Customer satisfaction (or CSAT) surveys are one of the most common ways companies ask customers for feedback – both positive and negative. 

It’s always good to know if your customers are happy with your service – after all, there’s great value in showing that 80 percent of your customers said they’re satisfied. But there’s more to it than that: you want to know exactly what’s working and what’s not, so you can plan for a better future, too.

As with all surveys, how useful the feedback you’ll get is hinges on asking the right questions. So, before you send your survey, be sure to plan it properly to maximize its value. Here are three factors that affect the questions you ask:

• The timing of the survey. Is it a generic quarterly survey or is it taking place after a critical milestone, like a product order or customer onboarding? You’ll need different kinds of questions for each situation. 

• The purpose of the survey. Sometimes you want to report on customer satisfaction. Other times, you’re looking for actionable qualitative data to inform your strategy.

• The target audience. B2B and B2C companies often have significant differences in the questions they ask customers. Similarly, when your buyer isn’t the same as your end user, you might end up asking them different questions, too. 

So, finding the right customer satisfaction survey questions may take a bit of thought. To help you build your own effective CSAT surveys, here are some sample customer satisfaction survey questions for a range of different situations where you want to gauge what your customers think.

First, a few tips on building survey questions

• Avoid double negatives. For example, don’t ask “Do you dislike not having product notifications?” These questions may confuse respondents.

• Ask why instead of if. This doesn’t necessarily apply to every type of question, but when possible, ask “Why do you like our product” instead of “Do you like our product”. With this approach, you can maximize the amount of actionable feedback you can get.

• Avoid leading questions. For example, don’t ask “Are you satisfied with our award-winning customer support?” This may make respondents feel uncomfortable sharing their view.

• 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 “How satisfied are you”. If you want to use stars, change it to “How many stars would you give us”, and so on.

• Use open-ended questions whenever it makes sense. Open-ended questions can draw out the deepest insight – but they’re more time-consuming to respond to for customers and more difficult to analyze for you. Use them sparingly to ask 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, and you want to make sure you don’t restrict answers on marital status to just “single/married”.

Related: How to survey customers properly.

General customer satisfaction survey questions

These generic questions can be used in various industries. They target the overall customer opinions on your services and brand, their product/service usage, as well as their motivations. 

These surveys can be done periodically or even 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.

Here are sample questions based on different response formats:

Likert scale:

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our services?
• 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/services today?
• How would you rate us on the following? (follow with a list of products/services/activities)
• How often do you use our product/service?

Yes/No

• Has our product/service helped you with achieving your goals?
• Would you recommend our product/service to others?

Multiple-choice

• Which three of these [features/offerings/etc.] matter more to you when you use our product? 
• For what purpose are you using [Acme]? (follow with list, including ‘other’)

Open ended

• What’s the biggest gain you’ve seen while you’ve been using us?
• What would you change about our product/service?
• What can we improve in our product/service?
• What can we improve in our communications/customer service?
• What would stop you from buying from us again?
• Have you ever had a negative experience with us and can you describe what happened?
• How have you used our services in the past?
• What can we do better?

If you’re planning to ask for feedback via email, here are seven email templates you can use to get responses.

And, if you’re wondering which questions to send after specific milestones, take a look below.

Questions after customer onboarding

Sending a CSAT survey after important milestones is essential. And, what’s more important than the period after onboarding, when customers are supposedly fully prepared to use your product (or service if you’re not in SaaS)? These customer satisfaction survey questions will help you understand whether your onboarding process works.

Likert scale

• 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).

Yes/No

• Do you feel ready to use your product to meet your goals?
• Do you feel you’re set up for everything you needed?
• 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?

Open ended

• Is there something critical for your onboarding that wasn’t covered during our process?

Questions after customer training

This is probably mostly relevant to SaaS (where customer success teams show customers how to use the software or platform). But, if your industry also does customer training, you can modify these questions to specifically reference your services.

Likert scale

• 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?

Yes/No

• Did you feel you got what you needed out of your training?
• Were the majority of your questions answered during the training?

Open-ended

• What can we improve in our training process?
• What suggestions do you have for our team regarding training?

Questions after new product launch

When you launch new products, or new features if you make software, you want to know how your customers respond. Especially because there will be a ‘probation’ period where you’ll be evaluating whether your product has a future or whether it needs finetuning.

Likert scale

• 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? (scale of not at all to very satisfied)

Yes/No

• Did you know we have [this new product]?
• Have you tried our new product?
• Have you used our new feature?
• Is our new product easy to understand?

Open-ended

• Do you have suggestions for improving our product?

Questions after a purchase

The exact timing and length of your post-purchase CSAT survey will depend on what you want to know. If you just want to gauge the overall feelings of your customers towards the purchasing experience, you can ask a simple broad question and add a blank field where customers can say whatever they want.

But, if you want more in-depth information about purchasing, 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, accuracy of description, etc.

Likert scale

• 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?

Yes/No

• Did you face any challenges while you were shopping and what were they?
• 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 / service as you thought it would be?

Questions after an interaction with customer support

This type of survey can be sent automatically to customers when a support ticket closes. It’s meant to assess how well your support team did in resolving the customer’s issues or providing them the information they needed. 

Also, you can use this survey to get opinions on your knowledge base or support chatbot if applicable.

Likert scale

• 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?

Yes/No

• Do you feel you got quick access to help?
• Did our chatbot help you get the answers you needed?
• Did you find what you needed in our help center?

Open-ended

• What would you change in our help center if you could?
• Please help us improve by giving us your opinion on our support process

Be open to 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.

But, most importantly, show that you care about your customer’s voice. Reply to feedback on social media or review sites with gratitude. Ask for more details when needed. Try not to come across as indifferent or arrogant – your customers want you to be open-minded, even if they’re wrong sometimes. 

And of course, act on the feedback you get. Half of customers don’t believe companies act on feedback they provide. Here’s a great opportunity to positively surprise them (and that will probably boost your customer satisfaction ratings, too).