Most companies think they know what their customers think. And most of the time they are wrong. Feedback is the cheapest way to find out what really works and what does not. You do not have to guess, and you do not have to pay for expensive research. Just ask the people who have real experience with you.

Why ask at all

An unhappy customer usually will not tell you. They simply buy somewhere else next time. Research has long shown that only a small share of dissatisfied customers actually complain. The rest leave in silence. A questionnaire is a way to catch these quiet signals before they show up in your revenue.

Feedback also gives you arguments for decision making. Instead of guesswork in a meeting, you have numbers: what percentage of customers complain about shipping, what they miss in your offer, how they rate your support communication. And you will often discover things that work better than you expected. That is valuable too, because you know what not to break.

When to ask

Timing decides the quality of the answers. Ask as close to the experience you are evaluating as possible:

• After a purchase or delivery, while the experience is still fresh in the customer's mind.
• After a service you provided, for example a training session, a consultation or a repair visit.
• After a support request has been resolved.
• Regularly, for example once every six months, when you want to track overall satisfaction over time.
• When a customer leaves. The answers hurt, but they are the most useful ones.

On the other hand, do not ask too often. Anyone who gets a questionnaire after every single order will stop responding. Later in this course we will show you how to tie the mailing to a specific event in Quanda, so the questionnaire sends itself at exactly the right moment.

What to do with feedback next

Collecting answers is only half the job. A questionnaire whose results end up in a drawer is worse than no questionnaire at all. Your customer gave you their time and expects something to happen.

The basic workflow looks like this: go through the answers, split the suggestions into small things you can fix right away and bigger topics that deserve a plan. For each topic, decide who owns it and by when. And share the results with the whole team, not just management. The person on your support desk or shop floor needs to know what customers are saying more than anyone else.

Closing the loop

The last step is the one most often neglected: letting customers know what you did with their suggestions. This is called closing the feedback loop.

A short email is enough: "We asked you about your satisfaction with shipping. Late deliveries were the most common complaint, so we have added a new carrier." An email like this has two effects. Customers see that their answers matter, so they will respond again next time. And they learn about an improvement they might otherwise never have noticed.

With critical answers, go one step further. When someone leaves a really bad rating and you know their email address, reach out personally. An apology and a concrete fix can turn an unhappy customer into a loyal one. In Quanda, identifying respondents is easy when you distribute the questionnaire through an email campaign. You will see how in the lesson on distribution.

In the next lesson we will look at the most important part: how to phrase questions so the answers actually tell you something.

The quality of a questionnaire is decided before you ever open the editor. It is decided the moment you phrase your questions. A badly worded question returns answers that look like data but cannot be trusted.

Three basic question types

Closed questions offer predefined options: single choice, multiple choice, a dropdown menu. They are quick to fill in and easy to analyze, because you can simply count and compare the answers. The downside: you only learn what you asked about. If something bothers your customer that is not among the options, you will never find out. That is why you should often add an "other" option with a text field to your choice lists.

Open questions give the respondent a free text field. They bring the most valuable insights, in the exact words your customers actually use. At the same time they take effort to fill in and to analyze. Use them sparingly, one or two per questionnaire, and ideally toward the end. A proven open question: "What one thing would help us improve your experience the most?"

Scales measure degree: satisfaction from 1 to 5, likelihood to recommend from 0 to 10, agreement with a statement. Their main strength is comparability. You can measure the same scale every quarter and watch the trend. Stick to one scale format throughout the questionnaire. If 1 means best in one question and worst in the next, respondents get confused and the data is useless.

How long should a questionnaire be

Short. With every additional question, the share of people who give up grows, and those who stick with it start answering carelessly toward the end. For a typical satisfaction questionnaire, 5 to 10 questions are enough, which is roughly 3 to 5 minutes of filling in.

A practical test: for every question, ask yourself what exactly you will do with the answers. "It would be interesting to know" is not enough. If the answer will not change any decision you make, cut the question. And tell respondents the length up front. The sentence "it will take you 3 minutes" in the invitation demonstrably increases response rates.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Leading questions. "How much do you like our new store design?" assumes they like it. Better: "How would you rate the new store design?" with a balanced scale from very poor to very good.
• Double-barreled questions. "Are you satisfied with the speed and quality of delivery?" What should someone answer whose goods arrived quickly but damaged? Always one question, one thing.
• Technical jargon. Write in your customer's language. Instead of "How would you rate our onboarding?", try "How easy were your first steps with our service?"
• Making everything mandatory. Save required answers for the key questions only. If you force a respondent to answer something they have nothing to say about, they either quit or tick something at random.
• A missing "don't know" option. For questions where people may legitimately need it, offer it. A forced answer with no opinion behind it is worse than no answer.

Before you release the questionnaire into the world, test it on two or three colleagues. Every point of confusion they ask about would confuse your respondents too. In the next lesson we will move the questions into the Quanda editor.

Your questions are ready, now let's bring them into Quanda. Create a new questionnaire in the questionnaires section, give it a name and the editor opens. A questionnaire has three parts: an intro page, the questions themselves and a closing page. On the intro page, welcome the respondent and tell them what you will use the answers for and how long it will take. On the closing page, say thank you.

