Testimonial form template: the questions that get specific answers

Most testimonial forms ask one thing: "Leave us a testimonial." Customers who like you answer it with "Great service, highly recommend!" That is kind, and it sells nothing, because it could be about any business. A prospect reading it learns that someone was pleased. They do not learn whether the product will fix their problem.

The fix is in the questions. A form that asks what the customer was struggling with, and what changed, gets answers a prospect can recognise themselves in. Below is a template you can copy as it stands, the reason each question is there, the consent wording, and the fields that do more harm than good.

The template

Copy this into whichever form tool you use. Everything marked optional can go if you want the shortest possible form.

The only things a customer must fill in are the rating, the testimonial, their name and email, and the permission box. Everything else is there for the customers who want to give more.

Why each question is there

The rating comes first

A star rating takes one tap, so it gets the customer moving before you ask them to write anything. It also gives you a way to sort. Reviews with a rating can be sorted and filtered by it later, and the threes are the ones worth reading first.

Order matters for another reason. Kantar found that when the same questions were moved from the start of a survey to the end, "I don't know" answers rose by 18% and very positive and very negative answers fell by about a quarter. Answers get vaguer as people tire. Ask for the testimonial second, while the customer still has energy, and leave the admin fields for last.

"What were you trying to fix before you found us?"

This is the question that does the most work. It gets the customer to describe the problem in their own words, and those words are the ones your next customer is typing into Google. A testimonial that opens with "We were losing a day a week to invoices" speaks to everyone else losing a day a week to invoices. "Great tool" speaks to nobody.

It also sets up a before and after without asking for one. Once someone has described the problem, they tend to explain what solved it.

"What has changed since? A number helps if you have one."

The second prompt asks for the result. The hint about a number is deliberate. Most customers will not have one, and that is fine, but the few who do will write "we answer tickets in two hours instead of two days", and a single line like that is worth more than a paragraph of praise. Asking "what changed" rather than "what do you love" keeps the answer on outcomes instead of adjectives.

"Who would you recommend us to?"

This gets you the customer's own description of your ideal buyer: "any agency with more than five clients", "first-time landlords". It tells the reader whether the testimonial applies to them, and it tells you which audience your happiest customers think you serve. When the answer surprises you, that is useful too.

Three prompts over one box, rather than three separate boxes, is a deliberate choice. Separate boxes produce three short, disconnected answers that are hard to quote. One box with prompts produces a short story, which is what a testimonial is.

Photo, video and job title

A name with a face and a job title is more believable than a first name alone. Make them optional anyway. Some customers will not share a photo, and a form that insists loses them. The same goes for video: offer it, and let the ones who are comfortable on camera say yes. With video testimonials in Shapo they can record or upload one straight from the form.

Which product

If you sell one thing, skip it. If you sell several, a single dropdown saves you building a form per product or tagging every review by hand. One testimonial form for multiple products walks through the setup, including an "Other" option that keeps a review about your support team from pretending to be about a product.

Consent wording that holds up

You need permission to publish what a customer wrote, and it is far easier to get it on the form than to email people later. Three rules keep the wording honest.

• Say where it will appear. "On your website and in your marketing" is clear. "May be used by the company" is not.
• Say what will appear. Name the parts: the review, the first name, the photo. If you plan to show the company name or job title, list those too.
• Keep it separate from marketing email. Permission to publish a review and permission to send newsletters are two different things. A single box that covers both is a box many people will not tick.

The optional follow-up box is worth keeping. A customer who ticks it has told you they are open to a case study or a reference call, and you did not have to send a separate request to find out. Add a line near the button saying how to have a review taken down later, such as "Changed your mind? Email us and we will take it down." It costs nothing and makes people more willing to agree.

What to leave out

Rewards for positive reviews. The FTC's final rule on fake reviews and testimonials, announced in August 2024, prohibits incentives conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment. A thank-you for every review, whatever it says, is a different matter from a discount for five stars. If you offer anything, offer it for honest feedback and say so.

Leading questions. "What do you love most about us?" gets gushing and generic answers. "What were you trying to fix?" gets specific ones. Readers can tell the difference.

Rating grids. Five rows of "rate our speed, price, support, quality, value" turn a testimonial form into a survey. Kantar's data shows a block of 14 rating statements losing 12% of respondents against 2% for a block of six. If you want that data, run a separate survey, and keep this form about the story.

A required phone number. Nobody expects a call about a review, and a required phone field reads as a sales trap. Email is enough to confirm the person is real.

Several open text boxes. Each extra box is another chance to close the tab. Keep one box for the public testimonial, and add at most one or two private questions that you will actually read, such as "What nearly stopped you from buying?"

The testimonial page: where the form lives, and where it leads

"Testimonial page" means two things, and you need both. The first is the page where the form lives, the link you send customers after a purchase or a finished project. Give it your logo and colours so it looks like part of your site, and keep the URL short enough to fit on a receipt or a QR code.

The second is the public page where the approved answers end up, often called a wall of love. Our wall of love examples post covers what makes that page work. The better the form, the better that page reads, because every card on it started as an answer to these questions.

How Shapo's collection form does it

A Shapo collection form covers the template above out of the box: the star rating, the written testimonial, photos or a video, and the reviewer's name, email, job title, company and photo. Every label is editable, so the three prompts go straight into the form, in any language.

The rest of the template is custom fields. You can add short text, long text, dropdown, checkbox and 0 to 10 NPS fields, required or optional. The free plan allows two per form and Pro allows ten, and forms themselves are unlimited on every plan. Two covers the core of the template, the product dropdown and the permission checkbox. The optional follow-up checkbox is a third field, which needs Pro, or you can drop the dropdown if you sell one thing.

The product dropdown is where it saves time. Each option can map to a tag in your workspace, so a review that picks "Trail runners" arrives with the trail-runners tag, and a widget filtered on that tag shows it on the trail runners page and nowhere else.

The NPS field adds the recommendation question to the details step, and the form's analytics then report a Net Promoter Score from the people who left a review. For a score from visitors who will never write one, the NPS survey is the better tool.

Custom field answers stay private. They show on the testimonial in your dashboard, in the CSV export and on the form analytics page, and never on a widget or the Wall of Love. That is what makes it safe to ask a private question like "What nearly stopped you?" on the same form as the public one.

When to send it

The best moment is just after the customer got what they came for: the delivery arrived, the project shipped, the first month's report came in. Ask then and the before and after is fresh. Ask six months later and you get "Great service!" again.

Put the link in the email that confirms the milestone, on the thank-you page after a purchase, and in a short follow-up to recent customers. Keep the form short, ask the three questions, and the testimonials that come back will be ones a stranger can learn something from.