Keep clients coming back · Every business
How to Ask for Feedback Customers Will Actually Answer
Customers answer short, specific questions sent soon after the visit, so a small business gets more useful feedback from one rating and one open question than from a twenty-item survey.
Ask two questions, within a day or two of the visit: one rating ("How would you rate today's visit, from 1 to 5?") and one open question that invites a specific answer ("What is one thing we could have done better?"). Send the questions to every customer by the channel they agreed to, read every answer within a day, and reply personally to anyone who rates the visit 3 or lower.
The questions to copy
| When to use it | Question |
|---|---|
| After every visit (the rating) | How would you rate today's visit, from 1 to 5? |
| After every visit (the open question) | What is one thing we could have done better? |
| After a first visit | What almost stopped you from booking with us? |
| After a large job or project | Was anything about the price, schedule or cleanup different from what you expected? |
| A customer who hasn't been back in a while | Has anything changed since your last visit that we should know about? |
| Once or twice a year, to your regulars | How likely are you to recommend us to a friend, from 0 to 10? |
Setup checklist
- Keep it to two or three questions. Longer surveys lose more people before they start and before they finish.
- Ask about one thing per question. Pew Research Center warns that questions covering two ideas at once, such as "Was our staff friendly and fast?", are hard to answer and produce responses that are difficult to interpret.
- Send it within a day or two. The details of the visit fade quickly, and a question that arrives a week later gets a vaguer answer.
- Ask everyone, and keep it apart from the review request. Google's policies prohibit selectively asking only happy customers for public reviews, so the feedback question goes to every customer and is never used to decide who gets asked for a review.
- Answer every low score within a day. A reply from a person ("Thank you for telling us; I'd like to make this right. Can I call you this afternoon?") is the reason customers keep answering.
- Put the answers in one place. A shared sheet with the date, the service, the score and the comment is enough to see patterns once a month.
Why it works
Length matters more than almost any other design choice. In a web-survey experiment published in Public Opinion Quarterly, the longer the stated length of the questionnaire, the fewer people started and completed it; a 2025 review of the research in Survey Research Methods reports that 75% started the survey when it was announced as 10 minutes, against 65% at 20 minutes and 62% at 30 minutes.
The open question matters as much as the rating. Pew Research Center found that when "the economy" was offered as an answer option in a 2008 poll, 58% chose it, against 35% who named it on their own when the question was open, so a list of options shapes what customers tell you, while an open question shows what was actually on their mind.
Sources
- Galesic, M. and Bosnjak, M. Effects of Questionnaire Length on Participation and Indicators of Response Quality in a Web Survey. Public Opinion Quarterly 73(2), 2009.
- Hanson, T., Aizpurua, E., Fitzgerald, R. and Vukovic, M. Surely Shorter Is Better? A Questionnaire Length Experiment in a Self-Completion Survey. Survey Research Methods 19(2), 2025.
- Pew Research Center. Writing Survey Questions. Methods guide.
- Google. Prohibited and restricted content: Maps user-generated content policy. Google Maps Help.
Related reading: How to Get More Reviews Without Begging, Based on What Makes Customers Write Them · What to Do When Something Goes Wrong: How Small Businesses Win Customers Back · Following Up Without Being Annoying: A Simple Post-Service Sequence
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