Understanding your customer’s experience is a fundamental aspect of business growth. Assessing your customer needs and expectations is part of managing customer satisfaction. There are several ways to obtain customer feedback – focus groups, customer satisfaction surveys and text analytics. But the main goal of a customer comment card process is to capture the customer experience when it is fresh in the customer’s mind.
Questions to ask on a comment card:
Date: ____________
Type of service (product) received: ____________
1. How would you rate the quality of (ie: food).
Poor Good Excellent
Comment: _________________________________
2. Please rate your overall experience.
Poor Good Excellent
Comment: _________________________________
3. Please rate the friendliness of the staff.
Poor Good Excellent
Comment: _________________________________
4. Please rate the cleanliness of the facility.
Poor Good Excellent
Comment: _________________________________
5. Please rate the overall experience.
Poor Good Excellent
Comment: _________________________________
6. How likely are you to refer us to a friend?
Poor Good Excellent
Comment: _________________________________
7. Please share your thoughts on what we can do to improve your experience?
_________________________________________
Optional (please complete only if you would like us to contact you)
Name: ___________________
Address: _________________
Email: ___________________
Phone number: ____________
This is merely a survey card template that can be formatted on any word-processing software to customize for your organization. When customizing, insert specifics about your organization, i.e. are you a dry cleaner, restaurant or auto repair shop? For fun add your logo and a special font that represents your organization. Keep comment card questions brief to encourage participation. Comment cards should be anonymous to protect the anonymity of the person completing the comment card. Provide a stamped return address on the back of the card so they can easily mail the card back.
Other thoughts:
- Customer comment cards should be easily accessed by the customer. Some common places comment cards are available are in waiting areas, on dining tables, business lobby or anywhere that a customer would naturally visit.
- Have a comment card box close to where the cards are displayed for easy card returns.
- When comment cards are in public areas, you can expect to get some cards returned that may not represent someone’s true thoughts, but may be a practical joke. These can be easily identified.
- Make sure you check your comment card boxes on a regular basis, ideally daily, so you have time for service recovery if needed.
- Valid issues should be addressed immediately.
- Create a database to track your comments so you can watch for trends over time that could identify a systemic issue.
- Incorporate improvement opportunities into long-term strategy and business goals.
Finally, this is one of many tools that should be considered when putting together a comprehensive customer service strategy. Using all available tools can help ensure you are accurately hearing the voice-of-the-customer.
photo by: Eric Marttinen
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a great idea. I recently switched my business over to a telephone answering system that also integrates something like this. It has been wonderful to get feedback directly from customers. Most dont seem to mind answering a few quick, simple questions to help maintain and improve their satisfaction. The services also help keep us better connected with our customers as well as our supply chain.
Do these cards come pre paid postage?
Hi. You can have the customer comment cards printed with prepaid postage on them. It is a good idea and would definitely increase the response rate. Thanks for the question!
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I agree with this… “Understanding your customer’s experience is a fundamental aspect of business growth. Assessing your customer needs and expectations is part of managing customer satisfaction.” This is spot on!
The challenge I have is with comment cards. They are at best futile. They are rarely filled out by the average guest and if the right question(s) is not used the data has little or no value.
People need to see that comment cards are not a very good solution for customer feedback.
Thanks for the comment! I agree that comment cards needs to ask the right questions, and the best way to find out what questions to ask is to find out what is important to the customer. One way to do that is through customer focus groups. Also customer comment cards are merely one tool to use in an overall customer service strategy. Thanks for commenting!