37signals: Question Your Customers

☑ One Question, Zero Limits
▪️ Open-ended questions get to the heart of what customers really think.
▪️ People feel free to share insights in their own words, no boxes or scales to fit into.
▪️ With fewer questions, response rates are higher and insights are deeper.

☑ Turn Their Words into Your Marketing
▪️ Customers' own language highlights real pain points and wins, giving you material that resonates.
▪️ Instead of polished marketing terms, you can echo the words that connect with people.

☑ Quality Over Quantity
▪️ Open-ended responses reveal patterns and real needs that go beyond stats.
▪️ Rather than tracking satisfaction scores, dive into narratives to understand the “why” behind customer behaviour.
▪️ Empathy grows as you engage with their full story, not just a score.

We tend to get really high response rates because it's one question and the question is always a question with a big text area and it's like fill it in

And the other thing is of course when you buy a car, they always tell you, hey, they nudge you, hey, hey, I need tens. Give me some tens, we need tens. It's like the whole thing is such a scam, but most of all, you're asking me so many questions that in the end, I'm actually not going to finish the survey. I'm not going to submit these answers. You're going to get nothing from me. You would've been better off asking me one thing or three things

You have as many chances as you want if you ask decent questions occasionally. Just take your time, get good answers from people and get great response rates

What's so amazing about these open-ended questions is that the customers who answer them will give you the greatest gift of all. They will give you the language by which they think about these problems

The richness of that unprocessed language, that's where all the gold is

There's so little in them, there's so little nourishment in them. There's so little you can use them for other than just putting them into some quarterly report that no one's going to read anyway and it's not going to have any bearing on whether you can attract more customers in the future or not

You can ask 30 questions in a survey and get less information than asking two questions

The information we get is what's truly on their mind, and that's actually the more valuable stuff, not the stuff that we want to squeeze out of them

I think the open-ended question is simply a more resilient form of surveying. It is more resilient to gamification, to junk stratification, to aggregate averages that compresses all the nutrients into this ultra processed bullshit

I'd rather take 10 minutes, give me a hundred responses and let's read ‘em together. That is way more valuable than seeing some chart