Importance of Product Survey Question to Build New Product
Companies use product surveys to learn more about customers and align their thought processes accordingly. Running a survey before launching the product means setting the right foundation for your product.
Talking from personal experiences and industry knowledge, my team has built Qwary, after extensive research and deliberation. A core part of our product development exercise was conducting surveys.
We use product survey questions to validate our ideas, build the right product, and obtain feedback from a large pool of customers to gain insights. Let’s explore how to use product surveys and know some questions to add to measure overall customer satisfaction and experience with your product.
When to Conduct a Product Survey?
Product surveys are invaluable tools for knowing your customers and understanding their needs and motivations, guiding you toward maximum customer satisfaction. However, knowing when and which survey to deploy according to the end goal is pivotal. Here are four situations to launch the survey and modify the product roadmap.
Pre-Launch
Pre-launch surveys are research powerhouses and are launched before the product goes public. They are used for;
- Concept Validation: Gauge potential customers’ interest and identify your target audience to validate and refine your product concept. Investing in the product without this survey can build a product your audience may not like.
- Understand Your Users: Ask your customers about their likes and dislikes while knowing their specific needs and problems to build a product that solves their problems.
- Prototyping and Product Testing: Measure your audience’s reaction and gather feedback on beta releases to identify usability issues and refine the final product before launch.
Target the right audience for maximum benefit by identifying potential users who align with your ideal customer profile. You must also use different formats, including MCQs, open-ended questions, and rating scales, to know your audience and improve your product.
Post-Launch
Followed by Pre-Launch surveys, post-launch surveys gather crucial insights on how your customers engage with the product, highlighting their experiences, concerns, and expectations. They are used for;
- Measure Initial Response: Gain quick feedback on customer sentiment and identify areas where the product exceeds the end-user’s expectations and where it lags.
- Discover Usability Issues: Exactly pinpoint friction points in user experience that can cause a barrier to product adoption and engagement.
- Product Roadmap Modification: Understanding the user’s response, the results give you a direction to prioritize bug fixes, resolve design problems, add/remove features, etc.
For post-launch survey success, target recent users using your product for the past weeks. Keep the survey short and precise, according to your end goal. You can run different post-launch surveys for different purposes. We ran a post-launch survey to gauge customer experience, product experience, design-friendliness, etc.
Ongoing Monitoring
Every product is an ongoing process. We run product surveys for Qwary to date as customer preferences and motivation change. So, to improve your product and refine the product roadmap, an ongoing monitoring survey is essential.
- Track Customer Satisfaction: With the right product survey questions, you can monitor and measure customer sentiment and shifts. It is important to address potential dissatisfaction before it can lead to customer churn.
- Know the Impact of New Additions: As an ongoing journey, you must add new features and make changes to the design. An ongoing survey is a good way to know the impact of the changes and gauge product experience.
- Stay Abreast With the Trends: As customer preferences change, this survey is important to gather their changing motivations and delve deeper into building a customer-centric product.
Send ongoing monitoring surveys to different user groups according to their demographics, usage patterns, and feedback history. I would recommend using automation tools to schedule surveys at exact moments with the Qwary trigger mechanism. As you gather customer feedback, you can also close the feedback to address customer issues and communicate the changes made with them to build trust and engagement.
Onboarding
Onboarding surveys set the stage to build and sustain a positive user experience as they help identify pain points and optimize the user’s journey.
- Customer Journey Assessment: Measure the customer’s interaction history with each stage in the onboarding process to find areas where they struggle.
- Ease of Use: Get information on your product’s intuitiveness and the seamless onboarding process for new users.
- Feature Adoption Rate: Understand which features the users like the most in the onboarding survey and which features require further explanation to ensure adoption.
Onboarding surveys are a great way to gather customer intent and suggestions. Still, you must trigger these surveys at the right time, like right after the onboarding milestone or when your users begin to encounter difficulties. Include questions that directly relate to the onboarding experience and do not overwhelm them.
One of the best practices with product surveys is to deploy them strategically throughout the product lifecycle. Use them to continue valuable user insights and make data-driven decisions. Use them to optimize your product and foster an enduring user experience.
What is the Purpose of Launching a Product Survey?
Product surveys bring important insights and feedback from customers through well-planned questionnaires, leading your product manager to build a great product. Use the best product survey questions and their responses to create an effective product, leading to higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and increased sales.
- Understanding User Needs: A survey allows you and your team to source direct feedback from the customers regarding what they want to experience with your product. Using this information, you can make products with market fit and achieve success.
- Measuring Satisfaction: Before and after launching a product, surveys can help you measure customer preferences and build products to improve satisfaction. As you work on the product to satisfy your customers, it translates to higher sales and customer loyalty.
