list of the best practices to send a survey via email.
When you use an all-in-one Customer Feedback Platform like Affiniv, you can easily create a post-purchase survey using our templates. Then you can distribute the survey either as a web pop-up or send the survey over email to your customers after, say, 15 days from purchase. And finally, you can analyze the feedback on the AI dashboard. Create a free account now to get started.
Best Practices for Post Purchase Survey
Now that we have covered almost every aspect of creating and sending post-purchase surveys, let’s explore some best practices. Please note that some of these best practices can apply to all kinds of surveys.
Keep the survey short and survey questions simple.
Ask a mix of quantitative and open-ended questions.
Timing is pretty important for a survey. If asked too early, the customer may not have used the product to provide actionable feedback. Surveyed too late, the customer may not remember their experience too well. It can reduce the response rate as well.
Provide incentives for a better response rate, especially if the survey is longer. The incentive works well if you are looking for detailed research into your customers and their journey.
Here is a detailed guide on how to increase the response rate.
Conclusion
In this detailed post, we have outlined the details of the Post Purchase Survey, why to use it, when to send it, the questions, and the best practices. If you are an online retailer or sell in-store, surveying your customers after their purchase can provide you with the right insights to improve your customer experience and delight them.
If you are looking for an all-in-one tool to create and distribute the survey, you can try out Affiniv. Used by hundreds of retailers across 10 countries, Affiniv can help you create the survey, show it using a web popup, send it over email, and analyze the responses on the dashboard. You can create a free account to get started.
Also Explore:
Affiniv Post Purchase NPS app for Shopify
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July 15, 2024
12 Jotform Alternatives to Check Out in 2026
Jotform is a no-code form builder using which you can build forms for data collection, workflow, customer feedback, accepting payment, and so on. It has been around for quite some time now and has built a reputation for its ease of use, good design, and usability.
It’s a web-based tool and is known for having an extensive template library to cover the most important use cases. Having said that Jotform is not suitable for every type of business or use cases. In this detailed guide, we cover the top Jotform alternatives, their pros, and cons, and when to use them. Let’s get started.
Why look for Jotform alternatives?
Jotform is a cloud-based tool for building build forms. Using these forms businesses collect user information, accept registration on websites or for events, collect user feedback, accept payments, etc. Some businesses even create workflows using these forms by connecting them to platforms like CRMs using various integrations like Zapier.
The top benefits of using Jotform are –
a good number of templates to choose from.
a What you see is what you get (Wysiwyg) form builder with drag and drop of form fields.
integrations with other business apps.
supports logic rules and branching.
can accept payment.
However, Jotform is not for all types of businesses or use cases. Here are some reasons businesses look for Jotform alternatives.
Not great for Customer Experience (CX) use cases like NPS, CSAT, CES, etc. Let’s say you want to measure key customer metrics like NPS, CSAT, CES, etc. for your product or business. Specialized tools like Affiniv can help you measure these metrics and collect customer feedback out of the box. Using a specialized CX tool, you can create these surveys. Then you can send the survey over Email, or embed them in your product to collect feedback. Also, the NPS and CSAT scores are auto-calculated and progress is tracked regularly. A form-only tool may not be the best help in this case.
Not great for Micro-Surveys embedded in the product. These are specialized surveys that can be embedded in the product. When the user takes some action, say completes an order, these surveys can be shown to the user to gather feedback. You may not be able to create the same using Jotform without some amount of coding. Here a specialized product survey tool may be required to control the placement, look and feel, when to show the survey, and so on.
Not great for employee experience surveys. As with customer experience surveys, employee experience surveys may measure employee NPS (eNPS) and employee satisfaction. You may need a specialized tool to send out personalized survey links to individual employees. And the eNPS or eSAT numbers should be auto-calculated for analytics and progress tracking.
Not very customizable. with Jotform, you can customize the survey form to some extent in terms of look and feel. However, if you are looking for more customization capability, you have to look elsewhere.
Can be expensive beyond simple use cases. For Customer Experience (CX) use cases, you need integrations with multiple products and custom development or integrations. This can be expensive to build and maintain.
Not so responsive Customer support. If your requirements are not provided out of the box and you need support with the tool, then you may be looking at longer timelines.
With that introduction, let’s get into our list of Jotform alternatives.
Affiniv
Zoho forms
Typeform
Paperform
forms.app
Google Forms
Wufoo
Formstack
Zonka Feedback
Survey Monkey
Microsoft Forms
ProProfs Survey Maker
1. Affiniv

Affiniv Survey and NPS is one of the best alternatives to Jotform. If you are looking for a full-featured customer experience (CX) tool to capture NPS, CSAT, CES, and customer feedback, Affiniv can be a great choice.
With Affiniv, you can create surveys with a user-friendly survey creator. Then you can choose to send the survey over email, SMS, or WhatsApp with reminders right from the tool. You can also embed the survey in your website/app without writing any code. Finally, you can analyze the result on the AI-powered dashboard to find out the customer insights.
The tool is user-friendly and doesn’t require any learning curve to set up and operate. For an e-commerce business, you can send surveys automatically after, say, 7 days from the order. If you are running a SaaS business, you can embed an NPS survey in your product, which can be shown, say, every quarter. Used by professionals across industries such as retail, finance, software, etc, you can explore the tool by creating an account here.
Top Features
All-in-one tool to create surveys, send the surveys over email, SMS, WhatsApp, and embed them on the website, to collect user feedback.
Embeddable surveys with powerful rules. E.g.. show to subscribed users, show again after some duration, show on specific pages and for a specific set of users, etc.
AI-powered dashboard to analyze results and find actionable customer insights.
Responsive support to help with customer queries via Chat and Email.
Customizable survey design. Email templates can be customized as per your brand guidelines.
Pros and Best Use
The best use of Affiniv is to collect customer and employee feedback and measure metrics like NPS, CSAT, CES, etc.
A single tool for creating surveys and sending them via multiple channels. Saves effort and cost
Can integrate with apps like Shopify, Salesforce, Zendesk, Hubspot, Google Sheets, Slack, and many more
Great support via chat, email, and phone
Budget-friendly and affordable compared to other tools
Cons
Not the best option for a form-only use case. Affiniv is an end-to-end customer experience platform.
Can lack some integrations. However, the implementation team usually does them without any extra cost.
Pricing – Free plan to get started, which covers 100 responses/month. Starter plan at $29/month, which covers 250 responses per month. Explore all plans here.
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2. Zoho Forms

Zoho Forms is one of the very popular Jotform alternatives. If you are already using any app from the Zoho ecosystem, such as Zoho CRM, or Helpdesk, Zoho Forms has a direct integration with the same. It’s available on the cloud and simple to set up as well. Businesses primarily use Zoho forms to create their data entry forms both for internal workflows and forms that accept payment and registration.
It supports a wide number of question types such as choice questions, descriptive questions, checkboxes, radio, currency, payment, etc.
Top Features
Can create forms with a no-code form builder tool, which is relatively simple to use
Can be embedded in a webpage using iframe or Javascript.
Analyze data by exporting them to a spreadsheet or other apps.
Integration with CRM tools like Zoho CRM, Google sheet, and more
The creator app is available for mobile.
Pros and Best Use
The Zoho form can be best used to create data entry forms for internal company workflow or external customer registration.
It’s user-friendly compared to some of the more enterprise tools.
Good compliance such as HIPAA, GDPR, etc.
Good integration with the Zoho ecosystem of apps. Can be integrated with other tools like Salesforce as well.
Cons
Not a great CX tool to measure NPS, CSAT, CES, etc. You need several expensive integrations to make the tool suit your needs. Also, for capturing customer feedback, there are other tools with a much more appealing interface instead of showing all questions in a form.
Limited design customizations.
Lack of live chat, or phone support makes it difficult if your requirement needs some consultation or custom implementation.
Pricing: Basic limited plan is priced at $12/Month. Premium plan starts at $110/month
3. Typeform

Typeform brought in good visual design elements to the otherwise boring forms. And it has been fairly successful at that. Typeform made the single question per view the default mode of the survey. There are several benefits to this design. The key among them is that a user is fully focused on answering the question as opposed to getting distracted by the full form. Also because of this design, it’s easier to have a better visual appeal making it one of the top Jotform alternatives.
Apart from the visual appeal, Typeform has built-in logic rules, can recall answers from previous questions, can include pictures in the survey pages, and more. It also has a good number of built-in templates.
Top Features
Can create visually appealing forms with images, background images, brand themes, logos, etc.
One question per view for a more focussed experience and better interface.
Supports logic rules, branching, and answer recall from previous questions
Can send form link over email, and get code to embed on website
Integrates with apps like Hubspot, Salesforce, Google Sheet, and more
Pros and Best Use
More modern interface compared to some of the legacy survey tools like Survey Monkey or Google form.
Typeform can be used both as a customer information capture tool and a surveying tool, though customer survey is a more preferred use case.
A good number of integrations to save you time and resources while getting started.
Cons
Lack of good text or AI-based analytics features for Survey responses
Lacks enterprise and compliance features in the sub-enterprise plans.
End-to-end automation of customer experience surveys like NPS, CSAT, etc will need integration with multiple tools. This can be expensive and needs more time and resources.
Pricing: The Free plan is quite limited. Business plan, which has the right set of features costs $99/Month.
4. PaperForm

Paperform can be used to create forms, accept bookings, registrations, payments, create surveys, etc. It has features like calculations, logic rules, etc, which make it one of the top Jotform alternatives. It supports features like scheduling, eSignature, etc, aiming at making your workflow smoother. It can also accept payments and can connect with other apps such as Google Sheets, Trello, Mailchimp, etc.
Top Features
Ability to create forms with a simple and intuitive form builder.
Can use themes, calculations, and logic to add more power to your form.
Has calendar scheduling built-in. Can accept payments and eSignatures.
Can connect with useful apps like Google sheet, Trello, Hubspot, Stripe, etc
Pros and Best Use
Paperform is best used to create customer-facing registration forms, event booking, payment forms, forms for eSignature, etc.
The visual design of form can be better than Jotform making it one of the top Jotform competitors.
Cons
Paperform lacks the capability when it comes to customer experience surveys and automating them. Lacks integrations with top e-commerce platforms and support tools such as Zendesk.
Pricing: Basic plan starts at $29/Month, which offers very limited functionality. Business plan is priced at $129/month
5. forms.app

One of the best alternatives to Jotform is forms.app. It allows you to create online forms, surveys, and quizzes in under a minute with its AI form creation features. Alternatively, you can choose from over 5000 pre-made templates to quickly build your forms.
The best part is that, unlike Jotform, forms.app has a super user-friendly builder. forms.app’s forms look modern and offer a smooth form-filling experience. You also have essential form-building features, including accepting payments, collecting signatures, adding question conditions, and calculating scores.
Top Features
AI form generator allows for quick form creation
Conditional logic helps reduce unnecessary questions
Over 5000 templates available for use
Payment collection through PayPal and Stripe
Multiple pages
Multilingual forms
Pros and Best Use
Offers AI form creation
Friendly interface
Native integrations
Good form-filling experience
Cons
No sentimental analysis
No PDF survey-generation option
6. Google Forms

A part of Google apps, Google Forms is one of the top Jotform alternatives. Though it’s not as visually appealing as its newer competitors, it’s pretty capable when it comes to functionalities. It’s easy to create a form and supports different types of fields such as choice questions, short answers, checkboxes, file uploads, scale, date time questions, etc.
Though it supports limited design customization options, you can still change your logo and add your brand color and fonts. The response summary can be viewed either within the tool or you can export the responses automatically to a Google Sheet.
Top Features
Easy-to-use survey-builder tool with a range of question types.
Can add custom branching logic based on answers to the previous question(s).
Pros and Best Use
Can primarily be used for creating surveys, quizzes, and doing customer research.
More user-friendly and simpler to use compared to Jotform.
Good compliance with HIPAA, ISO, SOC, etc.
Cons
Compared to other modern survey tools, the interface is relatively boring. Good tool for data collection and not so much for customer experience surveys, where a better interface and more out-of-the-box automation options are needed.
Not a lot of integrations are available out of the box besides the apps provided by Google
Doesn’t provide Javascript if you are looking to embed the pop-up survey on the web and show based on conditions.
7. Wufoo

Wufoo is a cloud-based form builder tool used by some of the popular brand, which makes it one of the Jotform alternatives. Using its form builder businesses create registration forms, application forms, surveys, contact forms, payment forms, etc.
Wufoo also provides capabilities to upload files and accept payments from customers using PayPal, Stripe, etc. You can also customize the forms to match the look and feel of your brand
Top Features
Form builder from Wufoo comes with a number of themes and a customizable look and feel. It also supports rule-based branching.
Can collect data, accept payments, and file uploads.
Automate workflow by integrating with other apps using Zapier.
Can use the in-built reports or export results to CSV for further analysis.
Pros and Best Use
Wufoo can be used to collect data and payments from customers using forms.
Supports custom themes and branding
Supports integrations with tools such as SalesForce, MailChimp, etc to create leads in the system and send out survey link to the customers.
Cons
Wufoo’s survey interface feels a bit old and dated compared to modern survey tools in the market.
Doesn’t have enough capability to run automated customer feedback surveys over email or on the website. Need custom coding to enable pop-up surveys to collect customer feedback on the website.
Customer support has a significant lag compared to earlier, especially after their acquisition.
Pricing: The basic limited plan starts at $19/Month. Professional plan starts at $39/month
8. Formstack

