Asking the right customer satisfaction survey questions can tell you much more than whether your customers are simply satisfied or dissatisfied. The answers reveal feedback that can help you retain business, validate business decisions and strategies, and ultimately grow your brand.
So, to help you create effective surveys, here’s a list of customer satisfaction (CSAT) questions to ask.
General customer satisfaction survey questions
Here are sample feedback questions that help you target opinions on overall experience, product or service usage, as well as customer motivations:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our product or service?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your experience on our site today?
- How would you rate your experience with our product or services today?
- How would you rate us on the following? (Follow with a list of products, services, or activities)
- How often do you use our product or service?
- Has our product or service helped you achieve your goals?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service?
- Which three of these [features/offerings/etc.] matter more to you when you use our product?
- For what purpose are you using [product or service]? (Follow with a list and include ‘other’ as an option.)
- What’s the biggest gain you’ve seen while you’ve been using our product or service?
- What would you change about our product or service?
- What can we improve in our product or service?
- How can we improve our customer service?
- What would stop you from buying from us again?
- Have you ever had a negative experience with us and if so, can you describe what happened?
- How have you used our services in the past?
- What can we do better?
You can send these general survey questions to your customer base periodically or directly after an event. For example, video and messaging apps like Hangouts and Viber will ask you about the quality of video and audio right after you finish calls.
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Post onboarding survey questions
Here are questions that will help you understand whether your onboarding process works and where you can potentially make improvements:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your onboarding experience?
- How would you rate your level of knowledge of what our product can do? (Follow with a list from low to high.)
- During the onboarding process, were you set up with everything you needed to use our product?
- Do you feel empowered to be successful with the product?
- Do you feel our product is going to help you achieve the goals that you want to achieve?
- Is there anything critical to your success that wasn’t covered during our onboarding process?
Post training survey questions
This is mostly relevant to SaaS, but if your industry also does customer training, you can modify these questions to specifically reference your services.
- How satisfied are you with your training?
- How confident are you about using our product/service?
- How well do you feel you know our product’s features after your training?
- Did you feel you got what you needed out of your training?
- Were all your questions answered during the training?
- What can we improve in our training process?
- What suggestions do you have for our team regarding training?
New product launch survey questions
Here are some questions to help you evaluate whether a new product has a future or whether it needs fine tuning:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how useful is our new product to you?
- How would you rate our new product?
- How satisfied are you with our new product?
- Have you tried our new product?
- Have you used our new feature?
- Is our new product easy to understand?
- Do you have suggestions for improving our product?
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Post purchase survey questions
Here are sample customer satisfaction survey questions to help you evaluate customer experience after purchases:
- How would you rate your shopping experience with us?
- How easy was it for you to navigate our site?
- How would you rate our communications while you were making your purchase?
- How would you rate our post-purchase communications?
- Was your order delivered in the timeframe you expected?
- Did you feel you were able to check your order status at any time?
- Was the item you purchased as described?
- Was our product or service as you thought it would be?
- How could we have improved your purchase experience?
- If you faced any challenges while you were shopping what were they?
The exact timing and length of your post-purchase CSAT or email surveys will depend on what you want to know. If you just want to gauge the overall feeling of your customers towards their purchasing experience, you can ask simple broad questions.
To inform more in-depth analysis, you can send a survey with multiple questions about price, site navigation, delivery time, and ask the customer to rate each one of them on a Likert scale. Amazon, for example, may ask you to rate a seller based on factors like speed of delivery, the accuracy of description, etc.
Post customer support survey questions
Here are customer satisfaction survey questions to help you assess how well your support team resolved customer issues or provided them the information they needed:
- How would you rate your experience with our support team?
- How would you rate the responsiveness of our support team?
- How would you rate the professionalism of our support team?
- How effective was our chatbot in understanding your question?
- How easy was it for you to navigate our help center?
- Did you get help in a timely manner?
- Did our chatbot help you get the answers you needed?
- Did you find what you needed in our help center?
- What would you change in our help center if you could?
- Please help us improve by giving us your opinion on our support process.
These types of questions can be sent automatically to customers when a support ticket closes.
How to create customer satisfaction survey questions
To make the most of your customer satisfaction survey, keep these tips in mind:
1. Plan your customer survey correctly
2. Consider the different types of customer satisfaction survey questions
3. Follow best practices when creating survey questions
Here are some more details:
1. Plan your customer survey correctly
Think about:
- Survey timing. Is it a generic quarterly survey or is it taking place after a critical milestone like a product order or customer onboarding? If the survey is in relation to a particular interaction, it’s important you don’t leave too much time between the two.
- Target audience. B2B and B2C companies often vary significantly in the questions they ask customers. Similarly, when your buyer isn’t the same as your end-user, you might end up asking different questions depending on who takes the survey.
- Survey Purpose. Decide your desired survey outcome first, i.e., do you want general customer satisfaction feedback or actionable qualitative data to inform your strategy? What other metrics are you trying to measure (e.g. customer effort score (CES) or net promoter score)?
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2. Consider the different types of customer satisfaction survey questions
There are different types of questions based on the response format and the reason behind the question. Having a mix of these types can help you get better insight. Here are some examples:
- Multiple choice questions (e.g. choose A, B, C)
- Likert scale questions (e.g. choose on a rating scale of 1 to 10)
- Matrix questions (e.g. how satisfied are you with each of the following aspects of your experience? Very satisfied to very dissatisfied)
- Open-ended questions (e.g. explain your answer)
- Demographic questions (e.g. age, gender, education category)
- Ranking questions (e.g. rank these items in order of importance)
- Image choice questions (e.g. choose the image showing the better user experience)
- Click map questions (e.g. click on the part of the image you like the most)
- Slider questions (e.g. drag the slider to rate your answer)
3. Follow best practices when creating survey questions
- Avoid double negatives. For example, don’t ask “Do you dislike not having product notifications?” These questions confuse respondents.
- Ask why instead of if. For example, ask, “Why do you like our product” instead of “Do you like our product”. With this approach, you maximize the amount of actionable feedback.
- Avoid leading questions. Don’t ask, “Are you satisfied with our award-winning customer support?” This may make respondents feel uncomfortable sharing their true views.
- Ensure questions match response formats. If you ask “Are you satisfied?”, the answer should automatically be yes or no. If you want to use a Likert scale (e.g 1 to 10), modify the question to something like “How satisfied are you?” If you want to use a star rating, change it to “How many stars would you give us?” and so on.
- Use open-ended questions whenever it makes sense. Open-ended questions draw out deeper insight, but they’re more time-consuming to respond to and more difficult to analyze. Use them sparingly for only the most cutting questions.
- Be careful with demographic questions. If you want to collect demographic data, do it at the end of the survey and only ask for the information you absolutely need. Be sure to be inclusive, too, and keep an eye out for laws. For example, some countries forbid asking for age unless the question is optional.
Be serious about feedback
Although sending targeted CSAT surveys is important, successful companies are open to feedback constantly. Apart from sending surveys with tools like Delighted, Typeform, and SurveyMonkey, try to cultivate a level of trust that will encourage your customers to proactively tell you what they think.
For example, you can include a link to anonymous surveys in every email communication. Or, you could place a link in a prominent position on your site. You could even use your chatbot to collect feedback from customers 24/7.
Most importantly, show that you care about your customer’s voice. And the best way to do that? Act on the feedback you get. Many customers don’t believe that companies act on the feedback they provide. So, this is a great opportunity to positively surprise them.
Check out how the Acquire platform helps you offer the customer experience people want.