Customer Satisfaction Survey: 17 Key Questions (and Templates)
There are recurring customers in your company and others who only make a purchase that does not depend on chance but your experience. That is why it is essential to receive and analyze the feedback from your clients. To indicate how positive or pleasant their experience with your business is, you can use a customer satisfaction survey.
Through this resource, you will be able to discover the reasons behind these behaviors. This way, you will obtain valuable data about their perception of your products or services, their attention, and how well your brand is positioned against the competition. Keep in mind that consumers are willing to pay 16% more for products and services that provide a great customer experience.
Index of contents
- What is a customer satisfaction survey?
- What is the use of conducting customer satisfaction surveys?
- How to do a customer satisfaction survey?
- Types of questions for a customer satisfaction survey
- 15 Sample Questions for Customer Satisfaction Surveys
- Five best practices for creating customer satisfaction surveys
- How to create surveys using HubSpot’s customer satisfaction survey template
- 20 Examples of Customer Satisfaction Surveys from Real Brands
Let’s get started!
5 Customer Satisfaction Survey Templates
What is a customer satisfaction survey?
The customer satisfaction survey is a study that allows knowing the degree of conformity concerning a brand, product, or service. Given that the interviewer does not intervene in the response, the information collected is valuable to improve the service offer and processes.
What is the use of conducting customer satisfaction surveys?
The opinions and comments of your customers are two of the most critical factors that validate the priority decisions within your business, catalyzing its sustainability and growth.
Your feedback also shapes the Customer-Based Cycle or Flywheel. If you don’t know what your customers are thinking, you’re less likely to retain, delight, and entice them to make future purchases.
Here are five key points of what customer satisfaction surveys are for:
They reveal areas of opportunity
Customers are honest about what they are not satisfied with. You will obtain precise feedback with which you will be able to give optimal attention and communicate some specific recommendations to other areas, such as product design or sales.
They enhance success.
You will know which aspects your clients like the most to establish a guide of good practices and replicate the successes in other projects.
They enrich your buyer personas.
You will be able to add characteristics, needs, and preferences in your representations of the ideal client or buyer personas. In addition, you may discover new types of consumers, which will help you create increasingly accurate campaigns and attention models.
They favor loyalty
When you let the customer know that he is the center of your business, you will see that you listen to him and care about improving his experience. In this way, it is more likely that he will become a repeat customer, either because he is satisfied from the beginning or because of a recommendation.
They differentiate your brand.
Because not all companies take the time to receive the opinion of consumers or ignore their suggestions, you will be able to stand out from the competition.
How to do a customer satisfaction survey?
- Set your goals and the phases you will study.
- Direct the survey towards a target audience.
- Select the best questions.
- Define your communication channels and the necessary resources.
- Create follow-up processes.
1. Set your goals and the phases you will study
Create specific goals that give meaning to the entire operation with SMART objectives to obtain accurate and measurable indicators. Otherwise, you will only get disjointed data that will not be relevant to improving your organization.
Some examples of survey objectives are:
- Know the level of customer satisfaction regarding your website in the first approach: is its navigation easy? Are download times fast?
- Analyze the online store’s performance during the purchase: are the items easily found? Are the descriptions detailed?
- Examine how satisfied buyers are with a specific product line after the sale: does it deliver what it promises in the report? Is it beneficial?
- Determine the critical points of loyalty by studying repeat customers: what aspects satisfy them the most? Would they recommend the product or service to others? Do you consider that the attentive service is adequate?
2. Direct the survey towards a target audience
The more specific and delimited your survey is, the better indicators you will obtain; therefore, you must focus on a target audience.
Perform user segmentation based on this target audience by age group, by preferences, or by their level of recurrence: if they buy continuously or do it on a single occasion.
In addition, you can study the satisfaction of those who consume a specific product, those who buy on your online site compared to the point of sale, or those who downloaded your application.
3. Select the best questions
Once you have clear objectives of what you are looking for with this tool and have already defined your target audience, you can select the topics of your questions and formulate them.
You will create the most appropriate questions, thanks to the focus of the study. Remember that they must be concrete, specific, and with direct and precise wording so that anyone can understand them and answer them without any problem.
The questions can be open or closed, with options or a simple “yes” or “no.” You set this depending on the data you want to collect. When they are closed, and you limit the number of options, you have greater control over the interpretation of the answers.
A survey with few questions is recommended out of respect for the clients’ time and because this way you guarantee that they answer everything. If someone sees a long list of questions, they probably won’t answer.
The selection of questions must be focused on the topic, product, service, or aspect that you will evaluate. If they are very general, or you get out of the thread that leads to the available questionnaire, you can confuse the client.
4. Define your communication channels and the necessary resources
Online surveys have advantages over other means since the information will come to you directly, and the client will have all the time necessary to respond.
If your business has outlets, you can create quick exit surveys. However, it will always be better if you have a database of your customers to send them a short survey by email.