Formstack is another Jotform alternative, which helps businesses create forms such as patient registration, loan application, admission, event registrations, etc. Using these forms, you can create workflows for your process without using any code. Using its suite you can also generate documents and accept eSignatures.
Top Features
Drag and drop no-code form-builder with conditional logic for branching
Can integrate with other apps such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Stripe, etc.
Supports various fields such as choice, long answer, Email, Phone, Data, time, credit card, etc.
Pros and Best Use
Formstack is best suited for creating forms and workflows to collect data for various industries such as education, finance, healthcare, etc.
Supports a wider range of field types compared to Jotform.
One question view on mobile at a time and ability to customize theme as per brand or website.
Supports file upload, payment processing, and eSignatures.
Cons
Limited functionality when it comes to CX surveys like NPS, CSAT, and CES. It can’t be readily embedded on the website or embedded in the email without custom coding.
Pricing: The basic plan with limited functionality starts at $50/Month. The recommended plan starts at $229/Month.
9. Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is one of the strongest alternatives to Jotform if you are looking for a modern, insight-driven feedback and survey platform rather than a traditional form builder. It is built for businesses that want to collect customer feedback, measure experience metrics like NPS, CSAT, CES, and analyze responses deeply with AI.With Zonka Feedback, you can create surveys using an intuitive no-code builder, send them through email, SMS, links, WhatsApp, QR codes, or embed them on your website and product with ease. You also get advanced targeting and automation to trigger surveys at the perfect moments in the customer journey. The AI-powered analytics dashboard helps you uncover themes, sentiment, drop-offs, and actionable customer insights instantly.Zonka Feedback is user-friendly for teams across industries like SaaS, e-commerce, banking, healthcare, hospitality, and more. Whether you want to measure support quality, improve product UX, or track customer satisfaction at scale, the platform is flexible and easy to set up.
Top Features
All-in-one tool to create surveys, share them via email, SMS, links, QR codes, or embed them across your website and product.
Advanced targeting rules for website surveys. Eg. show to returning users, show after scroll, show only on specific pages, trigger during exit intent, etc.
AI Feedback Intelligence that turns open-text responses into themes, sentiment labels, and insights you can take action on.
Pre-built templates for NPS, CSAT, CES, onboarding, churn insights, feature requests, and more.
Deep integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, Google Analytics, Intercom, and dozens more.
Pros and Best Use
Best used for customer experience & voice of customer programs, location-based feedback, and product/in-app surveys.
Highly customizable surveys with branding, logic, multilingual support, segmentation, and advanced targeting.
A single platform for creating surveys, distributing them across channels, and analyzing insights.
Real-time alerts via email, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
Built-in case management to turn feedback into tickets and follow up with customers directly.
Strong AI capabilities for automated analysis, insights, and prioritization.
Ideal for mid-sized to enterprise teams needing omnichannel collection with centralized analysis.
Cons
Doesn’t support payment forms or complex workflow forms like Jotform does.
AI features and advanced integrations are available on higher-tier plans.
Setup for complex workflows may require initial configuration time.
Because it is a full CX platform, it may be more than what very simple form-only users need.
Pricing: Zonka’s Customer Feedback plan starts at $199 per month, while its AI feedback Intelligence plans start at $999 per month.
10. Survey Monkey

SurveyMonkey is one of the top Jotform alternatives when it comes to customer or employee surveys. It has been around for quite some time and has gone through a few revamps to its user interface. It’s used both as a form for data capture and to run customer and employee experience surveys. It supports a wide range of question types and design customization. Let’s explore some of the features, pros, and cons below.
Top Features
Supports both Survey and form. You can create forms such as event registration, job application, contact forms, etc.
Support fields for payments, files, orders, applications, contact information, etc.
Embed forms directly onto your website.
Can accept payments and show the forms on the web.
Can integrate with apps via Zapier
Pros and Best Use
Survey Monkey is best used for customer and employee surveys. However, it also supports forms as an additional offering.
Supports logic, calculations, payments, file uploads, etc.
Cons
Survey Monkey became popular with customer and employee surveys. Forms are not as advanced as some of the other providers in this list.
It can be expensive for a small to mid-sized organization.
Though there are multiple modes of support such as chat, email, and phone, the response time can be quite high.
11. Microsoft Forms

If you are using apps from Microsoft, you can consider Microsoft Forms for your data collection and surveying needs.
With Microsoft Forms, you can capture the information you need with custom surveys, polls, and quizzes. For the education industry, Microsoft Forms offers a wide range of tools for assignments, quizzes, and student assessments.
Top Features
Great for building quizzes, polls, and simple survey forms.
Data can easily be exported to Excel for further analysis.
Pros and Best Use
If your data capture or survey requirements are simpler and you are already using Microsoft apps, you can give this free app a try.
Good for the education industry where students can be engaged using polls and quizzes.
Free with a Microsoft 365 subscription.
Cons
Lacks professional features for both Form and Survey use cases.
Integration is also a challenge with non-Microsoft tools.
12. ProProfs Survey Maker

ProProfs Survey Maker is a good choice for creating NPS Surveys, quizzes, polls, forms, etc. It has email integration using which you can send surveys to your customers. You can also embed the survey on your website as a popup. Supports form customization using logic, and themes. If you are looking for a tool for customer feedback, then ProProfs may be a good choice. It has templates available for standard surveys like NPS and question types to collect customer sentiment such as star and smiley face.
Top Features
You can build different kinds of surveys with built-in templates with customization to the themes and logic.
Can create sidebar forms to embed on the site, or send the form via email
Can create quizzes, tests, and assessments.
Integrates with various CRMs to capture customer responses.
Pros and Best Use
ProProfs survey maker is best used to create customer or employee experience surveys such as NPS, CSAT, etc. With its support for embedding the form on the website and sending it over email, you will spend less effort building those integrations.
Supports visual or emotional scale types such as Star, Smiley Face, etc. Good for capturing customer sentiment.
Cons
ProProfs is good at customer or employee feedback surveys. If your use case for form is complex, you should look at other tools in this list. The available field types are more suitable for customer satisfaction surveys than a complex form. However, for simpler forms, it will take less effort if you use ProProfs.
Pricing is relatively higher compared to other form builders.
Pricing: $9.99 for 100 responses per month
Conclusion
By now I hope I have given you enough insight into Jotform and some of the top Jotform alternatives. Even though Jotform does a good job at forms and surveys, it may not be the best fit for your business or use case. So choose a tool based on your requirements and budget. It’s also important to choose a tool that has highly responsive customer service to help with your queries or custom requirements.
You can also try Affiniv, as we specialize in surveys such as – customer experience, customer feedback, and employee experience. Using Affiniv, you can create various types of surveys such as NPS, CSAT, employee NPS, and custom surveys pretty easily. You can also send the surveys over email or embed them on your website or app without writing any code. Integrates with platforms such as Salesforce, Shopify, Zendesk, and more.
You can create a free account and try out the platform for 14 days!
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June 21, 2024
14 Product Survey Questions and Best Practices
Summary
Want to know what your customers are thinking about your product? What’s working well and the areas of improvement? How happy they are and whether they will recommend your product to others? Or want to have pre-launch feedback on a new product or feature? In the competitive world of software saas, understanding your customer needs is more important than ever. With the right goals and the right set of questions, you can build better products based on customer insights. In this guide, we have picked some of the best product survey questions, when to use them, and the best practices.
TL;DR
Product Survey is an important tool for the product manager. Product surveys can be done at various stages of the product life cycle. Some of the stages are as follows. During a new product conceptualization, pre-launch, early customer feedback just after launch, continuous product feedback, churned customer feedback, etc.
It’s important to have well-researched product survey questions for the exercise to be effective. A survey can give you a lot of data, but a set of well-researched product survey questions can help you get the right insights. To create a great product survey, you must start with a clear goal. What stage is your product, which set of users are the right ones for this survey, what do you want to learn from the product survey, and so on.
Generally, the product survey questions can be categorized under various headers.
Customer Satisfaction or Loyalty questions – These set of customer experience (CX) questions help you judge the satisfaction level of your customers. The key ones here are the NPS and CSAT questions. These questions can also indicate loyalty towards your product.
Product Market Fit Questions – These questions are part of the survey conducted during the early stage of product conceptualization or development. These can serve as early indications of how well your product will be adopted once launched. This can also help understand various go-to-market strategies for your product.
Product Performance Questions – These questions help you understand how well the product performs when used by your customers. For example, the usability, reliability, speed, etc.
Features and Roadmap Questions – These questions help you identify the top features that your customers love and the ones that are missing from your product. Done well, you can get a set of features that can be ordered according to their usefulness to your customers.
Competition Questions – Every SAAS product, no matter how niche it is, can have competition. Understanding what your customers have already tried or considered trying can provide you with competitive insights.
Below we have covered the questions under these categories in detail.
Once you have identified the set of questions, you can consider sending the survey using various methods. Embed the survey in your website or App, send the survey over email, send survey links, etc.
you can follow some of these best practices to get higher and more meaningful responses. Start with a clear goal. Communicate the purpose of the survey clearly to the respondent. Avoid leading and biased questions. Go for a limited set of questions with easy-to-understand language. You can run the questions past a few of your colleagues to refine them and get feedback on the questions themselves.
A survey software like Affiniv can help you create surveys using some of the best practices. Plus you can distribute the survey easily using web/app embeds and email. You can create an account here; it’s free to get started.
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Why should you conduct product survey?
Before getting into the product survey questions, let’s first see why should product managers run product review surveys.
Every product goes through a life cycle. Some of the stages are – new product conceptualization, early-stage development, beta testing, early customers, new feature development, etc. Product surveys at each of these stages can bring in the voice of customers and can provide you with the right insights to build better products and features.
Let’s look at each of the stages in a little more detail and explore how product surveys can add value at these stages.
Early product conceptualization
Are you building the right product? Who are the target customers? Who are the early adopters? What are they already using? What is the price they are willing to pay? Some of these are very important questions at an early stage. The right set of product survey questions can help answer some of these questions. Along with surveying a larger group, you should also look at personally talking to a small set of customers to get more detailed feedback.
Pre-launch feedback
At this stage, you may have a minimum viable product or MVP. You may also have identified a few customers who are willing to be your early customers. As you start giving the finishing touch to your MVP, you should plan to do a product survey to iron out some of the details in design and functionality. The right product survey questions at this stage can help you understand aspects like usability, UI/UX, robustness of critical functionalities, etc. The success of MVP can depend on this minimum set of functionalities built well! So take some customer feedback at this stage while you give a finishing touch.
Beta Testing Feedback
This is the stage your early customers are using your product. Product survey questions at this stage will focus on the usability, feature set, missing features, workflows, etc. These insights will help you improve your products for your next set of customers. Your product survey questions can also focus on pricing at this stage. These early sets of customers can give you a more accurate idea of pricing based on the problem that your product is solving for them.
Continuous improvement and new feature insights
At this stage, your product is somewhat mature for a particular use case. The product survey questions will help you measure the CX metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES. And also helps identify the features that are performing well and the ones that need improvement. Done well, you can develop your product roadmap in collaboration with your customers. At this stage, you should conduct product surveys continuously to keep improving your product. Say once every month or every quarter.
Churn prevention insights and post-churn feedback
At every stage of your product lifecycle, some customers may not be happy with your product. Say the initial set of customers are finding your product more complex now. Some enterprise customers need more security and compliance features. The right product survey questions can identify these customers early and help with retention. Also, the customers who have churned can provide you with critical feedback on your product and competitors.

Product Survey Questions
Here is a list of product survey questions applicable at various stages of the product lifecycle.
1. How likely are you recommend our product to a friend or colleague?
This is the classic NPS question and ranks at the top among the most frequently asked customer experience (CX) questions. Invented at Bain & Co., the NPS question is a top measure of customer loyalty. The response is on a scale of 0 – 10, where 0 being “very less likely” and 10 being “highly likely”. Users selecting 0 – 6 are called Detractors, 7 and 8 are Passives, and 9 and 10 are Promoters. The NPS is arrived at by using the formula – (percentage of promoters – percentage of detractors).
NPS is a standard measure of customer loyalty. You can compare and benchmark your NPS against other businesses in your sector and the industry average. You can visit our NPS page to have more details and create a free NPS survey.

2. How satisfied are you with our product/feature?
This customer satisfaction question aims at measuring one of the key CX metrics – CSAT. The response is a 5-point scale, ranging from 1 – 5. 1 is “Not Satisfied at all” and 5 is “Highly Satisfied”. This CSAT question can be used to measure the satisfaction level at various features or even at the product level. For a deeper analysis of when to use CSAT vs NPS, please refer to this post.

3. How can we improve our product to meet your expectation?
This is a long answer question, only shown to the customers who are unhappy with your product. This group can consist of unsatisfied, detractors, or even passives. Unsatisfied/Unhappy customers are the ones who have chosen 1 or 2 in a CSAT survey. Detractors are the ones who have chosen 0 – 6 in your NPS survey. Passives have chosen 7 or 8 in an NPS survey. This question helps bring out additional insights on what you need to improve in your product for this set of customers.
4. What features do you like the most?
This long answer question is meant for your happy customers or promoters after they choose 9 or 10 in an NPS survey or 4/5 in a CSAT survey. This gives you an understanding of the features that your customers like. There could be several ways of using this response. For example, you can make the highly liked features more visible. So that more of your customers use these features which results in a high degree of customer delight.
5. What are the top 3 features that you want to see in the product?
This is a long answer question, meant to help you create a product roadmap in consultation with your customers. Irrespective of the stage that your product is in, this question can help you identify the key features that are valuable to your customers. You can collate all the responses and prioritize the features to be included in your product roadmap.
6. How much effort does it take to use our product (or a particular feature)?
This is the Customer Effort Score or the CES question. This can be a 5 or 7-point scale question with scores ranging from 1 – 5 or 1 – 7. 1 being “A lot of effort”, and 7 being “Very Easy”. The goal of the CES question is to find out the usability aspect of your product. That is whether your customers find it difficult or easy to use. This question is most commonly used to understand the usability of a particular feature. For example, how easy is it to use our invoicing feature?
7. If you have contacted support recently, please rate the quality of support.
If you are running a product, occasionally your customers will run into issues. Or they may need support to perform certain tasks. This 5-point rating scale will give you insight into how satisfied are your customers with your support team. You can follow this with a long answer question for the customers who are not happy with your support.

