Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT): 52 questions + templates

Businesses must deliver the best possible customer experiences. If they don’t, they may pay the price: 73 percent of customers will switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences, and more than half will switch after a single unsatisfactory experience, per Zendesk Benchmark data. You must request feedback and listen to your buyers to minimize poor customer experiences and boost customer retention. 

An effective way to get that feedback is by creating customer satisfaction surveys. In this guide, we cover the basics of customer surveys, questions you can use, and best practices to follow to create expert surveys and improve your customer experience (CX).

More in this guide:

• Why customer satisfaction surveys are so important
• Types of customer satisfaction surveys
• 52 customer satisfaction survey questions
• How to create an effective customer satisfaction survey
• How to use customer data to improve customer experience
• Turn surveys into action with Zendesk

Why customer satisfaction surveys are so important

Customer satisfaction surveys enable you to understand customer expectations and see where your business is falling short and where it’s excelling. Here are a few of the top benefits.

Helps you build better products

Satisfaction surveys are the basis for Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiatives—an interdepartmental strategy that uses customer feedback to improve products and services. Customer feedback can tell you if your buyers love what you’ve created, so you don’t have to guess.

Say your company offers a project management tool for startups. On calls, customers complain that they keep missing deadlines because they can’t distinguish between messages and assignments in your software. You act on that feedback by rolling out a new feature that lets users distinguish between their colleagues’ messages and tasks assigned to them.

A customer satisfaction questionnaire can help you determine if customers find this new feature helpful. Customers’ feedback will reveal any pain points and possible solutions, so you can improve the product to better suit customer needs.

Reveals strengths and weaknesses

Brands can use surveys to learn where they’re getting it right or wrong. There’s a strong chance your business is doing better than the competition in some areas and missing out on opportunities in others.

These gaps may be blind spots for you, but not for your customer base. With feedback from customer satisfaction surveys, businesses can identify holes in the buyer’s journey and find possible solutions.

Improves customer relationships

Surveys help businesses measure customer satisfaction and ensure they feel heard. When you ask consumers for their opinion, they’ll see that you care about their ideas and want to improve. In turn, your customers are more likely to trust your brand, especially when you act on their feedback, and maybe even recommend it to their friends and family.

Types of customer satisfaction surveys

There isn’t only one way to measure customer experience. Different types of customer satisfaction surveys drill down into specific metrics such as overall satisfaction, effort, and loyalty. Learn more about the types of customer satisfaction surveys below.

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score surveys indicate how happy customers are with a particular interaction or experience with your brand.

Say a customer just spoke to a support agent, and you want to find out if they got the help they needed. Your CSAT survey can ask, “How satisfied were you with the support you received?” Your customer can rank their experience on a scale from 1 to 5 or choose from options ranging from “very dissatisfied” to “very satisfied.”

To measure your CSAT score, divide the sum of all positive responses (responses from 4–5 or 7–10, depending on the scale) by the total number of responses collected. Then, multiply the result by 100. The percentage represents your satisfied customers.

Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys measure how likely a customer is to recommend your product or service to someone else. You will usually measure NPS surveys by asking a variation of “How likely are you to recommend [company name] to a friend or colleague?”, and prompt the user to rate it on a scale from 1 to 10. These surveys differ from CSAT surveys because they assess long-term customer loyalty and overall customer sentiment toward your brand.

To determine your NPS, compare the percentage of detractors (respondents who answer 0–6) to that of promoters (respondents who answer 9–10) to see where your company stands.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (CES) gauges how much customer effort is required to complete a task, use your product, or resolve an issue. Similar to CSAT surveys, CES surveys isolate areas of customer friction.

This type of survey shows how easy (or difficult) buyers find interactions with your brand, so the metric is helpful for recognizing potential churn in customers. CES surveys typically feature a prompt like “How easy was it to resolve your issue with us today?” and ask users to rate on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means “strongly disagree” and 10 means “strongly agree.”

Collect CES scores by sending out surveys that ask customers to rate their most recent support experience. To calculate your CES, divide the sum of all scores by the total number of respondents.

52 customer satisfaction survey questions

There isn’t a single customer satisfaction survey template that will give you all the insights you need to improve your CX. Instead, tailor survey questions to different department needs and customer touchpoints. Use the following list of customer satisfaction survey questions that apply to various use cases.