Make an adequate budget, considering the type of survey you want to carry out. If you need polling agents, you will need more resources. You could opt for specialized software in an online survey, whose prices are variable.
Of course, you can use HubSpot’s free online form builder to apply your surveys easily.
5. Create follow-up processes
To obtain successful results, you must establish a follow-up and verification process that the survey has been answered and achieved the indicators. You can carry out the measurement, analysis, and interpretation with them to know what to improve or what to replicate.
Start by setting indicators of satisfaction. They are based on percentages and indicate that, of the total number of respondents, a particular part is satisfied with a specific aspect, be it the ease of use of your site, the usefulness of your products, or the quality of the service among other elements. Over time, you should study whether the degree of satisfaction increases or decreases.
Create a base of recommendations that you can share with each responsible management, as this will improve the areas of opportunity.
Six types of questions for a customer satisfaction survey
If you want to get valuable feedback from your customers, you have to ask the right questions. Sharing information is not always an easy task, and it is not the customer’s job to offer your company constructive criticism.
If you don’t know what to ask your customers, here are some of the types of questions we recommend including in your customer satisfaction survey:
1. Product usage
When it comes to customer success and satisfaction, your business needs to collect feedback on your product or service. It will be more challenging to assess the client’s needs and provide practical solutions if you don’t.
Finding out how satisfied your users are with your offer gives your marketing, sales, and product teams valuable information, which can use to improve customer retention.
Some questions you could ask in this section are:
- How long have you been using the product?
- What alternatives did you consider before buying the product?
- How often do you use the product or service?
- Does the product help you achieve your goals?
- What is your favorite tool or part of the product or service?
- If you could, what would you improve?
- What product features do you consider most valuable?
- What product feature do you use most often in your day-to-day life?
- What points of friction have you found when using the product?
- If there was a new feature you could suggest, what would it be and why?
2. Demographics
Demographic data is essential for marketing and sales teams because it makes it easy for companies to segment customers into buyer personas. By grouping customers based on critical characteristics, this categorization helps employees visualize the target audience. Marketing and sales teams can use that information to find leads that are more likely to convert.
When asking these questions, make sure you take a proactive and inclusive approach. These questions shouldn’t be required, so always give customers the option to skip an answer. Your goal is to extract truthful information, but not at the expense of customer comfort.
Here are some demographic questions you should include in your following survey:
- How old are you?
- Where are you?
- If applicable, what gender do you identify with?
- What is your work situation?
- What is your marital status, and do you have children?
- What is your level of education?
- What is your approximate annual household income?
- Where do you work, and what is your position?
- What industry are you in?
3. From psychographics
Psychographic questions go even more profound than demographic questions, revealing information related to your customers’ preferences, habits, behaviors, and trends. It’s not about who your customer is, but why he does.
Psychographic questions may seem intrusive, but they are invaluable pieces of information that give you insight into the reasons behind your customers’ buying habits. Customers typically provide information about your industry and not your product specifically.
These questions are essential in customer satisfaction surveys because you can indirectly determine how you can better serve your customers.
Here are some questions you can ask:
- Do you prefer to shop from your phone or on your laptop?
- What is your priority when (insert something related to your industry)? For example, if you’re a mortgage lender, you might ask, “What’s your priority when buying a home?”
- What is your biggest obstacle when (insert something related to your product)? For example, if you’ve created a recipe-sharing app, you can ask, “What’s your biggest hurdle when accessing the best recipes online?”
- How much time do you spend on (insert social media platform you would like to use for advertising)?
- How much do you care about sustainability when buying a product?
- What do you think about (insert type of product)? For example, if you sell women’s razors, you might ask, “What do you think about women’s razors?”
- What don’t you like about (insert type of product)?
- How many hours a day do you spend doing (insert something related to your product)? For example, if you sell ergonomic car seats, you might ask, “How many hours do you spend driving?”
4. On a satisfaction scale
Sometimes there are aspects of your offer or business that you want feedback on, but your customers may not be actively addressing. Before you do this, you’ll need to determine a quantifiable way to measure responses. Adopting a satisfaction scale is a great way to create a consistent approach to quantifying this subjective survey feedback. Some ways you can implement this scale are:
- A scale that measures from 1 to 10 (or another number). One means that the customer was highly dissatisfied, and ten that he was delighted.
- A descriptive scale that measures a customer’s response from dissatisfied to satisfied. The customer receives a shortlist of answers to choose between “very dissatisfied” and “very satisfied.”
- An image scale that uses images to symbolize customer satisfaction. For example, you can use happy, sad, and indifferent emojis to collect customer feedback quickly.
Some sample questions you can include:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your in-store experience today?
- How likely are you to recommend (insert product or service) to others?
- Please rate your satisfaction with our team to solve your problem.
- Did you feel that our team responded promptly to your query?
- Do you agree or disagree that your issue was effectively resolved?
- What are the chances that you will buy from us again?
- How likely are you to come back to our website?