8. How was your experience with our onboarding/implementation.
This is a 5-point scale question. This question is relevant for the customers who went through your onboarding process or the initial implementation process. This is particularly important for the larger ticket saas/software product, where there is a need for initial customization or implementation. Onboarding is often the first touchpoint of a product for a customer. You would want it to be as smooth as possible by removing all friction based on your customer feedback. If a customer rates 3 or below, you should have a follow-up long answer question to collect more detailed feedback from the customer.
9. What products did you use for your <insert your solution here> needs before using our product?
This question can help you understand which of your competitors your customers have tried. You may already know some of your competitors, but some could surprise you. For example, you may be making a product to simplify operations and consider other operations software as your competitors. However many of your customers may be using spreadsheets with custom rules and formulae to manage their operations.
This question can be a multiple choice question, with some of your competitors listed and an “Other” option for the missing ones.
10. Why did you choose our product?
With this question, you are trying to understand why the customer chose your product vs some of your competitors. This insight is very useful as it can help you reach out to similar businesses with similar needs. Perhaps they liked some feature, simplicity, your UI, your sales team, referred by a colleague, and so on. Understanding why they chose you can give you insights that you can highlight in your sales presentation or website.
11. How do you rate the speed and performance of our product compared to the other products that you use?
This can be a 5-point scale, where 1 is “Terrible” and 5 is “Outstanding”. Speed is extremely important for software today. Many products that your customers use in their daily lives raise the bar for speed. So if your customer perceives your software to be slow that can be a major red flag. This question helps you uncover such issues.
12. How often do you use our product?
This question can be a multi-choice question with options such as – Once in 15 days, once a week, multiple times a week, Daily, etc. The frequency is an important indicator of the usefulness of your product. The more times it gets used, the chances are that your product provides the desired benefit to your customers. Also, a highly used product may have a lesser churn risk. But keep in mind that all products and users may not be the same. For example, for a survey and customer success software like Affiniv, users like PMs and Customer Success managers/reps may be using the product daily. However, the users in the top management may look at the dashboards once a week or a few times a month. So depending on the category of user and product, it’s ok to have a lower number here.
13. Rate our product in terms of value for money.
This can be a scale question where 1 – “Not good value for money” and 5 – “Excellent value for money”. This question can help you find out how your customer perceives your product compared to your competitors or the other products they use. For some products, the customers may be using them, even though it’s expensive. Primarily because there are no viable alternatives or there is a large switching cost to move to another product. Or if most of your customers are very satisfied with your pricing, you may be pricing it lower. Having this insight can help you set the price of your product in a more informed manner.
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How to share your product survey questions with respondents?
You have created the product survey. And put in place the right questions depending on the stage of your product. Now it’s time to share it with your customers. There are several ways to share your survey. You can use a mix of the following modes to get a higher number of responses. A survey software like Affiniv can help you share the survey over multiple channels easily.
Embed your survey in the product/app
Embedding your survey in the product is the best way for your customers to notice the same. With survey software like Affiniv, you can set the rules to show the survey on specific pages. You can also show it after a certain delay, based on user properties, and more. The biggest pro of embedding the survey in your product or app is that you can show it to your customers right when they are using it. That’s the best time to get their attention. The downside is that they may not give you detailed feedback as they are already busy with a task.

Send via Email
Email is one of the best ways to share your product survey. When you send a survey via email, you should make sure that the survey gets embedded in the email to get the best response rate. For example, if it’s an NPS survey make sure that the rating scale is embedded in the email. The pro of sending the survey via email is that customers can take the survey at any time. Unlike the web-embedded survey, email surveys can be taken at a time when the user is free. In fact, our research shows that email surveys can fetch more detailed feedback from the customer than embedded surveys. Also, you should make sure that the email is personalized and branded appropriately to create trust.
Using survey software like Affiniv, you can pretty easily embed the survey in emails, use your own brand theme, and personalize it with the user’s first name, company, and other details.
For a deeper understanding of how to send the survey via email, please refer to this complete guide.

Send Survey Link
Sending product survey links can be the easiest way to start getting customer feedback. Though it’s pretty easy to get started, personalizing the link to understand who has responded is a little difficult. To get around this, you may have a survey question where you ask the user to provide their email address. Sending product survey questions using links can work for a smaller number of customers. But for a somewhat higher number of customers, consider embedding a product survey within your product or sending it over email.
Please refer to this post to understand more about how you can increase your survey response rate.
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Best practices for choosing the right product survey questions
Now that we have seen questions for product survey, let’s go through some of the best practices to get more responses and high quality ones.
Start with a well-defined goal and communicate it to the user
You may be trying to understand your customer satisfaction, the usefulness of a feature, or conducting a product survey to prepare your roadmap. Starting with a clear goal can help you frame your product survey questions appropriately. Also, consider communicating the same to your user. That creates trust and the user may be open to collaborating with you to a greater degree if communicated clearly.
Ask qualitative product survey questions
Quantitative questions like scale questions or multi-choice questions are extremely useful for quantifying the responses. But consider asking at least 1 or 2 qualitative questions. These questions help you get more detailed and free-form customer feedback. While asking a long answer product survey question, just make sure that the question is not mandatory. Otherwise, there could be a risk of user drop-off.
Don’t ask leading questions
While designing the product survey questions, be careful not to ask leading questions. For example: questions like – Do you find feature X delightful to use? – should be rephrased to – How was your experience with using the feature X? Leading questions can bias the user towards a more favorable response and can lead to biased feedback data.

Keep the product survey questions simple
A well-designed survey should have simple and easy-to-understand questions. For example, for the English language, you should try to use a reading grade 4. After finalizing your questions, you should run them through some of your colleagues to see if the questions are simple and not confusing. You can also test the readability online.
Collect partial responses for longer surveys
A shorter survey can result in a better completion rate. However, in many cases, you need to design surveys that are longer to collect detailed feedback. When using a longer survey, you should make sure to collect the partial responses. When using a survey software like Affiniv, you can do this pretty easily. This makes sure that even if the user drops off without submitting the survey, the partial responses get captured. This helps with a better response rate.
Incentivize your users to get better response rate
Providing incentives to your users can be a good way to get a higher response rate. For example, e-commerce companies give out coupons for discounted shopping as a note of thanks. One way of incentivizing your users can be to offer Amazon or any other gift voucher.
Conclusion
Carefully selected product survey questions can give you much-needed insights to make your product better. It can also help measure customer satisfaction levels and help you design a product roadmap in consultation with your customers. Use some of the questions from this post and best practices to collect a higher number of quality responses.
A survey software like Affiniv can help you create a survey with various options. Plus you can distribute the survey easily using web/app embeds and email. You can create an account here; it’s free to get started.
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April 22, 2024
Customer loyalty metrics – How to measure customer loyalty
In today’s world, customers have more choice than ever. They can choose a range of businesses to buy products and services. Plus with the ever-increasing cost of acquiring new customers, the loyalty of your existing customers towards your brand matters a whole lot. Customer loyalty is an abstract concept; loyalty is an emotion that your customers “feel” towards your brand. How can we measure it more objectively? This post explores several customer loyalty metrics that can help you measure loyalty. We will also explore various ways to improve your customer loyalty so that you can take the necessary actions to improve upon these customer loyalty metrics.
Why measure customer loyalty metrics? Benefits of Customer Loyalty
We all understand that the loyalty of your existing customers is extremely important. Let’s see some data that can quantify the importance of customer loyalty. In the apparel segment, an average customer spent 67% more in the months between 31 – 36 than between 0 to 6 months. This means the older the customer, the more the possibility of a higher spend. Looking at the repeat purchase data from a little different angle, this study by Bain found that in the apparel segment, customer’s fifth purchase was 40% more than the first purchase. The tenth was nearly 80% more than the first one!
Ok, that is some data. Now let’s put down the key benefits of building a loyal customer base.
Repeat Purchase
Loyal customers of a brand keep purchasing from it unless something goes terribly wrong. Though today’s customers have more choices, choosing from a wide range of options can become challenging. This is explained well in this study. So if your customers are feeling loyal towards your brand, they are more likely to buy from you instead of looking out for one of your competitors.
Higher Spending
Not only do your loyal customers purchase repeatedly from you, but also they are more likely to spend more. This is captured in the study by Bain as noted above. That means not only higher revenue for your business but also higher profitability.
Cross-Purchase
If you sell multiple products, loyal customers can try out the other products. This can help increase sales of other products from your business.
Save on Marketing Cost
Today many of the marketing channels are way more competitive than they used to be 10 years back. On platforms like Google, FB, or Instagram, where marketers bid for keywords, the competition also increases the cost per click. While you have to pay more to acquire new customers, having a loyal customer base can become crucial to keeping marketing costs low.
Less likely to Churn
If you are running a SaaS business, customer churn is one of the top metrics you may be tracking. Loyal customers are way less likely to churn. If a customer is using your product for months or years, they are more likely to stay on if they are happy and satisfied. Also, if there is an issue with your product or service, the set of loyal customers should be more tolerant and understanding.
Getting more Referrals
Loyal customers are more likely to refer more customers to your business. However, for the referral to work seamlessly, you may need to have a well-structured referral program in place.
What are the top customer loyalty metrics?
Now that we have identified some of the top benefits of having loyal customers, let’s explore how to measure customer loyalty. Loyalty is not easy to measure, unlike financial metrics like Revenue growth or Profitability. Loyalty of your customers is an emotional connection that they have towards your brand. However, you can measure some of the key metrics, that can serve as a proxy for customer loyalty.
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS) – One of the top customer loyalty metrics
Net Promoter Score or NPS is one of the most universally adopted measures of customer experience. The NPS system was invented at Bain & Co. and is a widely popular metric to measure both Customer and Employee experience. The NPS question is an 11-point scale asking the customer of the likelihood of recommending their business to others. More specifically an example NPS question can be –
How likely are you to recommend <your brand/product/service> to your friends and family?
The customer can choose a scale ranging from 0 to 10. Customers choosing between 0 to 6 are called Detractors, 7 and 8 are Passives and 9 and 10 are Promoters.

NPS as one of the top customer loyalty metrics
Promoters: Promoters are the ones who chose 9 or 10 for the NPS question. These customers are the happiest ones with your product or service. They are loyal to your brand and are most likely to share your brand with their network. They not only stay longer and buy more but also refer others to your business.
Passives: Passives are the ones who have rated 7 or 8 for the NPS question. These customers are neutral in their outlook towards your brand. They may neither recommend your brand to someone nor talk bad about you. As a business, your goal should be to convert as many people in this bucket to promoters by delighting them.
Detractors: Detractors are those respondents who have chosen 6 or lower (0 to 6). Detractors have most likely faced issues with your product/service. They are least likely to refer anyone to your brand. Moreover, they may talk negatively about your brand within their network and post bad reviews on the review sites. So, it is very important to find out their issues, and address and resolve them immediately.
How to calculate NPS?
NPS can be calculated by a simple subtraction –
NPS Formula – (% of Promoters in the Response – % of Detractors in the Response).
Below is an example of how to calculate NPS. Let’s say 100 customers respond to your NPS survey. Out of them 70 were promoters (Score of 9 and 10), 20 were Passives (7 & 8), and 10 Detractors (0 – 6). In the above example, Percentage of Promoters = 70%, Percentage of Detractors = 10%. So the NPS is (70 – 10) = 60.

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2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – One of the next-level customer loyalty metrics
As the name suggests, the Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT is used to measure customer satisfaction at multiple touchpoints. Generally, the CSAT survey is a 5-point scale survey asking customers about their experience with a recent purchase or interaction. For example, you may choose to send a CSAT survey after a few days of someone receiving their order, using a product feature, contacting your support, and so on. Customers responding 1 and 2 are dissatisfied or unhappy. 3 are Neutral. 4 and 5 are Satisfied or Happy.
Example questions can be –
CSAT Example Question: Please rate your experience with your recent [order/transaction/feature use]
Scale 1 – 5.
1 – Very Poor
5 – Excellent
CSAT Example Question: Please rate your recent experience with our support desk.
Depending on the score selection, your users can be classified into 3 buckets as follows –
Dissatisfied: Score of 1 & 2. These customers did not like their recent interaction or transaction with your business. They may or may not be the detractors of your brand, but they did not like this particular experience.
Neutral: Score of 3. They were not dissatisfied but not very satisfied with the recent transaction or interaction with your business
Satisfied: 4 & 5. These customers were happy with their recent interaction. But it may be a mistake to think that all of the customers in this bucket are your brand promoters or they like your business overall. As your CSAT is tied to a particular context or transaction, it simply means that they found this transaction, interaction, or feature satisfying.

Can the CSAT score be one of the customer loyalty metrics?
The CSAT survey is used in the context of a transaction and may not be very suitable to measure overall customer loyalty. However, a collection of CSAT scores measured at various touchpoints may be suitable as customer loyalty metrics. Here is a post to help you understand more details on when to use NPS vs CSAT.

CSAT is one of the top customer loyalty metrics
3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
The Gartner article titled – “Effort is the strongest driver to customer loyalty” gave momentum to the concept of CES or “Customer Effort Score”.
In simple language, it means – how easy it was for your customer to use a particular feature, carry out a particular transaction, place an order, etc.
Some CX industry people classify it as a separate kind of survey, while others treat it more like a special case of CSAT.
Irrespective of the point of view, the question and survey methodology remains the same in the case of CES as in the case of CSAT.
CES is also a 5-point scale, with the main question as follows.
CES Question: How easy was it for you to [use feature X/place order on website/do Y transaction]?
1 – Very hard
5 – Very easy
In our view, CES should be treated at the same level as CSAT to establish your customer loyalty metrics. A combination of multiple CES and CSAT scores at various touchpoints needs to be considered for the purpose.
4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value or CLV is another key metric to establish customer loyalty. In simple terms, CLV tells you what is the value that get from an average customer. It’s the combination of all profits across a time period. Let’s provide 2 examples from two different industries to explain it to you.
E-commerce example: In the case of an e-commerce business, assume your average order value is $100 (for the sake of simplicity of calculation). And your margin per order is 40%. So your margin from an average order is $40. Now let’s assume an average customer places 8 orders in her lifetime with you. So the customer lifetime value is $40 * 8 = $400.
Some customers place only a few orders and some keep placing orders month after month. If the business has been running for a little longer period, you can arrive at the average number of orders by using the simple formula as – (Total number of orders in a period / Total number of customers during the period). Say in a period of 2 years, your business received 200K orders from 20K customers. In this case, the average number of orders per customer is 10.