Question types in the editor

Add a question with the "Add new question" button and pick a type from the dropdown menu. Quanda offers a whole range of them, but in practice these will cover you:

• Short and long text for open questions. Short text for a name or a one-word answer, long text for free comments.
• Radio button list for choosing exactly one option.
• Checkbox list for selecting several options at once.
• Dropdown menu when there are many options, for example a region or an industry.
• Rating scale for satisfaction ratings, for example from 1 to 5.
• Radio button table when you rate several items on the same scale, for example speed, communication and price on one screen.
• NPS (net promoter score), a ready-made recommendation question with a 0 to 10 scale. More about it in lesson five.
• Number, date and email for structured data. The email field also validates the correct format.

Split a longer questionnaire into multiple pages with the "Insert new page" button. The respondent then sees only a few questions at a time and filling it in feels lighter. It makes sense to group questions on the same topic onto one page.

Branching logic

Each question has a Logic tab. There you can set it up so that, based on their answer, the respondent is redirected to another part of the questionnaire or the questionnaire ends for them right away.

What is this good for in practice? A few examples:

• You ask whether the customer used your support. Whoever answers no skips the whole page of support questions.
• Whoever states in the opening question that they have never bought from you gets a thank-you and the questionnaire ends. You are not collecting answers from people the topic does not apply to.
• Send an unhappy customer to a page with the follow-up open question "What went wrong?", and a happy one to "What do you appreciate most?"

Branching saves respondents' time and makes your data more precise. Just do not overdo it, complex logic is hard to keep in your head. After setting it up, walk through the whole questionnaire in the preview and test every branch.

Design and templates

In the editor's top bar you will find the template settings, where you adjust the background and font colors so the questionnaire matches your brand. Next to it is the preview, which shows the questionnaire through the respondent's eyes. Always open the preview before launching, ideally on mobile too, because a large share of respondents fill it in right there.

You do not have to start from scratch. Quanda has a questionnaire library with professionally prepared templates including invitations: customer service evaluation, project delivery evaluation, retention questionnaire, website evaluation and more. Load a template into your account, adjust the questions to fit and you are done in a fraction of the time. Even if you end up building your own questionnaire, the templates are good inspiration for how to phrase questions and order them.

Your questionnaire is built. In the next lesson we will get it to people.

Even the best questionnaire is useless if nobody fills it in. Distribution decides how many answers you get and from whom. In Quanda, go to the Distribution step in your questionnaire and change the status to "ready to use". This launches the questionnaire and generates a URL where it can be filled in.

Email invitation

The most effective route to your own customers is email. In the Distribution step, choose the "distribute by email" option and pick a regular or logic campaign. From there you proceed as with any email campaign: write the invitation and insert the questionnaire link, either as a text link or, better, as a prominent button.

Sending through a Quanda campaign has one major advantage: respondents are identified. You can see which contact submitted each response and connect the answers with the data you have about that contact. This will come in handy both during analysis and when closing the loop from lesson one.

A few tips for the invitation:

• Put the number of minutes it takes into both the subject line and the text. A short estimate increases response rates.
• Explain what you will use the answers for. "You will help us improve shipping" works better than a generic "your opinion matters to us".
• After a week, send a reminder to those who have not responded. A reminder usually brings another wave of answers.

Public link and QR code

You can share the generated URL anywhere: on your website, on social media, in your email signature, in chat. Responses through the public link are anonymous, which is sometimes an advantage. On sensitive questions, such as employee satisfaction, people answer more honestly when they know nobody can connect them to a name.

For physical locations, turn the link into a QR code and print it. A sign at the reception desk, on a table in your store, on the receipt or on the shipping box. The customer points their phone and is filling it in within moments. The shorter the path from experience to questionnaire, the more answers you collect. Always add a short call to action next to the code, nobody scans a bare QR code without an explanation.

Automatic sending after a purchase or service

The best questionnaire is the one that sends itself at exactly the right moment. In Quanda, you use automations and transactional emails for this. The principle: you set a "trigger when" condition for a specific event, and as the action you choose sending an email with the questionnaire invitation. You prepare the invitation email in advance in transactional emails. On the action, you also schedule a delay in minutes, hours or days.

Choose the delay based on the situation. After goods are delivered, wait a day or two so the customer has time to try them. After a resolved support request, ask within 24 hours while the experience is fresh. After a training session or consultation, the same day is fine.

Automation ensures you ask consistently and nobody slips through. Just keep an eye on frequency: a customer who buys three times a month should not get three questionnaires. In the next lesson we will look at the two most widely used satisfaction metrics, NPS and CSAT.

When you want to not just collect satisfaction but also measure and compare it, you need a standardized metric. The two most widespread are NPS and CSAT. Both are simple, both have direct support in Quanda, and each is good for something different.

How NPS works

NPS, net promoter score, is built on a single question: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" The respondent answers on a scale from 0 to 10. In Quanda, NPS is its own question type, so you add it to a questionnaire in a couple of clicks and the scale renders correctly by itself.