5. Open questions
Open questions allow the participant to answer within a text box. It encourages users to fully express their opinions, using the voice of the customer instead of the answers previously written by the company.
Although they can sometimes take a long time to analyze, these questions encourage the participant to be honest and give them the freedom to broach any topic. Open-ended questions can be a critical asset in determining your customers’ core values.
Here are open-ended questions you can ask in your following survey:
- In your own words, describe how you feel about (insert company or product name here).
- How can we improve your experience with the company?
- What is working for you and why?
- What activities can our employees optimize?
- How can our employees better support your goals or those of your company?
- How can we improve your experience with the website or in-store location?
- Why did you choose our product over the competition?
- What would be a word you would use to describe us and why?
- Do you have any comments for us?
6. Continuity
In the last part of your survey, you want to include questions about the steps that will take place after submission. These questions allow your team to follow up with the participant in the future.
It is useful when you implement changes and want to get updated feedback from the same customers who have previously participated in a survey. You can ask these types of questions in different ways:
- May we contact you to follow up on these responses?
- In the future, would you be willing to retake this survey?
- If we were to update (insert product feature here), may we contact you to discuss these changes?
- Can we connect you with a customer satisfaction manager via chat?
- Would you be willing to discuss upgrade options for your product?
- Can we send you a list of helpful resources to get the most out of your product?
While measuring customer satisfaction can be tricky to manage, asking practical questions can reveal valuable customer information, and the questions we’ve listed will certainly work.
15 Sample Questions for Customer Satisfaction Surveys
You will notice that each of these questions is focused on a particular issue. On the other hand, if you mentioned something like “Do you find our products and the care provided adequate?” you would have ambiguous results since it is impossible to know if the respondent thinks about the products or the attention.
Keep impartiality as a principle of your survey. “How would you rate our product concerning your needs” is a more objective and focused question than “Do you think our product is excellent?”.”
Without further ado, know the questions to evaluate a service that will give you a strategic vision:
How long have you been using our products or services?
This question will help you know how many of your current customers have been around for a long time and have recently approached your company. Notice how you can set the periods:
How often do you make purchases on our website?
It is one of the critical questions to determine the level of commitment to your brand, although it depends on the type of product or service you offer. You can define the options as in this example:
Do you think [product name] meets your needs in [specific area: design, HR management, accounting]?
This question will help you to know how effective your product or service is regarding the customer’s need, who will be able to decide between options such as:
What is the probability that you will repurchase our products?
Further, define your audience’s preference with this question. Set straightforward options:
What is the quality of the information about our products?
This way, you will know the performance of the areas that are in contact with the client. It is a fundamental question to improve service and care:
How was the attention to resolve your doubts?
You can direct this question towards the electronic mailbox or any other means that you use for customer service. For example, if you focus on live chat, the options could be:
What is your rating for our brand if you think of similar products or services?
It helps you to know what your position is concerning the competition. If the answer is not satisfactory, there will surely be a lot to do in the customer experience.
What is the probability that you will recommend us to your acquaintances?
These questions are used to determine how many potential brand ambassadors you have.
Overall, how satisfied are you with this company?
It is a generic question that focuses on brand appreciation. Give them options where you set levels of “satisfaction.” Remember that it must be one of the final questions because the other questions will have already served to reflect and be clear about what you will answer.
What is the aspect or aspects that you would improve in your experience with our brand?
This open-ended question will help you direct their suggestions, which are invaluable in both production and care pathways. Once you receive the offers, you will be able to assess the average number of requests per customer and the areas that require further reinforcement from their point of view.
What are some features or alternatives that our competitors offer that we don’t?
Don’t be afraid to ask your customers directly if you’re doing something wrong. These questions help you quickly detect your areas of opportunity and optimize your service as soon as possible. Do not forget to include an alternative if they do not have any negative aspects to highlight.
How would you describe our products?
This question has a double function: the client will be giving you a direct (and honest) opinion of what he thinks of your products, and at the same time, it is an excellent way to find out how he would describe your product to his acquaintances. The selected adjective will measure your level of liking, and you can make sure that everything is going well or it is time to optimize some details. You can approach them to find out how you could improve their perception of her.
What are the three characteristics that you like the most about our product?
Just as it’s okay to ask if you’re doing something wrong, don’t hesitate to find out what they like best about your product. This way, you can dig into the details and at the same time check what they select the least and find out why.
What do you think of the relationship between the quality offered and the price?
Price is one of the most critical aspects for a customer when choosing a product and measuring its quality. This question also allows you to assess whether your product or service is easy or difficult for your consumers to access.
Do you have any other comments or suggestions for us?
Another open question. This one is intended to be more general and give clients the freedom to express themselves on aspects that may not have been discussed in the other questions. It can also be an excuse to congratulate you on your excellent service (whoo!).
Create specific questions that help you know your audience’s perception from these suggestions. Thus, you will have a constantly improving service, and you will promote the development of your customer-focused company.
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Customer Satisfaction Survey: 15 Key Questions (and Templates)