SaaS example: In the case of a SaaS business, calculating CLV is straightforward. Let’s assume the retention duration for an average customer is 30 months. Average monthly revenue per customer is $100 with a margin of 70%. To calculate the CLV, you can simply multiply the (margin per customer per month * average customer retention duration in months). In this example, the CLV is ($70 * 30) = $2100.
5. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
Customer Retention Rate is one of the key Customer Loyalty Metrics, particularly when it comes to SaaS business. It measures the percentage of customers you are able to retain in a particular time period.
Let’s consider an example – Say at the beginning of the year 2023, i.e. on 01 Jan 2023, you had 200 customers. At the end of the year 2023, that is on 31st Dec 2023, you ended up with a total of 280 customers. Out of these, say 120 are new customers. In this example, the old customers from 01-Jan-23 you retained for the year 2023 are (280 – 120) = 160. To calculate the CRR, you can simply use the formula – (Number of existing customers retained during the period / Number of customers at the beginning of the period * 100). So in this case the CRR for the year 2023 = (180/200 * 100) = 80%.
The formula for CRR for a period = (Total number of customers at the end of the period – Total number of new customers during the period)/(Number of customers at the beginning of the period) * 100.

As is evident, for SaaS business, the customer retention rate is one of the key customer loyalty metrics. In the above example, though the business has grown from 200 to 280, which is a 40% growth, it’s customer retention rate is only 80%. So it may be having a customer retention issue, that may need to addressed through improvements in product or services.
Sometimes in high growth SaaS companies, the new customer growth can shadow the retention of the older customers. New customer acquisition is an expensive process. So unless the existing customers are retained, the profitability of the business may suffer. Also, a great customer retention number points to a healthy product-market fit and vice versa. Hence businesses like SaaS should keep a close eye on this metric.

Customer Retention Rate vs Customer Churn Rate
Customer churn rate is the exact opposite of customer retention rate. If customer retention rate for a period is 90%, the Churn Rate is 10%. In simple terms, it means what percentage of your existing customers in the beginning of a particular period leaves or churns.
6. Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR)
Repeat purchase rate is one of the customer loyalty metrics. It shows how loyal your customer base is by measuring the percentage of repeat customers in your base within a specific time period. For example, say for a particular year, 200 customers buy items from your e-commerce store. Out of the 200 customers, say 50 customers purchased more than once. So the repeat purchase rate is (50 / 200) = 25%.
Formula for Repeat Purchase Rate = (Number of customers purchased more than once in a period / Total number of customers purchased in that specific period)
Higher repeat rate for a period means that you have a loyal customer base purchasing from you. In this case you don’t have to spend on expensive marketing to acquire new customers to grow your business.
7. Purchase Frequency
Purchase frequency is also a measure of customer loyalty, especially in the e-commerce business. Purchase frequency is the average number of times a customer buys from a brand within a specific time period. To measure purchase frequency, you can simply divide the total number of orders in that period and the number of unique customers who purchase within that time period.
Let’s consider this example – say in a particular month an e-commerce business gets 10K orders. Total number of customers who purchased from the store is 4K. To put in other words, 4000 customers placed 10000 orders. So the purchase frequency is (10k / 4k) = 2.5.
To put it in formula – Purchase Frequency = Total number of Orders for a Period / Number of Unique customers for the period
As with RPR, Purchase frequency of PF is an essential measure of customer loyalty. A high purchase frequency number means that the existing customers are purchasing more from the brand. This can typically lead to better margins and revenue growth for the brand.
How to increase customer loyalty? Improving the customer loyalty metrics
Now that we have identified several customer loyalty metrics, it’s time to dive a little deep into how to actually increase customer loyalty. Here are some of the things you should look at, which may contribute to an increase in the same.
High-quality product or Service
Depending on type of your business customers are buying your products or services. Whether you are an e-commerce brand or SaaS business, providing high quality products for your customers is the most important way to establish loyalty. Providing high quality product makes sure that customers keep using them or keep coming for more. If you are a SaaS business, you should make sure that your product solves the customer needs as promised, is fast and error-free. In the age of highly competitive software market, providing a high-quality product is a must if you want to retain your customers.
Ethical Products
Over the past decade there has been an increased awareness about environment-friendly, cruelty-free, and ethically-sourced products in several consumer segments. If your business sells them, there is good chance that your customers view you in positive light and become more loyal towards your brand.
Amazing Customer Support & Service
Customer support and service is an essential part in most types of businesses. For a SaaS businesses, the initial onboarding and integration, support tickets, bug fixes, etc, are some of the areas needing human touch. For an e-commerce business, areas like exchange/returns, delivery issues, product issues/information, etc, may be some of the frequent areas for your support team.
Most businesses treat the customer purely as a “cost center” and rightly so. But these support interactions are a great chance for a business to create a memorable and lasting information in customer’s mind. A highly informative response from a support agent or a speedy resolution of a support ticket are some of the sureshot ways to increase customer loyalty. There are companies like Zappos that put the support at the heart of their business and built a great customer-centric company. In case of a SaaS or Software business, providing outstanding customer service is a great way to gain customer trust and stand out against the more established competitors.
Excellent Return policy like Amazon
Similar to customer service, returns also cost businesses money. But a great return policy helps build customer loyalty toward the brand. The customers who go through a hassle-free returns process can potentially become loyal customers and spread the word about your brand.
Community and Engagement
Customers like to share their experience and respond to similar queries/issues they face in their lives. Enabling a community for your customers is a great way to build interaction and engagement. This also helps build a loyal customer base. In the commerce world, some of the brands selling baby products or pet products have build excellent community. For example, new mothers have many queries, which may be answered by others and experts in a baby care forum. A baby e-commerce store can have a forum where these interactions can take place, resulting in more engagement and brand loyalty.
Similarly, SaaS business build community to answer product and tech queries. Through the community the customer queries can be responded in a faster and cost-effective manner. Plus, done well, existing customers can show their expertise and get community recognition. This works pretty well in case of developer-facing products and open-source ones.
Proactive Feedback Collection and Loop Closure
Asking for feedback from your customers is also a great way for them to feel valued and can improve the customer loyalty. The feedback collection process also gives your unhappy customers a channel so that they can voice their concerns. If the highlighted issues are resolved on time, these customers can be loyal to your business. Apart from providing many other benefits, proactive feedback collection can help you improve your customer loyalty metrics.
Brand building
Brands building improves trust in the business and also helps with top-of-the-mind recall. Both of these factors can lead to building a more loyal customer base. Also, the brand building exercise should be done in sync with providing a great product and service to increase customer loyalty.
Running a Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs are a tried and tested method to nudge the customers do more transaction with your business. Businesses in segments like airlines, travel, financial services, retail, and many more have been using loyalty program to make sure that customers keep doing more transactions and get rewarded. You can run a well-designed loyalty program so that your customer feel valued and are sufficiently incentivized to transact more with you. Again, loyalty program in itself is not sufficient to build loyalty. It can enable you to build a loyal customer base once you have put the basics in place as described above – great product, good service, proactive feedback collection, building engagement, etc.

Conclusion
In this post, we have explored the top customer loyalty metrics, how to calculate them. We also touched upon the benefits of building customer loyalty and the ways to improve the same. When it comes to improving customer loyalty, many businesses think of the loyalty program. And there is nothing wrong with having a great loyalty program in place. But to truly improve the customer loyalty metrics, you need to work on the core part of the business – your products, services, customer engagement, voice-of-customer, etc.
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February 19, 2024
What is tNPS? Detailed guide to Transactional NPS
If you have recently purchased any product online or used any website or app, you might have received a survey asking you to rate your experience. Some of the ways the user experience can be measured are Net Promoter Score (NPS), CSAT, CES, etc. Net promoter score is a globally accepted and well-understood measure of customer experience and customer loyalty. There are 2 types of NPS – Relational NPS (rNPS) and Transactional NPS (tNPS). In this guide, we will talk about both of them in detail, when to use either, and the best practices with examples.
Summary
The Net Promoter Score or NPS is a widely accepted measure of customer experience or brand loyalty. NPS is of 2 types – transaction NPS (tNPS) and relational NPS (rNPS).
The transactional NPS (tNPS) aims to measure the customer experience at a specific context or touchpoint. For example: after a customer places an order, uses a product feature, attends an event or webinar, and so on. In contrast, the relational NPS is used to measure the overall feedback for the company or brand. By design, the feedback received from the relational NPS survey is broad and generic feedback as opposed tNPS, where the feedback is more specific to the context.
The transactional NPS (tNPS), as its name suggests is collected after the transaction. Depending on the type of product or service, there may be a lag of a few hours to a few days between the transaction happening and the survey being sent out. For example, if your user is using a feature on the website and you are looking for feedback, you can show a web survey right after the user tries out the feature. But say if you want to collect product feedback from the user who has purchased it from your site, it’s best to do it after a few days from delivery as the user gets time to use the product. Relational NPS is generally sent at periodic intervals, say every quarter or year to understand the brand loyalty and overall feedback about the company.
There is no specific rule as to when to use transactional NPS vs Relational NPS (tNPS vs rNPS). Both are great customer experience metrics. They can be used together in various contexts – tNPS for specific transactions and rNPS to understand the overall brand experience and loyalty.
Continuing from the above point, you should use both tNPS and rNPS to get transaction-specific as well as overall brand NPS. Apart from the NPS question, you should also have a follow-up question for the user to provide specific feedback about why she has chosen that particular rating.
You can send the survey over Email, or show the survey on the website or App. If you are sending via Email, you should consider sending a reminder message to increase the response rate.
Once you have the scores, the NPS calculation is straightforward. The formula is (%age of Promoters – %age of Detractors). Please note that as in the case of the rNPS, passives are not taken into the tNPS calculation.
After you get the response, you should also do the appropriate follow-up to close the loop. The action could be requesting the promoters to refer others, getting in touch with the detractors to resolve their issues, etc.
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What is tNPS or transactional NPS?
To recap a bit, the NPS survey measures customer loyalty on an 11-point scale ranging from 1 – 10. There are 2 kinds of NPS surveys – Transactional NPS and relational NPS. Transaction NPS survey measures the NPS at specific touchpoints. Some examples of touchpoints are – after the purchase of a product or service, delivery of the product, after using a newly launched feature, contacting the support, and so on. If we compare the tNPS with the other kind of NPS, that is relational NPS (rNPS), the relational NPS survey is done at periodic intervals across the customer base. So the relational NPS tends to provide overall feedback about the brand or business, whereas the tNPS is interaction-specific.
The question for the tNPS can be a little different from the NPS question.
Example tNPS questions –
Based on your recent use of the <Feature Name> feature, how likely are you to recommend the same to a colleague?
Based on your recent purchase, how likely are you to recommend <Product X> to a friend or colleague?
Based on your recent interaction with our support, how likely are to recommend our support to a co-worker?
The response scale for the tNPS question is the same 0 – 10. Users responding 9 and 10 are classified as promoters. 7 and 8 are passives. 0 to 6 are detractors.
Promoters (9 and 10): These set of users who rate 9 and 10 are happy with the recent transaction and are very likely to recommend others.
Passives (7 and 8): The users who rate 7 and 8 are the passives, who are not so happy, but not too dissatisfied as well. They didn’t have a bad experience, but not a delightful one either.
Detractors (0 to 6): The users who rate between 0 to 6 are called detractors. They are unhappy about the recent purchase or transaction. They are most likely to provide a negative review either in person or on social media.