Respondents fall into three groups based on their answer:

• 9 to 10: promoters. Enthusiastic customers who actively recommend you.
• 7 to 8: passives. Satisfied but without enthusiasm. They are not counted in the calculation.
• 0 to 6: detractors. Dissatisfied customers who may discourage others from buying.

You get the final score by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The result is a number from minus 100 to plus 100. If you have 50% promoters, 30% passives and 20% detractors, your NPS is 30.

Always pair the NPS question with a follow-up open question: "What is the main reason for your rating?" The number alone tells you where you stand. Only the reasons tell you why, and that is what you can work with. The branching logic from lesson three offers an elegant solution: ask detractors "What should we improve?" and promoters "What do you appreciate most about us?"

CSAT: satisfaction with a specific experience

CSAT, customer satisfaction score, measures satisfaction with a specific interaction: "How satisfied were you with today's support conversation?" It is answered on a scale, most often 1 to 5, which you create in Quanda with the rating scale question type. The result is usually reported as the share of satisfied respondents, that is, the percentage who picked one of the two highest values.

The difference from NPS is scope. NPS measures the overall relationship with your brand, and you ask it once in a while, for example twice a year. CSAT measures one specific experience, and you ask right after it: after a purchase, after delivery, after a resolved request. Ideally through the automatic sending from lesson four. The two metrics complement each other. CSAT shows you which specific touchpoint is creaking, NPS shows you how that translates into the overall relationship.

How to interpret results and track them over time

The most common mistake is obsessing over the absolute number and comparing yourself to other people's leaderboards. NPS varies significantly by industry, country and collection method. A score of 20 can be excellent in one industry and below average in another.

Your own trend is far more valuable. Measure with the same question, through the same channel and on a similar group of customers, and do it repeatedly. Then a simple rule applies: a rising curve means your changes are working, a falling one is a warning that deserves attention before it shows up in revenue.

When reading the results, also mind the number of responses. An NPS based on fifteen answers jumps up and down by pure chance, so draw no conclusions from it. And watch the structure, not just the final score. The same NPS of 30 can mean a calm, satisfied base, but also a polarized mix of enthusiasts and detractors. Each situation calls for a different response. In the final lesson we will show how to turn answers into concrete actions.

The answers are in, and now comes the part that separates companies that truly benefit from questionnaires from those that merely collect them. In this lesson we will walk the path from raw answers to concrete steps.

Reports in Quanda

You will find the results in the questionnaire's response analysis section. For each question you can see how many people answered and how many skipped it. A high skip rate is information in itself: the question was unclear, too personal, or the questionnaire had simply become tiring at that point.

The "Expand" button opens a detailed breakdown, either for a whole page at once or for individual questions. You can add a chart to a question, name it including the axes, and attach your own comment with an interpretation. It pays to do this as you go, because Quanda then generates the final report from your edited analysis.

The final report is a finished deliverable for colleagues or management. You customize the cover page, the intro and summary comments, and the design with your logo, then download it as a PDF or send it by email to yourself or a colleague. No copying anything into presentations, the report is built directly on the data.

Segmenting the answers

An average across all respondents often hides what matters. An overall satisfaction of 4.2 out of 5 looks good, but it can conceal a group of wholesale customers averaging 2.8. So always slice the answers into segments.

The advanced filter in response analysis is the tool for this. You can filter by answers to individual questions, and if you distributed the questionnaire through an email campaign to identified contacts, also by contact and company data. A few useful cuts:

• Answers from NPS detractors. What exactly do they write in the open question?
• New customers versus long-term ones. Are they bothered by the same things?
• Customers of a specific product or branch.
• Those who said they are considering leaving. Their other answers are a map of your weak spots.

For open answers, create simple categories, for example shipping, price, communication, product range, and sort the answers into them. After half an hour of reading you will see which topics keep coming up again and again.

From data to priorities

The segmented analysis leaves you with a list of findings. You need to turn it into a short list of priorities, otherwise it stays at the level of observations. A proven way to sort them is along two axes: how much the topic hurts your customers and how much the fix costs.

Start with the intersection of "hurts a lot and the fix is cheap". A confusing order status email, missing information on the website, an unnecessary step in the checkout. Things like these you can fix within a week, and customers feel it immediately. Plan the big topics, such as switching carriers or expanding the product range, with a deadline and an owner. And for every priority, write down the question you will use in the next round to verify that things improved. That is how a one-off questionnaire becomes a measurement system.

Tell customers what changed

Close the circle where we started the course. Once you change something based on feedback, let your customers know. A short campaign from Quanda in the style of "we asked, we listened, we changed" takes half an hour to write and has a triple effect: it builds trust, highlights the improvements and lifts the response rate of your next questionnaire. Reply personally to detractors who described a specific problem.

And that completes the cycle: you know why to ask, how to design questions, build them in the editor, distribute them, measure satisfaction and turn answers into actions. Only one thing remains, getting started. Your first questionnaire does not have to be perfect. It is enough that it is short, clear, and that you do something with the answers.