Customer feedback is an essential part of doing business. While it might feel a little uncomfortable to ask guests for their honest opinion, it’s the best way to improve the quality of the experiences you offer.

Feedback surveys should be a key part of the post-activity experience, especially since the majority of customers won’t give you feedback unless they had an extremely good or bad time.

Asking deliberate questions should prompt customers to share exactly what they enjoyed and what they wish you would improve for next time. 

If you’re just getting started with asking for customer feedback, we recommend getting familiar with how to collect and score guest responses. Once you determine what kind of surveys make the most sense for your business, you can move on to the important piece: what questions to ask!

Satisfaction and Word of Mouth

Asking the right questions can feel difficult, especially because you don’t want to overwhelm your survey respondents with a barrage of queries. 

You can always start with gauging customers’ satisfaction and willingness to promote your activities. The Compass guide shared above recommends the following questions.

1. How would you rate your overall satisfaction with [tour or activity] on a scale of 1-5?

2. How likely are you to recommend [tour or activity] to a friend or family member?

These questions are a good starting point for measuring the overall satisfaction of your customer base. However, they don’t provide much opportunity for detailed responses.

3. How did you hear about us?

This is a quick and easy question that can be presented to customers in a multiple choice format, allowing them to select how they found your business (e.g. Instagram, Google search, friend/family member recommendation, etc.).

The whole purpose of this question is to use it to inform how/where you spend your marketing efforts – and dollars! For example, if the majority of respondents indicate that they heard of your business on Facebook, you can assume your strategy for that medium is working well. However, you might want to consider what changes you can make to reach a wider audience through other methods. 

Pro Tip: Ask how customers heard about your business in the booking process! By setting up a custom field with this question in your Dashboard, you can run a report to see all the responses for a given time period. See this in action in our FareHarbor 101 webinar.

4. How could we have made your activity better?

Or, how could we have gone above and beyond? This is a great question to ask if you are looking for very specific responses. Plus, it’ll give you plenty of good ideas for small changes to implement now, as well as longer term solutions that might require more thought and work. 

For example, you might need to reconsider the pace of the tour or remind tour guides to speak louder so the whole group can hear. 

5. What made you choose our tour?

Tour operators are always looking for an edge against the competition. This question might result in some insights you hadn’t even thought of – perfect for your next marketing campaign! 

Getting your customers’ perspectives on this question can reframe the way you see your business and give you additional ideas to highlight in your marketing materials, tour description, and other parts of your website. 

6. Did you have any problems booking your activity online?

This will give you an idea of what you can improve on your website. For example, customers might say that they had to fill out too many fields on your book form or they had trouble finding information about how long the activity was. 

7. What did you think of your tour guide [driver, check-in staff, instructor, etc.]?

Use this question to get an outside perspective on how your employees are doing. This kind of feedback is an important tool to be used when evaluating staff and sharing areas of improvement. 

Analyze the Results

As you send out post-tour surveys and use these questions on a regular basis, trends will emerge that can be used to inform business decisions. 

In our webinar on collecting customer feedback and improving the guest experience, we cover how to track and analyze qualitative and quantitative results and how to create surveys your customers will actually take the time to complete. Take a look here.