• Demographic questions
• Product usage questions
• Quantitative customer feedback questions
• Follow-up questions
• Open-ended and long-form questions
• Nominal scale questions
• Ordinal scale questions
• Likert scale questions
• Semantic differential questions
• B2B questions
• B2C questions

Demographic questions

Questions that assess your customer demographics can help marketing and sales segment customers into buyer personas. Responses could lead to extremely valuable insights that influence revenue and support strategies. Demographic questions can validate existing data while revealing new patterns.

Product usage questions

Survey questions about how customers use your product or service allow your company to better understand the customer experience. Ask buyers what they like and don’t like about your offering, so you know what areas need improvement to keep your audience loyal.

Quantitative customer feedback questions

Qualitative responses are important, but numbers are easier to measure. These survey questions can help you validate, confirm, or disprove problems and make decisions based on the data you receive.

Follow-up questions

Follow-up questions ensure you’ve covered all your bases. Ask customers how they feel about recent interactions with your business. You can send follow-up questions after a buyer has finalized a purchase or contacted customer support.

Open-ended and long-form questions

Open-ended customer satisfaction questionnaires allow customers to describe their experiences and opinions. Descriptive responses can help you build better products, provide ideas for your knowledge base, and pinpoint areas of improvement.

Nominal scale questions

Nominal questions categorize answers into two or more variables. The options do not overlap, are usually qualitative, and have multiple-choice options, so you can’t use numbers to define your answers.

Let’s say you want to include other languages on your website so your readers across the globe can access information easily. You could ask:

What languages do you speak?

• Portuguese

• French

• German

• Spanish

• Russian

• Mandarin

• Other (Please specify)

Nominal scale responses are easy to collect and measure, but the questions sometimes restrict how customers express themselves.

Ordinal scale questions

Ordinal questions measure customer feelings or opinions using a set of ordered responses. They are arranged in a specific manner so that each response is greater or less than the other. For example, your doctor could ask you to rate your pain from 1 to 10.

Likert scale questions

A Likert scale question uses an ordinal scale on a five- or seven-point rating scale to gauge customer sentiment. Usually, Likert scale questions ask respondents to agree or disagree with statements. They provide more information than binary “yes/no” questions and are regarded as a more reliable way to measure customer satisfaction.

Say you want to find out how well a customer self-service option, such as your knowledge base, performs with your customers. You might frame your prompt as:

The knowledge base articles are helpful and informative.

• Strongly disagree

• Disagree

• Neither agree nor disagree

• Agree

• Strongly agree

Other options for answers might include phrases like “possibly,” “definitely,” or “somewhat unlikely,” depending on how you phrase the question.

Semantic differential questions

Semantic differential questions ask customers to rate an interaction, product, or brand by selecting where their feelings lie on a seven-point scale between polar adjectives.

Say you want to ask respondents about the quality of their interaction with a support agent. Your question and answer options might be:

How would you rate the support you received?

• Very satisfactory or unsatisfactory

• Strong or weak

• Pleasant or unpleasant

The customer will then choose how they feel on the scale between those two adjectives. With semantic differential questions, customers can choose responses that closely align with their feelings instead of simply agreeing or disagreeing with a statement.

B2B questions

B2B, or business-to-business, survey questions aim to target other business professionals. Many times, B2B surveys are meant to gauge interest in a service or product to increase purchase rates. These types of questions also gather information on how to solve problems or improve offerings. You will usually tailor these questions to company size, job title, and industry.

B2C questions

Business-to-consumer, or B2C, survey questions differ from B2B questions because they target the general public or people who use your offerings rather than other business professionals. These questions are usually related to an end user’s experience with the product or service.

How to create an effective customer satisfaction survey

Creating customer surveys requires more than just asking the right questions. Use the following tips as a guide for your customer satisfaction survey.

1. Begin every survey with a goal in mind

For feedback to be actionable, surveys should have an obvious objective. So, before sending out a survey, ask yourself what you don’t know. This will help you identify your goals.

