Pain points survey

Even the world's best products and services have unhappy customers.

No matter how successful you are, there will still be customers who face problems, who encounter issues and who simply don't want to use your service again.

These issues are often referred to as 'pain points'—the specific part of your product or service that causes multiple users pain. Spotting pain points is often a fruitful task as it'll lead you to issues that (once fixed) can make the experience better for multiple users.

With the help of our customer Ryanair, we've designed this pain points survey to capture all of the core issues for your users.

This survey template will help you spot those pain points with four simple questions. Simply hit 'get started' to grab a copy of this template for yourself.

With this survey, you'll learn:

1. If your product/service is easy to purchase

2. What interrupts users during their session

3. How satisfied your users are

4. And the reasons why users are dissatisfied

Make it your own:

• Tweak each question in the template or add your own

• Change the color scheme

• Remove Hotjar branding (with Scale and Business plans)

• Pick between full screen, pop-up or external link Surveys

The survey Ryanair send to millions of customers

Every day around 1.8 million people visit Ryanair's site. Most have no problems. They're able to accomplish what they set out to achieve—usually that's purchasing a flight.

But occasionally users encounter issues. It could be payment problems, flight details missing, or simply slow to load pages.

Anna Zajac is a user experience researcher at Ryanair. She knows that capturing this feedback is vital to improving the page. In fact, her team at Ryanair asks these questions to 20% of all customers to make sure pain points don't slip through the cracks.

"The value of Hotjar, for us, is that we can observe trends. We started doing this in May of 2018, and we were quickly able to observe trends in satisfaction. We can compare one month with another, and we find this useful." - Anna Zajac, user experience researcher at Ryanair

The research and usability team then takes this information, crunches the numbers, and figures out which factors influenced each rating, including product issues (e.g. timed-out searches, policy changes) as well as external factors (e.g. weather delays).

We've written extensively about Ryanair's approach to survey creation. If you want to learn a little more about the process before you get started with this template, read more here.

3 questions you’ll be able to answer

1. How easy is it to use the site?

The survey asks how strongly visitors agree with the statement "it's very easy to use this site". Respondents leave a rating from 1-10, helping you pinpoint how different users feel about your site.

2. Do users get disrupted during the flow?

When you need users to complete an action, you'll want to make that action as easy to accomplish as possible. That means removing additional steps, simplifying flows, and making copy easy to understand. This survey will help you learn if anything is slowing the user down so you can resolve it.

3. What do unhappy customers dislike?

For customers who give a low score, this template will follow up with one more additional question and ask “Can you please tell us the main reason you gave that rating?". With this question, you'll hone in on unhappy customers and learn the real reasons why they don't like your product yet keep coming back.

Set up the pain points survey in seconds

Getting started with the pain points survey is fast and easy. Start by clicking the ‘Get started with this template’ link at the top of the page. 

On that page, that you’ll be asked to create an account and verify your email. 

After you’ve verified your email, you’ll be taken straight to the survey template which will be ready for you to send out to customers to start collecting insights. 

However, you’ll also have the option to install the Hotjar tracking code on your site. This tracking code will allow you to host the survey live on your site rather than via an external URL. This might be useful if you want to show the pain points survey to users on a certain page. It’ll also mean you’ll be able to access all four of the Hotjar features.

Don’t worry, installing the tracking code won’t slow your website down. And it doesn’t cost you anything (our free plans are free forever). So, to set up your full Hotjar account and install the tracking code, follow these steps.