Are you currently developing a new product or service? Then, we have some advice! We recommend including the Voice of the Customer in your development cycle. In this article, we will provide you with three customer survey examples, to ensure that your new product launch is a success: A survey to assess your target customers’...
Are you currently developing a new product or service? Then, we have some advice! We recommend including the Voice of the Customer in your development cycle.
In this article, we will provide you with three customer survey examples, to ensure that your new product launch is a success:
- A survey to assess your target customers’ needs before the development phase.
- A survey to test your new product and service on a panel of customers before it is marketed.
- Once the new product has been marketed, a survey to measure customer satisfaction with the bought product.
We have also included a few sample questions for each of these three survey use cases, during the product launch phase.
Discover 20 Tips for a Successful Voice of the Customer Programme
A Survey to Assess Your Target Customers’ Needs
You want to develop a new product or service, and you need to ensure that it meets your target customers’ needs. The first survey use case for a new product therefore takes place before the actual launch.
If you regularly measure customer satisfaction and use surveys to enrich your customer knowledge, then you don’t necessarily need to create a specific survey to assess their needs. In fact, your future product or service may already be aimed at your current customers. You may, therefore, already know their needs and expectations like the back of your hand. Maybe your idea for this new product or service came from analysing customer surveys!
However, if this is not the case and if you are not familiar with your customers’ needs, then we strongly recommend creating a survey to better understand their needs, to help you steer the development of your new product/service in the right direction.
A Few Sample Questions to Assess Customer Needs
We will provide you with a few sample questions, but they will of course depend on your business and the type of product/service that you wish to develop. These examples therefore simply aim to give you some ideas and pointers when writing your own questions. Here are a few examples to qualify your target customers’ needs and expectations:
- What are you looking for on our website?
- What are your interests?
- Why did you choose our brand as opposed to another?
- In your opinion, what are our main strengths?
- Which product families are you most interested in?
- Which part of our offer caught your attention?
- What is your average budget for [product family]?
- What are your main challenges today?
- What are your primary needs in terms of [family of products or services]?
- How much are you willing to spend on [family of products or services]?
- What are your main criteria when you buy [product, service, etc.]?
- What makes the difference between a good and bad [product, service, etc.]?
- What are your main motivations when using [product, service, etc.]?
A Survey to Assess Your New Product or Service
You have developed a new product or service. The next step is to test it on your customers or a group of pilot users to:
- Verify that your new product/service meets your customers/users’ expectations.
- Identify areas for improvement to your product/service before it is marketed.
- Gather suggestions from your target customers or users to improve your new product/service.
A Few Examples of Questions to Test Your Product on Your Customers
Are you planning on building a survey to test your new product? Here are a few sample questions:
- What is your first reaction to the product?
- On a scale of 0 to 10, how would you rate the innovative nature of this product?
- How would you rate the quality of the product?
- How would you rate the product’s packaging?
- Does the product meet a need for you?
- What do you like best about this new product?
- If this product was on the market, how likely would you be to buy it?
- How likely would you be to change your [current product] for [new product]?
- How likely would you be to recommend this new product to others? (Net Promoter Score)
- Do you have any suggestions to help us improve our new product? (Open question)
- In your opinion, how can we improve our new product? (Open or closed question)
A Survey to Communicate on the Launch of a New Product
You have reached a new milestone – your new product is now on sale! You want to assess your customers’ satisfaction with regards to this new product. How? Build a customer survey and deploy it to customers who have bought your product. For example, the survey could be deployed by email to all the product’s customers after X days of use, or X days after delivery/in-store purchase.
A Few Sample Questions
We’ll keep this part short, as you can use a lot of the questions from the product testing survey.
Here are five additional examples to give you a few more ideas:
- What adjective do you think best describes the product?
- What do you think about the price of the product?
- What do you think about the product’s value for money?
- How satisfied are you overall with the product? (You can expand on this question to assess more specific items relating to the product)
- How do you rate our new product compared to the competition?
We have now come to the end of this article. We hope that these three use cases have given you some ideas on how to use surveys for a product launch.
