What makes this customer discovery survey template ideal for your brand:

• Personalization. Increase the response rate with personalized survey questions and branching logic
• Brandable. Use your own colors and customize the style of your surveys to match your brand, product, or website.
• Contextual. Use triggers and segments to launch the survey at the right time and collect more feedback.

What is customer discovery (and why do you need to run surveys for it)?

The term - customer discovery - refers to a continuous process to understand the target audience’s challenges, pain points, problems, and needs. The goal for conducting customer discovery is to get a deep understanding of the target market, validate market assumptions, and uncover any unmet needs or pressing challenges that you could help them overcome.

The customer discovery process is also a great way to confirm that a particular problem or pain point you’ve identified is actually worth solving.

Finally, the process can help establish the target market’s buying process, understand how these people select products and services, and uncover any adoption barriers.

But why use surveys for customer discovery?

One reason is because surveys are the most scalable user research method. You can run surveys continuously, reach a wide target audience, and use several delivery methods. Not to mention that survey results are easy to analyze and draw conclusions from.

Surveys are also inexpensive and allow you to research a large pool of participants in a short time, while still delivering actionable insights.

What is a customer discovery survey, then?

Customer discovery surveys are questionnaires you use during the Understand (otherwise known as Discovery) phrase of the product discovery process.

Through a carefully designed survey, a product team can gain a complete understanding of the user needs and uncover what their real challenges look like.

Based on the survey results, product teams can build buyer personas, and develop hypotheses about how to solve those people’s needs.

When should you use a customer discovery survey?

Much like with the entire customer development process or a product discovery process, you conduct customer discovery continuously.

You run customer discovery surveys every time you have a new idea for a product. And you do the same when you face unknowns in the product development cycle.

Here are the three most common situations when you should run customer discovery surveys:

• At the start, when you’re trying to validate ideas for your product. The product discovery framework I’ll explain shortly will help you identify who’s the best audience for it, what are their pain points, needs, and challenges. The process will also help you establish whether your product idea delivers on those needs successfully.
• During product development, when you’re having a product roadmap but aren’t sure which of those ideas are useful and usable for your audience.
• You can also run the process when you merge another solution into your product (i.e., through an acquisition.)

What questions should you be asking in customer discovery surveys?

Let’s start by discussing the types of questions to use, and how to phrase them.

You know already that the goal of a customer discovery survey is to gain the deepest understanding of your potential customers.

When it comes to formulating the survey, then, you should focus on questions that would help you:

• Uncover challenges, pain points, and needs of your target market.
• Verify any hypotheses and assumptions that you may have about them
• Uncover unmet needs and untapped market segments, and so on.

For that reason, you should include a mix of close-ended and open-ended questions in your survey. Some of these will help you validate your hypotheses, while others will allow customers to provide you with deeper insights into their situation and experiences.

And here are some common customer discovery survey questions:

• When was the last time you [scenario or activity that relates to your hypotheses] (i.e., when researching a customer reporting tool idea, a company could ask “When was the last time you created a report to a client?”)
• Can you explain your process?
• Rate how important is [scenario or activity] to you? (I.e., Rate how important is client reporting to you?) - This could be a rating question, asking customers to answer on a scale of 0-10, for example.
• What tools do you use to complete [scenario or activity]?
• On a scale of 0-10, how happy are you with your current process?
• If you could do [scenario or activity] differently, what would the process look like then?

The above is only an example, of course. But it illustrates the type of questions you should include in a customer discovery survey.

How to launch a customer discovery survey with our template?

1. Sign-up for a free Refiner account
2. Create a survey using this template. You’ll have access to it directly from your account. Optionally, click here to sign up and go straight to this template.
3. Customize every aspect of your survey
4. Install our JavaScript or Mobile SDK
5. Publish it and start collecting customer feedback

Why use the customer discovery survey template from Refiner?

Refiner is an advanced product & user feedback collection platform for SaaS and digital products. With Refiner, you can measure anything from NPS, customer satisfaction, customer needs, product-market fit, and more.

Here is what makes Refiner ideal for your customer discovery surveys:

Built for SaaS and digital products specifically

We created Refiner with people like you - product managers, product owners, and marketers and growth people at SaaS and digital products companies - in mind. Because of that, Refiner includes all the features you need to collect actionable insights from your users and none that you don’t.

Advanced customization and targeting

We understand that As a result, with Refiner, you can customize every aspect of your survey. From branding to advanced targeting and segmentation options to personalization, Refiner lets you run surveys just the way you want it.

Multiple use-cases

Refiner goes beyond just collecting NPS. With Refiner, you can collect all kinds of customer feedback, and trigger your surveys through different distribution channels (including web and mobile.)

Intrigued? Grab this customer discovery survey template and start gaining a deep understanding of your target customers now.