What is relational NPS?
In contrast to the transaction NPS or tNPS, relational NPS (rNPS) measures customer loyalty towards the brand or company. The relational NPS survey is done at specific intervals such as quarterly or yearly. As it’s not done in the context of a transaction or interaction, it captures the overall customer feedback about the brand or business.
The question typically looks like – how likely are you to recommend <Product/brand/business> to a friend or colleague?
What is a follow-up question in tNPS?
Once you have created the main NPS question, you should also consider having one or more follow-up questions. These questions help you find out the “why” behind the score. In other words, they help you understand why the customer has chosen the particular rating. The most popular follow-up question is a subjective or text-based question. Example: Please tell us the main reason behind choosing the score.
The answer to this question gives you the “golden insights” into the key issues and how to improve the customer experience at this touch point.
How to calculate the tNPS score?
After you have collected the NPS from your customers, it’s time to calculate the score. The NPS calculation is straightforward. NPS question scale ranges from 0 – 10. Users who choose 9 and 10 are promoters. Users choosing 7 and 8 are passives and 0 to 6 are called detractors. To calculate the score, you can find out the percentage of Promoters, and the percentage of Detractors. The NPS formula is (% age of Promoters – % age Detractors).
To give an example, let’s say you have scores from 100 customers, out of which 70 are promoters with scores of 9 and 10. 20 are Detractors and 10 are Passives. So your %age of Promoters is 70%. The percentage of Detractors is 20%. Your NPS is 70 – 20 = 50.
When you use an NPS tool like Affiniv, the scores can be calculated automatically. You can also track the scores month on month and analyze the key drivers to continuously improve the score.
What is a good NPS score?
According to Bain & Co., the inventors of NPS,
An NPS score less than zero, i.e. a negative NPS score is not considered good. It means that you have more detractors than promoters.
Anything greater than 0 is considered a good NPS score
An NPS score greater than 25 is favorable while more than 50 is excellent
Is it above 80? Then, your NPS score is close to perfect!
What are the pros and cons of tNPS vs rNPS?
Transactional NPS Pros
The tNPS score is in the context of a transaction, interaction, or usage of a feature. So you can get good insights on how to improve that feature, product, or process. Based on the feedback, the owner of the specific area of product or service can then keep improving the same based on the feedback.
As the tNPS surveys are done in the context of a transaction, the survey frequency can be higher than the relational NPS survey. The results can identify the customers who are likely to churn or leave a negative review. This can help you address some of these issues early without having to wait for the relational NPS results.
The insights from the survey can help with the training and improvement of customer support.
Relational NPS Pros
The relational NPS survey measures customer loyalty towards the business or brand. The result can be a great indicator of customer love in a somewhat unbiased way. Having said that you should keep in mind that though the relational NPS survey is conducted periodically without the context of a transaction, customer opinion can still be a little biased because of the recent transaction.
The feedback from the relational NPS survey tends to be generic. Because it’s not tied to a particular transaction context, the result can draw out insights on diverse areas of a business – product issues, service or support issues, site speed, UI/UX, and many more areas, that are not covered by a transactional survey. However, because of the diversity of feedback, it may be difficult to pinpoint specific areas that need more attention.
The industry NPS benchmarks are readily available. You can compare and plan continuous improvements to meet your target NPS goals.
What are various types of tNPS surveys? Transactional NPS Examples
Transactional surveys can be sent whenever there is a transaction or interaction – such as feature use, product delivery, support ticket closure, etc. The goal is to collect customer feedback at these touch points and find insights to improve the customer experience at these. Like other types of customer experience surveys, timing is very important for this survey as well. At some touchpoints, you may want to send this survey immediately, and at some, you should send it after a few days to a few weeks. Here are some of the sample use cases to illustrate when to send out the transactional NPS surveys.
Transactional NPS Survey Post-purchase (Web Survey and Email)
Let’s say a customer orders a product from your e-commerce website. After the customer orders the product, you can show a tNPS survey on the website when the user is at the “order confirmation” or “Thank you” page. This survey can capture the website ordering experience of the customers and identify the ways to improve the site based on the feedback. For example, customers may point out areas like – site speed, UI/UX, product pricing, ease of product discovery, checkout and payment, etc. This feedback should help you improve the website experience for your users.
Example NPS Question: Based on your recent order, how likely are you to recommend our website to your friends and family?
You can also choose to send an NPS Email to the customer after say 15 days of their order or 7 days from delivery to find out their experience with the product. This tNPS survey should help you understand which products are liked by your customers and which ones need improvement. Keep in mind that you need to allow your users a few days to try out the product before sending the survey.
Example NPS Question: Based on your recent purchase, how likely are you to recommend our products to your friends and family?
Using Affiniv, you can easily create surveys and then choose to show the survey on a specific page on your website. You can also send the survey over Email automatically with our integrations with platforms such as Shopify.
Transaction NPS (tNPS) Survey after Feature Release
Transactional NPS (tNPS) surveys can also be used to understand the feedback about the new features. Let’s say you have launched a new payment feature on your website. After a user uses the same, you can show a popup survey to collect the NPS and feedback. In this case, you can show the web survey immediately after the user has used the feature. When you use a survey tool like Affiniv, you can specify at what point you want to trigger the survey.
Example NPS Question: Based on your recent experience with our feature <Feature X> how likely are you to recommend <Feature X> to a colleague?
Customer Onboarding Survey
For Saas products, customer onboarding is a key milestone. Once the customer is onboarded you should send a transactional NPS survey to understand the user feedback. Ideally, this survey should be sent a few days after all aspects of onboarding are complete. If it’s a self-serve onboarding, the feedback can help you identify issues with the onboarding flow, ease of use, UI/UX, and so on. If it’s an assisted onboarding, this feedback can also help identify the feedback about the support, integrations, and other custom developments and the implementation timelines.
NPS Question: Based on your recent experience with our product/onboarding, how likely are you to recommend <your product/brand> to a friend or colleague?
Support interactions
Irrespective of the kind of business you run, your users should be reaching out to the support desk for help. After the support ticket closure, you can send a transactional NPS survey to understand the user feedback on the resolution of the ticket. This can identify issues like support staff knowledge, responsiveness, resolution timelines, etc. This data can help with support training and improvement of the support desk.
In-Store Experience
If you are selling products in your store, then you should measure the in-store experience of your customers and collect feedback to improve the same. The in-store experience can be collected by having a tablet in the store and the tNPS survey running in a kiosk mode. There are a few differences between a regular survey and the survey running in a kiosk mode. Let’s say the user has answered the first question and left it there. The kiosk mode survey should reset to the first question after minutes of inactivity (otherwise the next person would see the follow-on question instead of the first question). Also, the kiosk mode should reset to the first question after the user finishes the survey. With Affiniv’s Kiosk mode, you can easily create an in-store experience survey without any coding.
NPS Question: Based on your store visit, how likely are you to recommend our store to your friends or family?
Website Survey
The transactional NPS survey can also be shown on the website to collect website feedback. This can bring out issues like UI/UX, site speed, bugs and glitches, and more, which can be improved to give users a better experience. The web survey can appear as a popup after a few minutes to an hour of browsing. With Affiniv, you can create a website survey in minutes and add it to your website.

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How to analyze and use tNPS?
A good NPS Survey starts with the NPS scale question followed by one or more follow-up questions, which are subjective (text-based). This allows the user to not only rate based on the recent transaction, interaction, or feature use, but also to provide her thoughts about why she chose that rating.
Once you have customer responses and the score, your ultimate goal is to keep improving the score. Here are a few things that will help you with the same.
Analyze the voice of customer (VoC) responses to find the insights
The first step to improving the NPS is to analyze and find out what needs to be improved from the voice of the customer question (i.e. the follow-up question). The responses that you have got for that question are extremely important to analyze how to improve the product, process, or interaction. You can also analyze the scores with other details, such as which cities, countries, or products cause more dissatisfaction. If you are using an NPS software like Affiniv, you should have all these data points available for each response. You can identify the key drivers by applying various filters.
Closing the loop
Closing the loop refers to taking appropriate follow-up action based on the response. The follow-up action could be different for various buckets – Promoters, Detractors, and Passives.
Closing the loop for promoters
Promoters are highly satisfied with your brand based on their recent interaction. They are very likely to refer others to your product or business based on their recent interaction. So the next logical step is to request them to do the same. For promoters, you can have a referral program. After they have given their rating, you can request them to refer their friend, family, or colleague. The referral email can go out after a day or two from their response. Make sure that the referral email is personalized and includes a thank you note!
Apart from requesting referrals, you can also request public reviews and ratings. For example, you can request them to rate on trust pilot or Google. A rating on these platforms can boost the trust of your prospective customers.
If you are using a CX platform like Affiniv, you can easily set up the follow-up action functionality.
Closing the loop for passives
There are users who didn’t dislike their last interaction, but they are not very excited about it either. You can try the referral program with this cohort, but most likely you may not see positive result. For the passive segment, you should analyze what could have been done to give these users a great experience, so that you can delight them and convert them into promoters.
Closing the loop for detractors
Detractors had a bad experience with your product or service during their last interaction. It’s important to understand the pain points of each of the detractors and resolve them as quickly as possible. You can automatically send these responses to a ticketing system like Zendesk or Freshdesk for appropriate follow-up by your support team.
Apart from getting in touch with these customers to fix their issues, you should also analyze the causes of dissatisfaction and address them one by one. Once you start solving the underlying issues, you should start seeing your tNPS going up because of the lesser number of detractors.
Final words
In this post, we have explored both the types of NPS and their key differences and when to use one vs the others with examples. Please bear in mind that either the transactional NPS or relational NPS is not better than the other. You should use both to get the score and the feedback and keep improving the metrics. Relational NPS can provide you with broader overall feedback about your product and business, which can be great as it touches all areas of the company. Whereas the tNPS provides you with very focussed feedback which is highly beneficial to make that particular transaction or interaction better.
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January 5, 2024
Voice of Customer Template – questions and examples
Voice of customer, also known as VoC in its short form, refers to the feedback that customers provide to a business. “Listening” to the voice of customers enables a business to learn from customer insights and issues that impact them. Collecting and analyzing the VoC data can lead to better products or services which results in improved customer experience. Voice of customer template is a survey template, which contains a set of questions that can be used to survey your customers. It can be in the form of an NPS survey template, a CSAT Survey template, or a custom voice of customer survey template that can be used to get customer feedback.
In today’s competitive world, customer experience is paramount for business growth. In the US, 59% of the customers will walk away after several bad experiences according to this study. 17% will stop using the company product or services after just one bad experience. On the positive side, customers are likely to spend 140% more after a positive experience than customers who had a negative experience as per this article. Capturing the VoC, also known as “listening” to your customers is the first step towards providing a great customer experience.
This post helps you understand the voice of customer survey process and provides you with the voice of customer templates, that you can use to send out voice of customer surveys.
TL;DR
In the simplest terms, voice of customer survey tries to capture customer insights at various points of the customer journey.
A voice of customer template is used to send out the surveys at individual touchpoints as well as at specific intervals.
Voice of customer template uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative voice of survey questions to get insightful customer feedback.
It’s a good practice to send out the voice of customer surveys on a continuous basis at various touchpoints as opposed to doing it as a one-time exercise or a periodic one.
The responses to the voice of customer surveys can help improve customer experience. The voice of customer template should contain relevant questions to identify the customer’s pain points. These questions can be both quantitative and qualitative. The response to the questions can help you identify the problem areas in the customer journey. Working on removing these issues can help you provide a great experience to your customers.
The Voice of customer template can also contain other types of questions to generate new product ideas, improve existing products, do customer research, understand brand loyalty, and competitor research among others.
Some of the popular voice of customer surveys are – Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey, and Customer Effort Score (CES) survey.
You can get the voice of customer using various methods – customer interviews, focus groups, online surveys, customer chat with support, online and social reviews, analyzing support tickets, etc.
While using a voice of customer template, you should ensure not to include biased questions. Also, make sure that the voice of customer template is short and concise. Based on our research, we recommend not more than 7 questions in the template.
For voice of customer survey, you can use appropriate context. For example, send the survey after the user has done a transaction or used a particular feature. However relational surveys like NPS can be sent periodically to assess customer loyalty.
To seamlessly create and send out the voice of customer survey to your customers, you can use an all-in-one survey tool like Affiniv. Using Affiniv, you can create voice of customer survey pretty quickly using our voice of customer templates. Once the survey is created, it can be sent out using Email, WhatsApp, Text, etc., or can be embedded in your website or App. Finally, the results can be analyzed using the dashboard, which can provide insights into the voice of the customer.
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What is Voice of Customer template?
Voice of customer survey aims to capture customer feedback and responses to improve customer experience by making products or services better. These surveys can be sent over several touchpoints during the customer journey. Some of these voice of customer surveys can be sent in the context of a transaction, for example, after the purchase of a product, support ticket resolution, or use of a feature. some of the VoC surveys can be relationship-based like NPS, which can be sent periodically to understand brand loyalty. The voice of customer template provides a set of questions suitable for each of these survey types. The voice of customer template for a CSAT survey after a product purchase will contain a different set of questions than a relationship-based survey like NPS. In this post, we are going explore various types of templates suitable for a number of scenarios applicable to your business.
Why are VoC Surveys so Important?
Learning from the customers is super important for a business. These learning from VoC surveys are beneficial at every stage of the customer journey. Here are the top benefits of using a well-structured voice of customer survey.
A well-designed voice of customer template can help you gather meaningful responses at every stage of the customer journey. These responses can help create better products and services, which in turn results in a better experience for your customers. Better customer experience can help drive up your revenue by preventing churn, getting more revenue per user, and customer referrals. This can also help identify the customers with bad experiences and gives you an opportunity to correct the same.
In addition to improving customer experience, the voice of the customer can also help you generate ideas to launch new products and services. Most of the time, your customers have a good understanding of what else they need from a business like yours. Or they may be using products or services from another business, which can be fulfilled by you. These customer insights are absolute gold mines, which can help you ideate and then test out new lines of products or services with your existing customers.
VoC surveys can also help you find newer marketing channels to reach out to new customers. For example, many of your existing customers could be on a social platform that you don’t leverage for your business yet. This also means that you can also leverage the same to get your new customers as well.
Voice of customer template can also be used to understand more about your competitors. For example: which of your competitors your customers checked out before making a purchase decision, strength of some of your competitors, etc.
Voice of Customer Template Best Practices
In the next section, we will outline the voice of customer templates suitable for various use cases and touchpoints in the customer journey. But before that, let’s understand some of the best practices for choosing the voice of customer template and appropriate questions.
First, identify your goal and audience. Some of the questions to answer in the starting phase can be as follows. What do you want to achieve or learn from the voice of customer exercise? What is the customer segment that can provide you with this insight? For example, say you want to learn a new feature. Your new customers who have signed up in the last week may not be the best ones as they may not have a full understanding of the existing products. If you want to target a particular set of customers for this purpose, you can appropriately choose the right questions for the voice of the customer template.
When to reach out for feedback? As I have mentioned earlier, the voice of customer survey should be a continuous process. Meaning, you should survey your customers with the appropriate template at various stages of their lifecycle on an ongoing basis. It should not be a onetime or periodic activity. For example: when a customer completes a course on your website, a VoC survey should be sent asking for feedback, either immediately or within a few hours. It should not be that you select all the customers completing a course in a month and send them a survey in one go.
How to send out the voice of customer survey? There are several ways to do a VoC survey. The simplest are over Email or a messaging app like WhatsApp. Other ways could be to embed the survey in the website or App so that customers can respond immediately after they have taken an action.
Start with a rating scale wherever applicable. Choosing a rating scale as the first question sets the tone for the questions to follow. This is especially important for surveys like NPS, CSAT, CES, Smiley face Surveys, etc. Choosing the first question as a rating scale also ensures that a score can be generated on the basis of the most prominent question in the voice of the customer template. Using a voice-of-customer tool like Affiniv, this score can be tracked over periods, say month-on-month or quarter-on-quarter.
Use Quantitative as well as Qualitative questions. Your voice of customer template should contain both quantitative and qualitative questions. Quantitative questions such as scale questions, and choice questions are great for quantifying the result and getting some direct insights. For example a question – “Please rate our product on a scale of 1 – 5”, can objectively tell you whether your customers like, dislike, or are neutral about your product. And you can benchmark this score against other products or industries. But then supplementing this question with an open-ended follow-up question such as – “How should we improve the product?”, can give you a lot of text responses to find out the areas of improvement. Or maybe you can use this question as a multiple choice question with an “other” option where your users can write their feedback. Whichever approach you take, you should make sure to use qualitative feedback to get detailed customer insights.
Avoid biased or leading questions. Last but not least, while choosing questions for a voice of survey template, you must make sure not to ask them a biased or leading question. There are several posts we have written about biased questions that you can check out.
Use the appropriate thank you page. After your customers have filled in the survey, you should show them an appropriate thank you message. If doing a standard survey like NPS, CSAT, CES, Smiley face survey, etc, you should show an appropriate thank you message based on whether they are satisfied/promoters or dissatisfied/detractors. You can also use the thank you page to show your users how to avail of the incentive if you had promised them one for taking the survey.
Voice of Customer Templates for various use cases
Here is a collection of voice of customer templates for various use cases. Choose the right questions based on your customer segment, touch point, and specific use case. Also, you can pick questions from various categories below and customize the questions. For example, while creating an NPS survey, you can take questions from the Brand Loyalty, Performance, Customer Service, and Customer Research template sections.
Brand Loyalty Questions for Voice of Customer Template
On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our brand to others?
How satisfied are you with your experience of interacting with our brand including customer service?
Options: Highly Satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Not Satisfied, Highly dissatisfied
What are the areas we should improve to make you like us more? Open-ended or multiple choice with “Other” option.
How likely are you to continue using our [Products/Services]?
Very Likely, Likely, Neutral, Not Likely, Not at all Likely
In a few words, what are the top reasons to consider repurchasing [products/services] from our brand? Open-ended
How well does our brand understand your needs and preferences?
1 – 5. 1 – Doesn’t meet my needs at all. 5 – Fully meets my needs
Have you ever considered switching to a competitor’s brand?
Options: Never, Occasionally, Most of the times
If yes, what motivated you to consider the change?
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Brand Perception Questions for Voice of Customer Template
What are the top words that come to your mind when you think of our brand?
How do you perceive our brand compared to the ones from the same industry?
Options can be Highly Favourable to Not Favourable At All
What are the top qualities of our brand that you find most appealing?
What are the top qualities of our brand that you do not find appealing?
Do you consider our brand as an innovator?
Options: Always Innovates, Innovates occasionally, Never Innovates
For the “Never Innovates” selection to the above question – A little bit on why you don’t consider our brand an innovator.
If there were one or two things that you think we should change in our brand, what would they be?
Product/Service Performance Questions for Voice of Customer Template
On a scale of 1 – 10, how will you rate the overall performance of our product?
How often do you face technical issues with our Product?
Options: Mostly Free of Issues, Occasionally, Very Frequently
On a scale of 1 – 5, how well does our product meet your needs?
Are there any features or functionality that you think we must have in our product?
How frequently do you use our product?
Options: Every day, Few times a week, Few times a month
What in your mind is the strongest selling point of our product?
Please rate the following attributes – [quality/UI/Speed]. Each attribute can be asked separately.
How do you perceive our product in terms of value for money? [1 – Not Good At All. 5 – Great Value for Money].
Brand Discovery Questions for Voice of Customer Template
How did you hear about our [Brand/Product]?
Options: Social Media, Online Search, Recommended by a Friend/Colleague, Advertising
[If selected Advertising] Please mention the advertisement that brought you to our site.
Options: Radio, TV, Online, Newspaper
Competition Question for Voice of Customer Templates
Have you ever used [Product/Services] from our Competitor?
Which of the Competitor’s [product/services] you have used earlier?
If you’ve used our competitor, what motivated you to choose their products or services over ours?
How would you rate our [products/services] when compared to our competitors?
Options: Much Better, A Little Better, Similar, A Little Worse, Much Worse
What features of our competitors do you find to be very useful?
How do you compare our pricing with respect to our competitors?
Will you consider switching to one of our competitors in the near future?
Website Questions for Voice of Customer Template
How do you rate your overall experience of our website? Rating Scale 1 – 5
If selected 3 or below, the follow-on question can be – What needs to be improved on our site?
Options: Speed, UI, Information, Errors or Issues, Others (Please Specify)
In a scale of 1 – 5, how easy was it to find products/features/information on our website?
1 – Very Difficult, 5 – Very Easy
If selected 3 or below for the above question, then the follow-up question can be – What [product/feature/information] were you looking for?
What would be the features we should add to our website to make it more useful?
How relevant the content on our website to what you were looking today?
Options: Highly Relevant, Somewhat Relevant, Neutral, Not Relevant, Highly Irrelevant
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Questions for Voice of Customer Template
On a scale of 1 – 5, how satisfied are you with our [Products/Services]?
How do you rate your overall satisfaction with your recent interaction with customer support?
Options: Highly Satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Not Satisfied, Highly dissatisfied
On a scale of 1 – 5, how do you rate the quality of our [Products/Services]?
How do you rate our communication with respect to news and product updates?
On a scale of 1 – 5, how well do we handle issues, bugs whenever you report them?
Modes of collecting Voice of Customer Feedback
There are several modes you can consider while planning to collect the voice of customer feedback. Here are some of them. Obviously the online survey are the number 1 choice by far. But that doesn’t mean you should overlook the other methods altogether. Here are some of the popular ones.
Online Survey
This is most obvious choice for a reason. Sending surveys online over a channel like Email doesn’t take much effort and is highly scalable if automated. Also, you can fully personalize the email and send gentle reminders using an all-in-one voice of customer tool like Affiniv.
Apart from sending Email, you can also embed the survey in your website. The survey can be auto-triggered after customer takes an action or visits a page after a few days of subscribing to your product. Again, using a tool like Affiniv, you can create and embed the survey very easily on your website. Web-embed is a very effective mode of collecting the feedback as the customer has your full attention while she or he is using your website.