Say you recently rolled out a new prospecting feature for your sales CRM that speeds up the process of collecting information. You’re not sure what prevents customers from using the new feature, and you want to find out how you might increase engagement. With this goal in mind, you can ask customers specific questions about the feature.

2. Evaluate past examples of customer satisfaction surveys

As you create your customer satisfaction survey, you can evaluate past examples to spark inspiration and make improvements. For instance, you should tweak your new survey if a previous one didn’t collect enough responses. Maybe customers didn’t fill it out because it was too long or had challenging questions, so as you create your next survey, you’ll need to ensure that you keep the survey brief and straightforward.

You could also draw inspiration from customer satisfaction surveys that you’ve received from other businesses. If you’ve encountered a survey that enticed you to fill it out, incorporate some of those elements into your own.

3. Keep survey questions simple and short

If your customers have to read your survey questions several times before understanding them, you risk not receiving any responses. Along with question complexity, your survey length also affects response rates.

A SurveyMonkey study shows that the longer a survey is, the less likely customers are to complete it—abandonment rates increased for surveys that took longer than seven minutes. Consider keeping your surveys around three to five minutes long, with no more than 10 questions.

4. Use open-ended questions to get more details

Include one to two open-ended questions at the end of your survey to let your customers express themselves and ensure there aren’t any problems you’re missing. For example, after asking the customer to rate your product, you could prompt them to provide more details by stating, “In your own words, tell us about your experience with our product.”

While open-ended questions are your friend, you should limit your usage of them so customers don’t have to spend too much time writing responses.

5. Select the right delivery method

When building out your customer satisfaction survey, choosing the right delivery and collection method is important. First, pick which platform you want to use to gather responses. Some delivery methods include:

• Email: This is perhaps the most popular option, as you can follow up after a customer interaction with an email containing your survey.
• App pop-ups: You can choose to have your survey pop up in an in-app widget. This option can narrow down usability issues. For example, it allows you to get feedback on a specific page of an app, like the checkout page.
• Live chat: You can send the survey when a live chat conversation with a customer ends.
• A landing page: Create a landing page on your website containing your surveys and share the links with your customers via email or social media.

If you’re not sure which delivery method is the best fit, you can test out a variety of platforms to see which one helps you collect the most responses.

6. Choose the right time to send surveys

The best time to send a satisfaction survey is when an experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind. A survey sent closely after the customer has interacted with a support agent is more likely to earn you accurate responses because that customer will still remember what happened and how they felt about the experience.

However, you must also be careful not to send surveys too early. Customers need to have formed an opinion about their experience before you contact them.

Send surveys at significant milestones and touchpoints during the customer journey, too. For example, when a new client finishes onboarding, send an in-app survey to ask about their experience.

How to use customer data to improve customer experience

Asking the right questions is only half the battle; you need to use that information to improve your customer experience. By analyzing survey responses, you can gain valuable insight into what your team is doing well and what you need to improve. 

To turn customer feedback into actionable improvements, consider the following steps:

• Segment feedback: Start by segmenting your feedback to better understand what matters to your customers. You can use multiple buyer personas as initial segmentation; if not, try grouping feedback by new customers and long-term clients.
• Identify recurring issues: From the initial feedback, pinpoint common complaints to identify where your CX is lacking. If you find multiple complaints for the same issue, your organizational alarm bells should start to ring.
• Prioritize changes by impact: Focus on improvements that will benefit the greatest number of customers.
• Close the feedback loop: Let customers know you’ve heard their feedback and explain your changes. Doing so builds trust and shows commitment.
• Monitor progress over time: Use follow-up surveys and metrics to track the impact of your changes, and if you need to alter your feedback system.

Businesses can create a cycle of continuous improvement by prioritizing feedback collection, customer feedback analysis, and tangible action.

Avon

Avon’s century-old legacy embraces the future of employee service with Zendesk

“Zendesk was designed to be easy to start with, and flexible enough to scale with us as our needs evolve.”

Karolina Michalska

Head of Global People Services

Read customer story

Turn surveys into action with Zendesk

Customer satisfaction surveys can give organizations valuable insight into consumer preferences and CX effectiveness. Download our free survey templates below to help you find gaps in your customer service. For help turning those surveys into action, check out our customer service capabilities to upgrade your CX and keep customers coming back.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.