- Identifying Areas of Improvement: In addition to gathering praises about your product, use a customer satisfaction survey to uncover important improvement opportunities. Asking the right questions can pinpoint usability roadblocks, technical problems, and features that may have missed their mark. So, as you gather information on the aspects that hinder adoption and reduce satisfaction, it's your chance to make improvements and build the right product.
- Future Product Planning: Through regular surveys, you find potent niches in the market to build a future-oriented product. So, instead of beginning market research from scratch, save and use the survey data to gather customer insights with respect to their preferences and expectations from future products.
From helping you understand the company’s operational efficiency to determining customer satisfaction, a product survey tool is invaluable for collecting product feedback and understanding overall performance.
Product Survey Questions to Ask from Your Customers
We have gathered from the most popular product survey questions companies have been asking to understand their users and product performance. At Qwary, we have also asked these online survey questions to understand how our customers build a good product and gather honest feedback.
Each question in the list below has a specific purpose and fits into one of the survey types discussed above.
Understanding User Needs
- What are the primary goals when using the product?
Purpose: Often used in pre-launch and ongoing performance survey types, this question helps understand customer motivations for choosing a product. Knowing the answers helps you design the product to achieve the desired outcomes.
Measurement: Check the survey responses to identify recurring themes and prioritize features, design, and themes to address the goals.
- How often do you use our product?
Purpose: This is a good question for post-launch and ongoing monitoring survey; ask this query to understand product engagement level and identify churn risks.
Measurement: Create user segments according to data to build targeted initiatives and refine the product roadmap for the future.
- Do you encounter problems when using a specific feature?
Purpose: An important question to identify usability issues and technical bugs in the solution; always include this question in post-launch and ongoing monitoring surveys.
Product Adoption
- How would you compare our product to other similar options?
Purpose: You can ask this question during the competitive analysis phase under the pre-launch satisfaction survey. Asking this question helps you get the names of solutions potential customers are using now. Use this information to refine your product development.
Measurement: Analyze user responses to compare products and identify areas where your product can gain a competitive advantage. Due to this, you can also use this question in the post-launch survey.
- On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this product to friends and family?
Purpose: Use this question in post-launch and ongoing performance monitoring surveys to get the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and pinpoint a level on the customer loyalty meter. It can also tell whether your customers can be influenced further to make them product ambassadors or promoters.
Measurement: Conduct multiple NPS surveys and track the score trajectory over time. From here, identify low-score customer segments to plan targeted improvement processes.
- Does our product meet your expectations and needs?
Purpose: Another question for post-launch and ongoing monitoring survey; you can ask this question to know customer’s satisfaction level and know their unmet needs.
Measurement: You can analyze the responses to gauge user satisfaction levels while using the scores as a direction to find recurring themes for improvement or changes in the product.
Identifying Areas of Improvement
- What are some issues you face when using the product?
Purpose: A great question for post-launch and ongoing monitoring surveys; we have repeatedly asked this question from our customers to improve our product. It tells you the customers' specific pain points and makes effective changes.
Measurement: Try to find common themes behind the mistakes, design, or technical issues flagged by customers. Give priority to the issues that can impact product usage and hamper product feasibility.
- What important features are we missing?
Purpose: In pre-launch and ongoing monitoring surveys, ask this question to identify missing features, new features, and functions in high demand. It can also help you understand customer interests and preferences, which is why it can be asked in ongoing monitoring surveys.
- How can we improve our product to meet your needs better?
Purpose: Get actionable feedback on specific areas to improve and build a successful product. When asked in a post-launch and ongoing monitoring survey, this question can help you build a successful product through honest feedback.
Measurement: From the qualitative responses generated from the question, you can identify specific user needs and potential future product development solutions. With quality feedback, it is one of the questions to ask customers to guide future development course.
Future Product Planning
- Which new feature would you like to see in the future?
Purpose: A great way to know your customer’s preferences and aspirations for the future. The answers will set the course for future development and prioritize feature and product roadmaps. Consequently, you can ask this question in every ongoing monitoring survey.
Measurement: Analyze the qualitative feature request responses and sort them in popularity. Use this data to conduct feasibility studies, refine the development roadmap, and make growth-centric business decisions.
- Will you be willing to pay extra for using our product or service?
Purpose: By asking this question in the pre-launch survey, you can gauge user’s sensitivity towards price and work on pricing strategies. When asked in an ongoing monitoring survey, it guides price changes to align it with customer preferences.
Measurement: Use the responses to analyze user responses and categorize the customers on their ability to pay. For each segment, you can then create a pricing strategy or one that will cater to both types of customers.
While these are some of the most common and important list of questions to know how customers feel about your product, you can constantly tailor them to fit your requirements. Conducting a survey is one of the best ways to interact with customers directly.
