Customer feedback survey template, with the reason for every question

Twelve questions, each one with a note saying why it earns its place, printed in full below and available as a file. There is no form in front of it.

The most important instruction is at the bottom of the file and belongs at the top of this page. Pick five. Twelve questions is a reference list, not a survey. Response rates fall off a cliff after about five, and a survey nobody finishes measures nothing at all.

Take the file. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers, and it may be copied, changed and used commercially with no attribution and no link back.

The twelve questions

Which five should you pick?

It depends entirely on what you will do with the answers, and there are three common cases.

You want a trend line. Take the two Score questions and stop. That is an NPS survey, it takes twenty seconds to answer, and it will get a response rate the longer versions never see.

You want to know what to build. Take the two Priority questions, the second Problem question about workarounds, and the follow up permission. Four questions, and every answer is either a feature request or a reason one matters.

You have just launched and want to know why people buy. Take the Buying question, the first Problem question, the Segment question and the Score pair. Ask it inside the first month, while the decision is still fresh.

Why ask what people do instead?

Because the workaround is the clearest statement of an unmet need anybody ever gives you.

When somebody exports a list every Monday and pastes it into a spreadsheet to get a number your product does not show, they have described a feature, sized its urgency and proved they will use it, all in one sentence. Nobody does a manual workaround every week for something they do not need.

Answers to would you use a feature that predict nothing, because people are agreeable and bad at forecasting their own behaviour. Answers about what they already do by hand are facts.

When should you send it?

At a consistent moment, because the moment is half of what you are measuring.

Sent right after a support ticket, the survey measures support. Sent ninety days after signup, it measures the product. Sent to everybody on the same Tuesday every quarter, it measures the general mood, which is the least specific of the three and the easiest to compare over time.

All three are legitimate. Mixing them in one dataset is not, and it is the most common way a feedback programme produces a number nobody trusts.

What do you do with the answers?

Treat every open answer that names something specific as a feature request, because that is what it is. This is the step where most surveys quietly fail, so it is worth being blunt about it.

Somebody took the time to write it. If it lands in a spreadsheet that gets opened twice and archived, asking was worse than not asking, because you now have a customer who believes they told you.

The fix is not a better spreadsheet. It is somewhere requests accumulate, where the second person to want the same thing adds to the first person's request instead of filing a duplicate, and where the count is visible.

That is what a feedback board is for, and it is also the argument for collecting as much as you can there in the first place rather than in a survey window once a quarter.

Should the survey be anonymous?

Only if you are asking about people, and you are not.

Anonymous responses are the right call for employee surveys, where the person answering has something to lose. For customer feedback they cost you the two things that make an answer actionable: which account it came from, and permission to ask a follow up question.

A named answer from a customer paying you four hundred a month is worth more than the same words from an unknown address, and not because the person matters more. It is because you can act on it: you can find out what they meant, tell them when it ships, and know what it was worth when it does.

That is also the argument for weighting. Each vote on a board here carries the revenue behind the customer who cast it, so the ranked list is ordered by what your paying customers want rather than by who answered the survey.

Is there a Word version of this feedback form?

Yes. Take the docx.

It is the same thinking laid out as a form somebody fills in rather than a sheet you plan from: a short table for who they are, three rating questions each with the open question directly underneath it, and six questions in their own words with space to answer.

The last page is for whoever owns the form and tells you to delete it before you publish. The CSV above is the version to work from if you are building the form in a tool and want the reasoning beside each question.

Both are free to copy, change and use commercially, with no attribution and no link back.

Customer feedback questions examples, and what makes one work

The twelve above are the examples. What makes them work is that each one asks about something that happened rather than something a person feels in general.

Compare are you satisfied with our product with what were you trying to do when you last opened it. The first gets you a number and a shrug. The second gets you a sentence with a verb in it, and a sentence with a verb in it can be turned into work.

The customer feedback questions that reliably produce nothing are the ones asking somebody to rate a thing they have not thought about since. The ones that produce too much are the open invitations, any other comments, which collect either silence or a complaint about something else entirely.

Five questions asked about a specific moment beat twenty asked about the relationship.

What do customer feedback card examples look like?

A feedback card is the short version, and the constraint is the point.

It fits one question a person answers in the moment, one rating if you need a temperature, and a line saying who reads it. That is the whole card. Anything more and you have made a survey wearing a card's clothes, and it gets left on the table.

The wording that works on a card is the wording of the moment it is handed over. What did you come in for today, answered on the way out, beats how would you rate your experience every time, because one of them asks about a thing that just happened and the other asks for a summary.

If the card goes digital, it becomes the four field form rather than the twelve question sheet. Six feedback forms with their fields written out shows those, and what a feedback form is and what to put in one covers the fields before you pick them.

Are there other templates?

Four more, all printed in full and all free.

The feature request template is three files: Markdown, a four field HTML form and a GitHub issue form. The release notes template puts breaking changes first, which is the order a reader actually scans, and comes as Markdown, plain text or a Word document. The product roadmap template ships as a CSV, an xlsx with the ordering formula already in it, a PowerPoint deck and a one page PDF example. The prioritization matrix template has six real requests already placed on its two axes.

If what you wanted was filled in examples rather than a blank form, twenty feedback survey examples with the wording of each one is the page for that.