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Customer Interviews
In this mode of capturing the voice of customer, employees talk to customers on an individual basis to get their feedback. This requires time and resources and is much less scalable than the online mode. But the amazing thing about talking to customers one-on-one is, you get a wealth of feedback, which you won’t get otherwise. You can ask probing questions and follow-up questions and get valuable insights. In fact it’s highly recommended that teams talk to customers on a periodic basis.
Focus Groups
Focus groups also give you an opportunity to talk to customers directly but in stead of one-on-one, it’s a group of customers. A group can help you get various views and counter-views, which is important to get an all-round understanding. The word of caution here would be that there may be one or a couple of customers who have a very strong view and can bias the discussion. Make sure to get a balanced perspective from the entire group.
Live Chat
If you have a chat widget on your website, customers may already be asking questions, queries and requesting for help there. You can either chat with customers directly or can refer to the chat transcripts, which were answered by support agents.
Social Media Mentions and Online Reviews
You can go through your social media handles and online reviews. These sources contain feedback which are often unfiltered and provide a good way to understand what the customers truly feel about your products or services.
Finally, you should use a mix of channels. As with most of the things, consistency is the key here. Automating the online survey process can help you save a lot of time and resources. But be mindful of the fact that you should also maintain an in-person touchpoint to have a deeper understanding of your customer feedback.
Conclusion
Okay, so now we have seen what is a voice of customer template, how to pick the right questions, when to do the survey. We have also seen voice of customer templates with questions which you can customize for your business and various touch-points. Also we have explored how to send the voice of customer survey, embed on your website. The entire voice of customer feedback collection may look like needing a lot of work, but with the right tool, capturing the voice of your customers can be fairly straightforward.

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November 8, 2023
5-Star Survey – An Ultimate Guide
5-star surveys could be the most popular survey method around. If you have done any transaction online, you would have received a survey to rate your experience. For example, you could have booked a cab using Uber or traveled by an airline. Or stayed at a hotel, and dined in a restaurant. And you would have received a 5-star survey asking for your experience. Uber asks you to rate your experience with the driver and cab on a 5-point scale. A 5-point rating scale is also used by airlines, restaurants, online marketplaces, hotel booking sites, and so on.
Businesses of all kinds use this rating scale to survey their customer and understand their experience. Using the feedback, they then try to improve their products, services, and overall customer experience.
In this article, we are going to dive deep and understand what is a 5-star survey, when to use the same, and how to create one.
TL;DR
5-Star surveys are one of the most popular survey methods to collect the customer experience. It’s widely used and understood by customers worldwide, which further increases its popularity.
A 5-star survey is a transactional survey as opposed to a relational one. A transactional survey is meant to capture customer feedback after a particular transaction or use of a product, and so on. Relational surveys are sent to the customer to understand overall perception and feedback. Net promoter score survey is an example of a relational survey.
Here are the typical use cases of a 5-star survey. Sending customers surveys a few days after they have received a product from an online store. Take feedback after they use a service, such as – a salon, spa, hotel, restaurant, airline, etc. 5-star rating scale is used to ask for their feedback on specific aspect of their experience as well. For example, in the case of a hotel, it can be used to understand the overall feedback, booking experience, check-in experience, cleanliness, food, and so on. Asking customers for their feedback after they have used a feature of the software or app. This survey can also be sent after a support issue is resolved to take agent feedback.
This survey is universally understood. Hence can be used in a global context where users may speak multiple languages. Can be used both in a professional business-to-business (B2B) as well as personal business-to-consumer (B2C) context. B2C marketplaces such as Uber, Yelp, Airbnb, Apple app store and many others use a 5-star rating scale to take their customer feedback across multiple aspects of customer experience. On the B2B side, software marketplaces such as G2, and app marketplaces such as Salesforce App Store and Shopify App Store are examples of B2B businesses using the 5-star rating scale.
A 5-star survey can have the first question asking about the overall experience of the recent transaction. The follow-up questions can be added to understand further experience from the customer. These questions can be 5-star questions, scale questions, choice questions, or any other open-ended questions to understand more about the voice of customers.
The survey can be sent over Email, embedded in your website or App, or a survey link can be sent directly to the customers over any channel. You can use an All-in-one Survey Tool like Affiniv to create a 5-star survey, send the survey over Email, and embed it in your website or App. Also, you can use the tool to analyze the customer feedback and closing the loop.
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What is a 5-Star Survey?
A 5-Star survey, as its name suggests shows 5 stars to accept feedback from their customer. The customer chooses the highest score by selecting the 5th star and the lowest score by selecting the first star. Each end of the star can be marked by labels with a clear indication of a low score and a high score. This survey aims to take customer feedback after they have done a transaction.
Typically selection of 1 star can be the lowest, and 5 is the highest. Along with the first question, multiple follow-up questions can be set up to take user feedback and collect the detailed voice of the customer. These questions combined can unlock the key insights to help a business enhance its customer experience.
Why use a 5-Star Survey?
5-Star surveys are a great way to collect feedback from your customers across various touch-points. Compared to numeric rating scales, 5-star rating scales are modern and universally understood. Add to that the widespread use of the same across the industry means that your users would already be familiar with this survey method. Here are a few top reasons to use the 5-star rating scale for your use case.
5-Star surveys are already widely popular and are used across the world and across industries. So your customers should already be familiar with the same.
It’s pretty easy and quick for users to understand and respond. This is because the 5-star rating scale format is familiar and the question can be relatively shorter.
It can be used across the user base worldwide without the language barrier. In that sense, it’s somewhat similar to smiley face surveys. The key difference is that smiley face surveys should be used to measure customer sentiment. Also, the Smiley face survey may not seem appropriate in B2B content. 5-Star surveys are a lot more versatile and can be used across a large number of use cases.
The previous point leads us to versatility as the 5-star surveys can be used across industry segments. Both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies use this survey across a wide range of use cases.
As the survey score calculation method for a 5-point rating scale is universal, you can easily benchmark your performance with the industry.
5-star ratings and reviews collected from your customers can be displayed on the website against the product that you are selling.
How to create a great 5-Star Survey
Now that we have explored the benefits of the 5-star survey, let’s see how we can create that perfect 5-star survey.
Start with your customer journey and identify the touchpoints where you want to survey your customers. If you are a software SaaS company, your customer touchpoints could be as follows. Customer Signup, Demo, Follow-up Demo, Price Negotiation, Onboarding, Periodic customer review by customer success, customer contact for support issues, contract renewal, etc.
These steps are just examples and may not be totally applicable to your business. Similarly, if you are an e-commerce company, your touch-points could look like – Site visits, orders placed, orders received by customers, product usage, support issue contact and resolution, repurchase, etc.
Identify the points of survey and type of survey: Once you have identified the touch-points, you should decide what kind of survey is needed at various of these touch-points. In the above example of the software company, you may want to collect customer feedback after the demo, after the onboarding is complete, periodically every month or every quarter, after the resolution of the support tickets, etc. You can decide on the right kind of survey at these steps.
5-point rating scale question: Time for us to create the first and the most important question – the 5-point rating scale question. My recommendation would be to keep it contextual, short, and clear.
A 5-star survey rating is done in the context of a transaction. Hence you should keep it highly contextual. An example of a contextual question could be – how do you rate the quality of the product <x>? Here <x> is the product the user has recently bought from the e-commerce store.
And the question should be short and clear. After all, the key benefit to using the 5-point rating scale in the first place is that the user can respond quickly without any friction. Here are some examples of the same –
– Please rate your recent interaction with our support agent.
– Please rate your experience with using our cab service/dining at our restaurant/staying at our hotel.
– How do you rate the quality of product <X>
– Please rate our website experience

Also, you should look to avoid jargon and difficult, confusing words, which may lead to poor understanding and a low response rate.
Use appropriate labels: Using labels can provide further clarity to a 5-Star Survey. On a 5-star rating scale, some of the users may be confused about which side is the highest rating and which side is the lowest. You should provide labels to clarify the same. That way the question response won’t be biased.
Here are some examples of labeling the scale appropriately.
– Please rate your interaction with customer support [Very Poor, Great]
– How do you rate the quality of the product [Very Poor, Amazing]
– How do you rate our website experience [Terrible, Amazing]
Follow-up Question(s): After the first question, you should set up one or multiple follow-up questions to understand the reason behind the response. The follow-up questions can be other scales, such as numeric scales, choice questions, or open-ended questions. You should consider asking 3-5 questions and not going beyond 7 questions. Asking a larger number of questions can reduce the number of people who complete your survey.
Having said that, you must ask the relevant questions to get the right feedback so that you can understand the “why” behind the response. After all, learning the reason why the user rated you high or low can help you improve your customer experience. This can, in turn, help you increase the star rating for that particular product, process, or feature.

