What Are Some Good Customer Survey Questions?
If you’re overhauling your financial institution’s customer feedback process, one of your first steps should be to isolate what you need to know about your customers. But guess what? That’s the easy part! Narrowing in on the right questions to ask, and ensuring that they tie strongly to your customer’s intentions is more difficult. As experts in financial customer service satisfaction, we’ve got a few tips and tricks for coming up with the right questions. Here’s what you need to know…
Satisfaction Isn’t Enough
Surprise! Of course, it does matter whether or not your customers are satisfied—but simply meeting their needs isn’t going to be enough to convince them to stay. Here’s a sobering statistic for you: about 60-80% of customers mentioned that they were satisfied with their current financial institution’s services before they left for a competitor. So while analyzing satisfaction is important, it’s just one metric, and not the whole picture.
Focus on Critical Stats
To get data that will help you identify pain points and growth opportunities, you need to ask actionable questions. At the very least, your research should include questions that allow you to measure perceptions of your financial institution’s trustworthiness, reliability, relationship, professionalism, ease of doing business, and likelihood to receive referrals. These key categories will provide an excellent overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the current customer experience.
Leave Room for Open-Ended Questions
You can’t argue with numbers, but root issues are revealed in strategic short-answer. Allowing your customers to share their thoughts outside of the constraints of multiple-choice or numerical ratings provides easy access to additional insights. As an added bonus, it makes the individual customer feel listened to and lets him or her know that your financial institution is doing its due diligence.
5 Customer Satisfaction Questions for Financial Institutions
Why Choose Us Over a Competitor?
There are hundreds of national banks, community banks, and credit unions out there—why did your customers choose you? This question will help your financial institution isolate the unique qualities that offer an edge over your competitors. Whether that’s unbeatable customer service, a flawless banking app, or valuable account benefits, those perks and characteristics are why your customers are here. And once you identify those key elements, you can lean into them and make them even better.
Have You or Would You Refer Us to a Friend?
Questions that evaluate likelihood to recommend go beyond customer satisfaction to provide a look at the key behaviors that actually drive loyalty and revenue. If your customers don’t offer a strong likelihood to recommend you to their friends and family, the next step is figuring out why—and what you can do to address this pattern. And if they would recommend you, that’s great! Learn what they love about you, and broadcast that message. High scores on likelihood to recommend questions are also a good indicator that your customer might also be willing to share their opinion of your financial institution online.
What Is One Thing You Would Change About Our Services?
No one wants to hear about the negatives—unless you want to improve! Knowledge is power when you’re looking at direct customer feedback. And as an added bonus, this question won’t just point to areas that could use some work; you’re also bound to get some insight from your customers about making something good that much better, or you can include an additional question asking what customers like most about your services.
Have You Ever Had an Issue With Our Services, and Was It Resolved?
Problem resolution, when done well, can actually increase overall customer loyalty by showing that your bank is both responsive and proactive. We believe that it’s actually a good thing to make a mistake, once you have your ear to the ground to be aware of a problem. That means that it’s essential to be in touch at all the right touch points to make sure that the needs of your customers have been met. Once a problem has been identified, ensure it was handled well. At Avannis, we offer follow-up surveys, to ensure customer concerns were resolved to their satisfaction.
Is There Anything Else You’d Like Us to Know?
Finish things off with a catch-all question to make sure that you received all relevant feedback from that customer. Some survey takers may want to share an experience, an insight, or other useful information that may not fit into any of the above questions. Additionally, ending with an invitation to share that additional feedback lets customers know that you care about their individual experiences; not just the collective numbers their data produces.
Leverage Powerful Customer Insights with Avannis
Gathering data is easy—but gathering the right data, the statistics and feedback that will help you improve customer satisfaction and loyalty? It can be daunting. At Avannis, we pride ourselves in being your financial services experts for all things customer experience! Reach out today to learn more about how our experienced guidance, variety of methodologies, dedicated support, and detailed industry benchmarking can help you transform feedback into actionable solutions that ultimately create a better experience for your customers.