Five popular questions to ask customers

According to Harvard Business Review, 80% of new product launches fail.

When you're launching a new product to market, the odds are stacked against you. Breaking through the noise and building a product that gets traction is often a shot in the dark.

But, you can stack the odds in your favor. You can get an unfair advantage that puts you ahead of the competition. How? By speaking to your customers.

Now, we don't mean spending thousands of dollars on a customer panel or even more on a market research agency. We mean spending half an hour or less sending a quick survey to your customers or prospects in your target market.

This survey template will take you through five of the most popular questions used by our 1 million users.

With this survey, you'll learn:

1. What made customers buy your product

2. Which challenges your customers are trying to solve

3. What customers like or dislike about your product

4. And what a typical day looks like for your customers

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

Five questions, endless insight

This survey template contains only five questions. It's not the large market research project that many of us associate with collecting customer insights. But these five questions, if asked consistently, can provide you with endless insights into how to improve your service, the issues your customers face and how to prioritize your roadmap.

We built this survey template with two business leaders: Brian Dean (founder of Backlinko) and Sarah Doody (author of UX Notebook). Both Brian and Sarah have experience in launching new products and understand the value of asking customers questions.

This survey template has been designed for any business, selling any type of product or service. To get started, all you need to do is grab your survey link (by signing up to Hotjar) and sending out to existing customers. All in all, it'll probably take 10 minutes of work—but you'll end up with heaps of valuable insight.

We've created a full blog post with Brian and Sarah on the value of each of these five questions, head here to read that in full.

3 questions you’ll be able to answer

1. What does a typical day look like for the customer?

This question will help you learn what your customers get up to on a typical day. You'll discover what processes they follow, the tools they can't live without, and how they structure their day. With this info, you can learn where there is (or isn't) space for your product or service.

2. What made a customer buy your product?

To improve your product you'll need to know the real reasons customers buy your product or service. Their response can be valuable information when crafting your marketing messaging. Learn the reasons why customers buy and you can use that in your messaging to convince others to buy.

3. What do customers dislike about your product?

Product development should never be a shot in the dark. It should always be based on reliable feedback from users. This question helps you capture that qualitative data. You'll learn what customers don't like so you can improve the experience for your customers.

Set up the five-question survey in seconds

Getting started with the five-question 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 five-question 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.