How do I ask customers for feedback?

Asking customers what they think is easy. Getting enough of them to answer is the hard part, and it’s why most feedback a small business receives comes from the two extremes: someone delighted, or someone furious.

Survey Rewards attaches a short questionnaire to a reward. To claim the reward, the customer answers the questions. You get responses from the quiet majority in the middle, who are usually the ones worth hearing from.

Find it in your dashboard under Advanced → Survey.

Why this beats asking on a review site

Three differences, and they matter more than they sound:

You know they actually came in. Every response is tied to a real reward, earned by a real visit. There’s no way to answer without having been a customer.

You know who said it. The answers are stored against that customer’s record, so a comment about slow service on Saturdays isn’t an anonymous complaint — it’s from someone whose visit history you can look at.

They’re already having a good moment. They’re claiming something free. That’s a far better time to ask a question than an email three days later.

Building one

A survey has a title, a description explaining what you’re asking and why, and a terms field for anything the customer should know before answering.

Then you add questions. Each one can be:

• Free text — they type an answer. Best for “what would you change?”, where the useful material is the thing you didn’t think to ask about.
• Multiple choice — you write the options, they pick. Best for anything you want to count.

Each question can be required or optional, and they appear in the order you set. Making everything required is the most common mistake — see below.

Attaching it to a reward

A survey is linked to a reward, and that link can be switched live or not live. So you can build a survey, attach it, and turn it on when you’re ready — or turn it off without dismantling anything.

This is the part worth thinking about. The reward you attach it to determines who answers:

• Attach it to a card-completion reward and you hear from your most loyal customers, since those are the people who finished a card.
• Attach it to a welcome reward and you hear from new customers about their first impression, which is the thing existing customers can no longer tell you.
• Attach it to a We Miss You reward and you can ask people who drifted away why they stopped — the single most valuable question a business can ask, and almost nobody asks it.

Keep it short — genuinely short

Three questions. Four at the outside.

The reward is what buys their attention, and it’s a small reward. A ten-question survey attached to a free coffee reads as a bad deal, and the people who abandon it halfway are the ones who were going to give you the most balanced answers.

Make one question required and leave the rest optional. A required free-text box at the end of a long form is where surveys go to die.

Questions worth asking

Three that consistently produce something usable:

“How did you hear about us?” — multiple choice. Genuinely useful and almost never known accurately. Most owners are wrong about their own best acquisition channel.

“What would make you come in more often?” — free text. Open enough that people tell you something you weren’t expecting, which is the entire point.

“How likely are you to recommend us?” — multiple choice. Simple, and worth tracking over time rather than as a one-off number.

Avoid “how did we do today?”. It gets “good” from almost everyone and tells you nothing.

Reading the answers

Completed surveys are recorded against the customer and the reward, and there’s reporting in the dashboard for reviewing them.

Two habits make the difference:

Read the free text yourself, all of it. At small-business volumes there won’t be many, and the value is in the specific unexpected comment rather than the aggregate. Summaries lose exactly the thing you were hoping to find.

Act on something visible, then say you did. “You asked for oat milk — it’s here” closes the loop, and it’s the reason people answer the next one.

Editing and archiving

Surveys and individual questions can be archived rather than deleted, which keeps the answers you’ve already collected intact. If you try to delete a survey that’s in use, the dashboard will stop you — that’s protecting the responses attached to it.

Changing a question part-way through skews your results, since you’ll have answers to two different questions filed together. If you want to ask something different, archive the old survey and start a new one.

Related

• We Miss You rewards — the campaign worth attaching a survey to
• Custom Audiences — choosing who gets asked
• Custom Alerts — being told when someone earns a reward