With Qwary, you can pre-build survey design and question survey template to fit them to your needs, fast-track the development process, and improve product experience. You can also check other templates on our platform to learn about survey questions that will help build the survey you need for your product development process.
Best Practices to Design and Launch a Survey
Conducting an online survey is simple, especially if you use Qwary. The responses generated are analyzed to know what your customers think about your solution. It can help launch a new product, ensuring market fit and aligning the aspects of your product with customer sentiments.
However, the right process is the cornerstone of conducting a successful survey.
- Keep It Short
Customers or respondents will prefer to complete a short survey rather than spend time answering 15-20 questions. While your survey should only have 4-5 questions, ask the right product survey questions to gain maximum information.
- Run Survey For A Single Purpose At Once
You need to have a key purpose for deploying the survey. Work with a purpose and plan ahead. Figure out what you wish to accomplish from the survey and decide relevant questions to ask regarding the same.
Create the survey for one of the four goals;
- Consideration
- Intent
- Purchase
- Engagement
You an use open-ended and rating scale questions to get detailed responses from the customers. Keeping only open-ended questions can discourage the respondents from attempting all the detailed questions.
On the other hand, having only rating scale questions is easier for the customers, but it will lack the qualitative information you need to build your product.
- Choose the Right Audience
The survey results won’t be as fruitful as you want if you don’t choose the right audience. Reducing the population for the survey is recommended rather than analyzing results from a large intended audience and using it to build an irrelevant product.
Use a pre-screening survey to select the respondents for the survey and then present the questions to only the audience who are more likely to share their views.
- Avoid Using Biased Questions
Biased questions can influence users to give misleading and inaccurate answers. Here are some standard practices to follow for creating questions;
- Avoid using leading language like starting the question with “Don’t you find this feature useful”?
- MCQs offer balanced responses including positive, negative, and neutral options. For example, the responses can be “Very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, neutral, somewhat dissatisfied, and very dissatisfied.”
- Choose The Right Platform
With the questions ready, choose the right medium to share them and get feedback to improve your product. You have several options to deploy the survey, including;
- In-app: Send surveys to your customers within the application by first giving them the choice whether to take the survey or not. While this option is convenient and has high engagement potential, it may also disrupt user experience.
- Email: Emails have a wider reach and can be sent at flexible timings. This medium is good for longer surveys and detailed responses, but the engagement rates are drastically lower.
- Website Popups: Use this survey option to capture users at the key moments on the website. Its a good opportunity for time-sensitive survey feedback, but can hinder user experience and may have lower response rates.
Other mediums to deploy surveys include social media, push notifications, among others. Use the medium where you can put in your best efforts and extract customer feedback.
How to Use Survey Results for Product Development and Improvement?
Understanding the survey results is akin to a gold mine for every type of company. From the moment you are planning to build a product to the point where you can take impactful action, product surveys can become your guiding light to launching your product and set it for success.
- Market Data-Driven Decisions: Intuition has never worked for me and my team at Qwary. We have built a successful product by utilizing our user’s feedback, asking questions based on the product development process and gaining a deeper understanding.
Prioritize feature selection and improvements based on user’s needs, reported issues, and feature requests.
- Plan Product Development And Improvement: Chart the development chart based on the findings. Allocate the required resources to address high-impact issues, customer requirements, and market trends.
Begin by developing prototypes of new features, but give priority to bug fixes as they can significantly hamper user experience.
- Assess Customer Loyalty: Track changes in customer responses, especially in the NPS and sentiment in the long term. Use customer feedback from every survey to identify their concerns and address them to foster trust leading to long-term relationships with the customers.
Surveys represent an ongoing conversation allowing your company to gather feedback and implement changes based on their honest feedback. As you make the changes, communicate the same with your customers to demonstrate your responsiveness and dedicated to satisfy customer needs.
Build Your First Survey with Qwary
Product surveys are an incredible tool for companies of all sizes and scales to understand their product through their customers. It's like stepping into your customer’s shoes.
To run a successful survey, it's essential to choose the right questions, select the intended audience, and analyze results. Run multiple surveys before launching a product to align product design and features with customer’s requirements.
Work with Qwary to deploy your first survey and collect valuable feedback. Our streamlined survey creation tool lets you build appealing surveys through an intuitive interface. Deploy the survey by embedding it into your product or send it through email, push notifications, or pop-ups.
FAQs
- What Questions to Ask in a Product Survey?
In a product survey, questions related to product usage, goals understanding, customer satisfaction, product comparison, and user experience. The questions are framed to source information from the respondents for these topics.
For instance, “How often do you use the product?” is a question for product usage, and “What are you trying to solve by using our product?” is a question to understand customer goals.
