4 Ways to Ask Great Questions To Customers
Did you know that your ability to ask great questions during interactions with customers is one of the single most important factors in customer loyalty?
It’s true! And yet, many of us are terrible at it. Not only are we bad at asking questions, but even worse at listening. But, behind every question is a potential gold mine of information for your business.
A little skillful questioning can bring you closer to understanding what your customer really wants and needs, find out how they feel about your product or service, or get them talking about their own experiences with it. And, it all boils down to asking the right questions in the right way.
The key is knowing what kind of questions work best for your business and learning when to use them. Below are 4 ways to ask great questions to your customer:
1) Ask for feedback instead of reviews
Asking for feedback will help you understand and empathize with the customer and their experiences. Because feedbacks are basically like "report cards" from the customer regarding all the experience. You can see the overall experience your customer had.
On the other hand, the review is just what the name implies -a review of the product. It is specifically based on your product. But nobody ever sells "just" the product, it comes with the experience. Customer experience, support experience, and also your product.
So, you need to get feedback on all the experiences which your customers had.
2) Seek clarification when needed
If you didn't quite get the point that the customer trying to make, always ask for clarification. But there is one small issue with that, if this is a synchronous conversation -meaning it is not a feedback form it is a direct conversation- then it might be hard to ask a question spontaneously. Because the brain will try to figure out two things at a time: How to ask the question, What to ask in that question. And even we can reduce one of these parts, it helps a lot and takes a lot of stress.
Since what we ask will always differ, I come up with this structure of how to ask the question.
Step one is telling the person what I understand, step two is what I want to know, and step three is what I think can be the answer -so the person can deny or confirm.
This method helped me a lot while talking to customers.
3) Avoid leading questions
I'll never forget the social experiment I saw on the TV. They had both groups watch the same car crash video. To the first group, 'What do you think was the speed of the red car crashing into the other car?' they asked. The second group was asked 'What speed did the cars collide?' And the answers were significantly different. The first group said much higher values than the second group.
So, never underestimate the power of the question. Because how you word your questions can have a significant impact on the answer you get. We have to choose the right words, so we can get the most accurate answers.
4) Ask open-ended instead of closed-ended questions
Open-ended questions lead to more information and give customers a chance to express more. The more they express, the better chance you have of understanding their needs and getting feedback. Closed-ended questions can often lead to incomplete responses or responses that don't provide much insight into what customers really want or need from your business.
You might think to yourself: "It takes so much time and effort to analyze all the responses and get the insights." And that is also why most of the business feedback is done by close-ended or ranked questioners.
Fortunately, I got the good news; you don't have to deal with that on your own anymore. With tools like Brieferr, you can turn your open-ended questions into insights without having to read a single response. While you are gaining insights into your customer's needs and point of view, you can also analyze the fundamental scores of your business, like CSAT and NPS just from open-ended questions.
It does barely take 10 minutes to get what you need to know about your customers.