Timing of your 5-star survey: When sending a 5-star survey, you should try to send it as soon as the transaction has happened. Or the customer has used the product feature. The sooner you send the survey, the experience is fresh in the mind of your customer. So the quality of response would be much better if sent earlier. One word of caution here. You should allow your user enough time to fully understand your product, be it software or physical, before asking for feedback.
If the timing is too early, this can result in lower response rate. Because the customer hasn’t fully understood your offering to provide an opinion. If it’s too late, then the experience is no more fresh and will reduce the quality of feedback. So you need to be careful to time the survey properly.
As an example, say you are creating a 5-star survey for an e-commerce apparel business. Sending a survey just after the product delivery can be too early as your customer may not have the opportunity to experience the product. If you send the product say after 20 days or so, it becomes a little too late. Depending on the type of product, you may want to send the survey within 10 to 25 days or so after the delivery.

If you use an all-in-one survey software like Affiniv, you can automate the survey workflow. That way a survey can go out after a fixed number of days from the event without needing any manual intervention.
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How to calculate 5-Star rating?
Calculating the score of a 5-star rating survey is straightforward. You can simply add up all the scores and divide them by number of responses. The 5-star rating is simply the average of all scores. Consider the following example –
Let’s say 10 users responded to a 5-star survey. Their scores are 5, 5, 4, 3, 1, 5, 4, 5, 4, 2.
If we add the scores, it comes to 38. To calculate the rating, we divide 38/10 = 3.8.
The simplicity of calculation is another reason, the score of a 5-star rating is prominently displayed against the products and services online. The score being universal, can be compared and benchmarked against other products on the site.
When to go for a 5-Star survey?
Here are some use cases of 5-star surveys from the industry. This may help you decide your use case. The 5-star survey is versatile, which means it can be used in a wide variety of cases. Also, the 5-star survey is meant to be contextual or transactional. A 5-star survey should be used after a transaction. For example: someone uses a feature in your web or app, buys a product from an online store, rates a service provider on an aggregator platform after getting a service, rates a professional at a spa or salon after a session, and so on.
If you want to have a general survey about your company as a whole, you may want to choose a relational survey like NPS.
Here are some use cases from the industry on using 5-star surveys.
Use case 1: Product Review Surveys for an e-commerce brand
Let’s say an online e-commerce brand sells products via a website or app. A customer buys a product, which gets delivered after 5 days from order. The brand can send out product review survey, which is a 5-star survey, a few days after the product gets delivered. This survey can go out via email.
The stars and product images can be embedded in the email body so that the user can start responding directly inside the email. On click of a star, the user can be shown the survey page to fill out the additional questions. Embedding the star rating in the email increases the response rate as users find it easy to respond.
In the additional questions the brand can ask for a review and a headline. The review question can be a long answer question and review headline can be a short answer question.
The ratings and reviews can be published on the product display page after verification. Publishing user generated reviews on the product page increases customer trust. This can be pretty useful while selling product online. Few things to consider here are –
– Send survey after a few days from the product delivery, so that the user gets time to use the product
– Embed the stars and product image to get more responses
– Upload the product reviews on the website against the products
– Make sure that the ratings are visible on the Google search when someone searches for the product

Use case 2: 5-Star rating survey embedded in website/app
You can embed the 5-star survey in the website or app. This is typically done after a user does a transaction or uses a feature. The typical questions can be –
– How was your experience with using our <X> feature?
– Rate your recent onboarding experience on our website
– Please rate your recent website/app experience
The web survey can be shown to the user after she completes a transaction or uses a feature. As we have seen before, for this survey the timing of the survey is important. You can choose to display the survey just after the user has completed the transaction.

How to distribute a 5-Star rating survey?
So far we have seen what’s a 5-star survey, how to create one, and various use cases for the same. Once you have created a 5-star survey, you can choose to distribute it over multiple channels. Some of the popular ones are – sending the survey via Email, Embedding it in your website/app, Sending the link over a social media app like WhatsApp, etc. Every channel has its pros and cons. You should choose the right channel depending on where your users are.
Send 5-Star Survey over Email
You can embed the 5-star survey in the email body. This is the best method to get a higher response rate as opposed to simply sending the link or adding a button. Using an all-in-one survey tool like Affiniv, you can embed the 5-star survey in the email body pretty easily.
Embed 5-star survey in website/app
A 5-star survey can be embedded in your website or app using a tool like Affiniv. You can choose to show the survey on a particular page, or after the user has taken an action or completed a flow.
5-Star Survey using Affiniv
With Affiniv, it’s easy to create a smiley face survey and distribute it over multiple channels or modes like Email, Website, App, link, etc.
Here are the steps –
Step 1 – Create your free account with Affiniv at https://app.affiniv.com/createaccount
Step 2 – You will see your dashboard page with the option to create an NPS survey, a CSAT survey, a CES survey, or a custom survey. Choose the “Create New CSAT Survey” option
Step 3 – A CSAT template will be pre-selected for you on the next page. You can create or edit the first question to a visual scale question and select the option type “star”.
Step 4 – Create additional questions for your survey and move to the “Distribute” section.
Step 5 – Here you can distribute your survey over Email, Link, Kiosk, or embed it in your website using the simple code that’s shown on the page
Step 6 – Once you get the result, you can analyze the same on your AI-powered dashboard or send it to a mailing list. You can download the result and send the result to any analytics system or Google sheet.

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October 4, 2023
Acquiescence bias: 7 ways to prevent it in surveys
Businesses create surveys to understand customer feedback, conduct market research, do demographic analysis, and a lot more. The results of these surveys are extremely critical in several areas of business. Such as improvement in products and services, launching new ones, understanding customer profiles, doing detailed demographic analysis, etc.
If the survey responses are used to make critical business decisions, then the quality of the decisions would depend on the quality of the responses gathered. Response biases are the inaccuracies or inconsistencies that get into the customer responses due to several reasons. In simple terms, the customer didn’t actually mean what she or he has responded. This could be due to survey or question design, an incorrect customer sample, and many other factors. Biases in survey responses lead to lower-quality data. Hence, it is important to understand some of the key biases and try to eliminate as many as we can.
In this post, we will dive deep into “Acquiescence bias”. This difficult-sounding bias is also known as the Yes bias, or Confirmation bias.
What is Acquiescence Bias?
Acquiescence bias is when a user agrees to a statement without actually meaning or believing the same. It’s also called “Yes Bias” or Confirmation Bias. Here, a user who takes a survey chooses an option that agrees with the survey statement or gives mere confirmation, even if she doesn’t totally believe it’s true. So it becomes a biased opinion as opposed to an independent, unbiased response.
Here are a few example survey questions that may lead to this bias.
– How much did you like our feature <X>?
– How much do you agree with the statement – I consume healthy meals almost every day. [Options: Fully Agree, Agree, Disagree]
The above questions are also called “leading questions”, where the user is very likely to choose the option that agrees with the question statement.

Acquiescence Bias Question Example

Acquiescence Bias Example
Acquiescence bias can also arise because of the faulty question options. For example, consider a question like – I properly plan and organize my day, with the option as Yes/No. The survey participants will most likely provide a positive response to this question.
This bias is overwhelmingly caused by leading or unclear questions followed by a limited number of options, such as True/False, Agree/Disagree, Yes/No, etc. The other key reasons are long or poorly worded questions, vague questions, lengthy surveys, the choice of demographics, and so on. We will explore them in more detail in the following section.
If not understood and rectified, this will lead to inaccurate response data. If a business needs to use this data for critical decision-making, this bias will lead to suboptimal outcomes.
Causes for Acquiescence Bias
Now that we have identified and understood this bias, let’s dive deep into what causes it. Below are some of the key reasons for the same.
1. Question Design – Leading questions
As we had explored earlier, leading questions are one of the key reasons why this bias creeps into your survey results. Leading questions are the ones where the surveyor asks the participant questions that lead to or favor a particular option more than the others. For example:
– How much do you agree with this statement – Our product packaging is really amazing.
– The payment feature of our product is very smooth. Do you agree with the statement?
These questions can potentially “guide” the participant to choose a more favorable option.
2. Options design – Limited number of options
Designing the options for a survey question can potentially introduce this bias. For example, consider a question –
Our product packaging is amazing. With 2 options -Yes, No.
With such a leading question and very limited answer options, the user most likely is going to choose a positive option.
Providing a limited number of options can lead to this bias
3. Question Design – unclear or poorly worded questions
Unless the question is clearly worded, it can confuse a user. In such a situation, she may choose the positive option. For most users, selecting a favorable option is highly likely if they don’t fully understand the question. Also, the survey creator may design the wording in such a way that it seems eager to elicit positive feedback as opposed to trying to get a more objective view from the user. Learn more about best practices for survey questions here.
4. Cultural implications and social influence
Users in some cultures are more likely to offer a positive response unless their experience or feedback has been highly negative. They may do it out of politeness, but for the brand, it may bias the responses and paint a more positive picture.
Similarly, social influences and the positive self-image of the participant may result in more positive responses. For example: questions like –
You should use your car less. Yes/No
I organize my calendar well for the day. Yes/No
These kinds of questions are most likely to fetch positive responses, though the participant’s action would suggest otherwise.
Question order is also important here. Let’s say a user has answered a question like this – I am methodical in my approach to work, True/False. If the user has answered this question positively and then if you pose a question like – I organize my calendar well for the day, there is an extremely high chance that the user answers the same positively as well. This is a result of our trying to seem consistent throughout.
5. Lengthy survey and non motivation
If the questionnaire is long or the user is not motivated to take the survey, they are very likely to try and finish the survey quickly by providing positive responses. As we have discussed earlier, if the user doesn’t understand the question properly or is eager to be done with the survey, then it’s very common to go for positive responses.
6. Non-anonymous surveys, especially non-anonymous employee surveys
This effect can be very prominent where the respondents are non-anonymous, and there is a fear of action or the fear of being judged based on their feedback. If a participant can be identified and a response can be tied back to them, it may seem safe to agree to a more social viewpoint.
This doesn’t impact customer experience surveys that much, as generally, for a brand, the customers are in a position of power. But in the case of employee surveys, unless there is an assurance of anonymity, the responses can very likely contain this bias. Especially if they believe that the response can be tied back to them, and perception can be built based on their responses.
7. Surveyor superiority and In-person Surveys
The real or perceived superiority of the surveyor impacts the outcome of the survey as well. If the respondents feel that the surveyor is superior, they are most likely to provide a positive view. This effect gets even more prominent in the case of in-person surveys or interviews. When the users are called onsite and interviewed, it’s important to keep in mind that out of politeness and gratitude, the users may opt for more positive responses than they would otherwise provide.
7 ways to prevent acquiescence bias in surveys
Now that we have seen how acquiescence bias is caused in the surveys, in this section we will explore how to prevent them. We will also explore whether the bias be completely prevented in the surveys. And what are some of the strategies to minimize if not completely eliminate the bias.
1. Avoid leading questions altogether
As we have seen in the previous sections, leading questions are one of the major causes of this bias. So it’s strongly recommended to avoid leading questions altogether. Here are some leading questions and how they can be put in a more neutral way.
Leading: Don’t you agree that our product is the best in the market?
Neutral: What are your thoughts on our product features compared to our competitors in the market?
Leading: How much did you enjoy the annual company-wide get-together?
Neutral: How would you rate your experience of our recent company-wide get-together?
Posing the questions in as neutral and objective a manner as possible can reduce acquiescence bias to a great extent. Also, the surveyor needs to make sure that the questions are not designed with an eagerness to get positive responses, but the goal should be to get objective views of the respondent.
Leading question vs Neutral question
2. Avoid difficult questions. Go for clear and concise questions.
As discussed before, if a user doesn’t understand a question properly, she is very likely to choose a positive option. It’s important to put across the question in as clear and concise a manner as possible. Simpler words and smaller sentences are the easiest to understand. It’s advisable to run the survey past some of the colleagues or real users before sending it to a larger base of respondents.
For a somewhat complex question, consider describing to further clarify your question. To keep the user focused and in the zone, you may also consider having one question per page. That way, the user is more likely to keep focusing on a single question without getting distracted by the length of the survey.

3. Be brief to avoid survey tiredness
If there are too many questions in a survey, it can lead to tiredness, also known as “survey fatigue”. This can lead to decreased attention and effort, resulting in acquiescence bias.
To mitigate survey tiredness, designers should keep surveys concise, prioritize question clarity, provide incentives, and communicate the survey’s importance in the beginning. These strategies make sure that the respondent is “intellectually present” to provide more objective responses and reduce acquiescence bias.
4. Proper choice of response options
A limited number of response options can lead the users to choose the more positive options. Also when designing response options, it’s important to provide middle-ground options, instead of just Yes/No, True/False, Great/Terrible, etc.
For example: consider the following question.
Do you agree that our customer service is delightful?
Options – Yes, No.
The above question can be redesigned as –
Please rate our customer service.
Options: Scale 1 – Terrible, 2 – Bad, 3 – Neutral, 4 – Good, 5 -Amazing
The first question is most likely to get a positive response on average, whereas the second question can get a more varied response. This can help you mitigate the impact of acquiescence bias.
5. Use open-ended questions
Open-ended questions can get you an unbiased opinion, compared to multiple-choice questions. For a multiple-choice question, the user can simply select an option and move on, whereas for an open-ended, descriptive question, the user will be able to describe their opinion in more detail. So this can be a great option for the questions where you feel there is a good chance of the response being biased.
However, you have to be careful while introducing more open-ended questions because these can result in drop-offs and lower overall completion rates. Especially if it’s a longer survey, the user has to put in additional effort to write the answer, which can result in non-responses or lower responses. Unless you are careful, open-ended questions can prevent acquiescence bias but can potentially introduce non-response bias.
6. Message of Neutrality and Transparency
To elicit objective and neutral responses from the users, it’s important to convey the importance of the survey and the ground rules. For example, before the survey, the surveyor should clearly communicate the objectives of the survey and what will be done with the responses. This message should also encourage the user to be frank with their feedback and how it’s going to benefit the user as well as the community or the group.
The user can also be requested and reminded to provide honest opinions in the question descriptions.
If it’s an employee survey, it’s important to start with a confidentiality statement on who has access to the employee responses. Also, for sensitive surveys, you may consider using an agency to roll out the survey. This will help employees provide honest and candid responses without any fear of repercussions. This can considerably reduce the acquiescence bias in your results.
7. Choice of demographics and user groups
This is as important as the other points. As we have discussed before, some cultures encourage people to be more polite, and hence, you are more likely to get more positive responses, even if they don’t completely believe so. To mitigate this, it’s important to choose a mix of demographics so that the sample can be a true representative of the population.
Can acquiescence bias be completely avoided?
The answer to this question can be “almost”! With the use of the above-described techniques, you can look to minimize the acquiescence bias. But please be aware that some bias can still be present in the data. Some demographic segments may respond more positively than others, some users may choose to be more socially correct, some questions can still be a little difficult to comprehend for some of them, and so on.
But overall, using some of the strategies described here can help you considerably lessen the acquiescence bias.
How Affiniv can help get more unbiased responses?
Affiniv is a customer and employee survey platform that can help businesses get unbiased customer feedback. Businesses both large and small use our product to create surveys, distribute the surveys over Email, send the link to the users, embed the surveys in the website, and more.
Using our pre-built templates, you can create a survey in minutes without worrying about the biases that can creep into your survey. Also, our survey experts advise businesses on creating customer experience and market research surveys, and can review your surveys for free!
Use the link to create an account and send a survey in minutes.

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September 14, 2023
Smiley Face Survey: Measure Customer Sentiment using Emojis 😀🙁
Have you recently used a software? Have you recently purchased from a store or online? Have you dined in at a restaurant, been to a spa or salon or travelled with an airline? If the answer to any of the above is “yes”, then you must have received a survey or filled one on the spot. Smiley Face Survey is a special kind of survey where you try to measure customer sentiment using smileys or emojis. In this post, we will dive deep on what is smiley face survey, why to use it, how to create one, some of the best practices and more.
Let’s dive in..
TL;DR
Smiley surveys are used to measure “customer sentiment” or “employee sentiment” at any touchpoint of their journey.
92% of users have interacted with smileys or emojis before as per this article. So users find smiley surveys to be very easy to understand and quick to respond as they don’t need to read through much text.
Use this survey in cases where you need a fresh approach to survey as opposed to using traditional scale-based surveys. Smiley face surveys are especially useful in the case of a young audience, busy places like a store kiosk, a multi-language user base, and so on.
These surveys are also excellent to use in the website feedback, feedback for your app and web product, and understanding process feedback after a support issue is resolved.
A smiley face survey can have a 2-point, 3-point, or 5-point scale. A 5-point scale is more common and can help reduce survey biases.
You can introduce additional questions to understand the voice of the customer in further detail. The additional questions can be scales, open-ended, or close-ended in nature.
The smiley surveys can be distributed using Email, embedded in your website/app, displayed on a kiosk
Emoji surveys are used extensively at restaurants, hospitals, retail stores, hospitality, salon spas, on websites or apps, etc.
Once you get responses using the survey, don’t forget to close the loop. For example, send the responses to the right team members, get in touch with unhappy customers, and analyze the response data to find out the insights.
You can use a survey tool like Affiniv to easily create a smiley survey, distribute the survey over Email, Web, App and act upon the responses.
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What is a smily face survey?
As the name suggests, Smiley Face Survey or Emoji Survey is a friendly way to collect customer feedback. It’s a fresh, quick, and more engaging alternative to using response scales. The survey can have 1 question or more follow-up questions. But at the very least, the first question shows a question and the response consists of a 2,3, or 5 smileys. The smileys show human faces and can range from extremely negative emotion at one end and extremely happy at the other.
Additional follow-up questions can also be asked to capture more detailed feedback.
Smiley Survey – Affiniv
Why use smiley face survey?
Smiley face surveys are a fresh way to survey your customers or employees compared to traditional scale-based surveys. Scale-based surveys, where you ask the users to pick a number ranging from 0 – 10, 1 – 5, 1 – 7, etc., have been around for pretty long and are well-accepted. But recently there has been a survey overload among the users. Survey overload is a scenario where the user is presented with several surveys across different businesses and hence tends to ignore the survey request entirely. This also leads to lower response rates.
Using a smiley face survey is a more human-centric way of surveying your customers. Humans evolved to understand facial emotions and expressions. Also, as many as 92% of online users use emojis regularly in their communications. So smiley face survey is an excellent way to design a fresh, engaging way to request feedback from your customers.
Here are the top 5 reasons why we recommend this survey to our clients –
Smiley face surveys are universal. They are very easily understood and can overcome language barriers.
They are fresh and engaging. This is a survey of choice, especially if you are dealing with young users or children (Of course with children there are other issues and guidelines to take care of).
They are very clearly understood even if users are short on time and have busy schedules. They don’t need to thoroughly read through the question text.
When measuring “user sentiment”, they are more accurate than using a scale. People can easily point at the emotion that they are feeling rather than selecting a numeric scale.
Can fetch a higher response rate by presenting users with a fresh way to interact. Let’s say showing a bunch of emotions and asking users to choose from them is more inviting 🙂
Smiley face survey scales
Typically with numeric scales, the popular scales are 0 – 10 (NPS), 1 – 5 (CSAT), 1 – 7, etc. Similarly, for smiley face surveys, the scales are 2-faces, 3-faces, 5-faces, 7-faces etc. A 5-point scale is way more common than any others.
2-Point Scale
For this scale, the user is presented with just 2 options. A sad and a happy face. Here is an example of a 2-point scale. This is very rarely used as users are to classify themselves into just 2 categories. Imagine a user is neither happy nor very sad. There is no option to select from. A neutral emotion is pretty common among the user base. So this scale does not capture the true “User Sentiment” of your base.

3-Point Scale
This is an improvement over the 2-point scale. By adding a neutral emotion, you are providing more options for your users to express themselves. This is actually the shortest possible scale for an emoji-based survey, which captures all emotions. But still, it lacks depth. An unhappy customer can be unhappy or extremely unhappy. This depth is a key reason, the NPS is an 11-point scale with scores ranging from 0 – 10.
3-Point scale smiley survey
5 Point Scale
For most use cases, a 5-point scale is the most suitable scale for a smiley face survey. The emotions range from Very Unhappy, Unhappy, Neutral, Happy, and Very Happy. Using a 5-point scale also helps you treat this like a standard CSAT survey and you can use a similar method to measure your user sentiment as the standard CSAT score. This helps your users categorize themselves into a deeper emotion level on both the unhappy and happy sides. Unless you have some constraints, you should use a 5-point scale smiley face survey.
Smiley Survey – Affiniv[/caption]
Choosing the emoji survey buttons
Choosing the design of feedback buttons generally depends on your preference. Some brands stick to outline faces, while some go for emojis. The advantage of using the outline emoji buttons is that the colors are easily customizable as per your brand. Outline emoji colors also go well with the rest of the survey questions and present a uniform color and design scheme for your survey. Having said that the emojis are more colorful and present a better visual appeal.

How to design a great smiley face survey
In this section, let’s go a little further and discuss the things to keep in mind to designing a great smiley face survey. We saw in some detail how to design the first question. Time to focus on adding more details.
First Question
The first question is of course the smiley face question, ideally with 5 emoji buttons. Some question text can be
– How are you feeling today?
– How was your shopping experience in our store?
– How was your overall dining experience today?
– How satisfied are you with our website/App?
– How was your experience after using our Payments feature?
While creating the first question, there are 2 general guidelines.
1. Ask about the experience for the most recent or current transaction. User Sentiment surveys are most successful when the user is asked the sentiment at that point or moment. And your users are going to choose the emoji based on their most recent or current experience anyway 🙂
2. Use a short question. As we discussed earlier, users are supposed to express what they are feeling at that moment quickly without having to read much text. And they generally don’t when you present the emojis to them. So better to keep it short.
Follow-up question(s) – Close ended
Now that we have created our first question, let’s move on to create a few follow-up questions. The goal of the follow-up question is to request the user, especially the unhappy ones, to give out more detail on what went wrong. Or what needs to be improved. These questions should be designed pretty carefully to draw out the thoughts of the user. This close-ended question data is very valuable to analyze the “why” behind the answer to the first question.
Smiley Survey with follow-on question

The sample question(s) could be –
– What went wrong for you? [Present 4-5 choices with an “Other” option]. The choices for a restaurant could be – Food Quality, Taste, Ambience, Service, etc. Similarly for a hotel or hospitality, it could be – Cleanliness, Service, Booking, Sleep Quality, Food, etc.
– What are the things that you want to improve? [Present choices with an “Other” option]
– What didn’t go as per your expectation?
If you go with a choice question, make sure to provide “Other” as an option. This helps users tell you the thing(s) that you have missed from your list. You can then update this list periodically by picking item(s) from the customer response to the “Other” option.
You can have multiple close-ended questions, including single-choice, multiple-choice, scale, etc. When setting additional questions, keep in mind to have a shorter survey. Shorter surveys generally have a higher completion rate.
Follow-up question – Open-ended
Open-ended questions are also called descriptive/long answer/text questions. Unlike multiple close-ended questions, you should have no more than 1 or 2 open-ended questions. Ideally, you should ask one open-ended question to your happy users and one to your neutral/unhappy users. The reason is that users mostly stop responding to further questions if you ask them to write their responses. Also, make sure to make the question optional. Making an open-ended question mandatory can lead to a lower completion rate and response rate for your survey.
Smiley Survey with follow-on question
If you use a tool like Affiniv, your response to every question is captured irrespective of whether the user submits the entire survey. This can help you design a more elaborate survey to understand customer insights.
Use a survey design theme
Every brand has a visual identity like logo, text color, and button color that the users can associate with. Your survey is an extension of your brand journey. So you should make sure that the survey follows the same design language as per your brand guidelines.
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Designing the right Emoji Survey – Best practices
Outlining and summarizing some of the best practices for designing a great Emoji Survey or Smiley Face Survey.
Choose the right number of response options. A 5-point scale is an ideal one.
Use the smiley survey at the right touch-point and at the right moment.
Create a single question (sentiment question) if your users are really busy. Set up multiple questions to get more insights into the “why”.
Use a combination of open-ended, and close-ended questions to get additional feedback.
Use your brand guidelines while designing the survey.
Avoid leading questions, for example: How much do you like our product? Also avoid vague questions or poorly worded, grammatically incorrect ones. Running your questions through a spellchecker or grammar correction software like Grammarly could be a good idea.
How to distribute a smiley face survey?
Now that we have designed our smiley face survey, it’s time to distribute the same. For distribution, you can use multiple channels depending on where your customers are.
Some of the key channels for distributing your smiley face survey are as follows –
Send over Email
Email could be one of the best modes for reaching your customers. Chances are that you are sending one or more surveys over email already. While choosing this mode, just make sure that the emoji buttons are embedded right in the email. When you use a survey tool like Affiniv, the emojis get embedded in the email automatically without any tech integration.
Email is particularly useful in cases like – a survey after resolving a support ticket, an employee pulse survey, a survey after a user onboarding, etc.
Embed Smiley Survey in Email

Embed the survey in your website/app
Embedding a survey in the website or app is a great way to collect quick user feedback on features, a particular page, a help article, etc. This can get you a pretty good response rate as the users are already in the “zone”. Generally, it can be a little challenging to embed the survey in a website, without the help of IT or Tech. Using a tool like Affiniv, you can create a smiley face survey and embed it right in your website or product without IT help.
Embed Smiley Survey on your Website
Show it in a kiosk
A kiosk can be a great place to display your survey, especially if you are planning to show it in a busy place like an airport, restaurant, store, etc. This way you don’t need to collect the email of your users to send them the survey.
The question of what’s the right mode depends on the customers that you want to survey. For example, if you are surveying your users in a busy store, a kiosk is the right mode for you. If say, a support ticket has been resolved, sending the survey over email makes more sense as opposed to embedding it in the website or app. Similarly, if a user is using a particular feature on your product or reading a help article, asking the user for feedback at that point can be a great place to show the survey.
Take action and derive insights
So far we have designed the survey and distributed the same over our preferred mode, where our customers are the most comfortable and we can get the best response rate. Responses start coming in. This section helps you understand what to do after we get responses.
Send the feedback to the right team
Once you start with your feedback journey, it’s important to set up the right process for further action on the responses received. The first step is to send the right kind of responses to the right team member. For example, many of our clients make sure to send all the negative, even some neutral responses to a dedicated team, so that they can address the issue. When you use a survey tool like Affiniv, different kinds of feedback can be sent to mailing lists.
Send unhappy customer data to your CRM/Helpdesk software
Generally, customers giving negative feedback can be captured in your support software like Zendesk or Freshdesk. This helps respective support teams take corrective action on each customer issue.

Get in touch with the customer and close the loop
A customer giving negative feedback is not such bad news by itself, it you can take steps to correct the same. Getting in touch with the customer to understand the issue in detail, and resolving the issue can create a brand champion. In the case of NPS surveys, unhappy customers are called detractors, who can be converted into happy customers, also known as promoters, if timely corrective action is taken. After all, you are doing this entire customer sentiment measurement exercise to not only measure but also to increase your share of happy customers. So this step of closing the loop is a must.

Analyze the feedback
Understanding and resolving the issue at a customer level is great. But you should also analyze the overall trends from the response data. For example, what are the top issues that your customers are facing, which segment of your customers are having the most issues, etc.
Smiley face surveys using Affiniv
With Affiniv, it’s easy to create a smiley face survey and distribute it over multiple channels or mode like Email, Website, App, link etc.
Here are the steps –
Step 1 – Create your free account with affiniv at https://app.affiniv.com/createaccount
Step 2 – You will see your dashboard page with the option to create NPS survey, CSAT survey or create custom survey. Choose “Create New CSAT Survey” option
Step 3 – A CSAT template will be pre-selected for you in the next page. You can create or edit first question to a visual scale question and select smiley.
Step 4 – Create additional questions for your survey and move to Distribute section.
Step 5 – Here you can distribute your survey over Email, Link, Kiosk, or embed in your website using the simple code that’s shown on the page
Step 6 – Once you get the result, you can analyze the same on your dashboard or send to a mailing list. You can download the result, send the result to any analytics system or Google sheet.

Want to create and send out smiley survey in minutes?
Affiniv is the simplest way to create surveys and distribute them over email or embed in your website. And then analyze the responses on our analytics dashboard to derive key insights.
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September 13, 2023