How to Build A Customer Satisfaction Survey: Questions and Examples

Customer satisfaction surveys enable you to get feedback from those who use your products or services. This feedback can help you improve the customer experience – boosting retention, revenue, and profits.

Here’s what you need to consider when building your customer satisfaction survey.

Benefits of customer satisfaction surveys

These surveys usually measures a specific customer experience: like a store visit, a purchase, or an interaction with a customer service team member.

Over time, the results of these customer satisfaction surveys will build up a picture of how you’re performing and how customers feel about you.

This is key to understanding where you need to improve, what you’re doing well, and what your customer-retention strategies should focus on.

Here are some of our top questions to consider when building a customer satisfaction survey.

NPS: How likely are you to recommend [company or brand] to a friend or colleague?

This question helps you determine your Net Promoter Score.

To calculate your Net Promoter Score, subtract the percentage of detractors (those who are not likely to recommend you) from the number of those who would promote you to a friend or colleague.

If 5% would not recommend you but 80% would, your NPS Score is 7.5 (80 minus 5) based on scoring system of between 0 and 10.

The higher the score, the better you have performed, and the more likely customers are to recommend you.

What’s the main reason for your score?

It isn’t enough to simply know a customer is either happy or unhappy. You need to know the reasons for their answer so you can either make improvements or continue with the positive things you’re doing.

We would really like to know what we could do to improve your score, can you tell us?

Not only will this inform you of any glaring issues there might be, but this question gives people the chance to provide small critiques that can make a big difference, which they might not have said without this direct question.

For example, if your delivery time is too long, this will likely be raised by many people. But one customer could also inform you that your payment webpage takes too long to load – which could be losing you a lot of sales as people drop their baskets and exit your website.

This issue would not be obvious to you and wouldn’t be known until someone flags it up.

How was the quality of service?

This includes speed, efficiency, and whether there was a satisfactory outcome.

What do you think about our service staff?

Front-of-house customer service can make or break the customer experience. From a polite hello, thank you and goodbye, to going above and beyond to sort out a problem, a positive interaction with a member of staff goes a long way to ensuring customers are happy.

Were our staff helpful and knowledgeable?

A member of staff could be enthusiastic and eager to help, but if they don’t know the answer to the question, there may be a problem.

How do you feel about our customer communication?

This can include your marketing emails, delivery updates, or responding to a customer query. Communication should be prompt, relevant and accurate.

How was the customer service you received?

Customer service includes whether staff members were polite, helpful and knowledgeable, and whether the customer was treated with importance.

How do you rate the delivery service?

With online shopping becoming so commonplace following the Covid-19 pandemic, delivery is more important than ever.

The days of a six-week lead time with delivery from China are long gone.

TIP: Check out our blog with 8 key reasons why customer satisfaction surveys are important.

Customers expect next-day for most purchases, and even same-day delivery has become commonplace with Amazon. Customers also expect communication. They want tracking updates and even a delivery ‘window’ on the day.

A lack of communication and a long lead time can cause a customer to look elsewhere next time.

How was the overall value for money?

Although we all love a bargain, most of us are happy to spend a bit more if it means we’re getting a quality product or service. Value for money is vital for keeping a customer coming back.

What do you think about the price you paid?

For price sensitive shoppers, this is the all important factor.

How was the purchase experience?

For in-store purchases, this will include the layout and ease of finding items, the helpfulness of staff and the ease of which the transaction took place.

For online purchases, it’s about how responsive your website is, how easy it is to find products and add them to a basket, how smooth the ‘checkout’ process is, and whether a confirmation of purchase is given.

Were you kept informed you with the progress of your order?

Online shoppers today expect a confirmation email, tracking updates, and real-time updates when a parcel is out for delivery.

How was our product knowledge?

From incorrect information on product pages to members of staff who can’t answer questions about the product, a lack of knowledge can cause a customer to lose faith and shop somewhere else.

Overall, how happy were you with the product/service?

This question may produce some positives that can help you understand what you’re doing well.

Overall, how happy were you with [your company or brand] ?

This ties into brand experience measurement and brand perception

How long do you expect a customer satisfaction survey to be?

The length of your customer satisfaction survey depends on many factors which are determined by the objectives set for the research.

If comprehensive and realistic objectives are not set, the survey will have little to no value. Therefore you should consider why you are conducting the survey and what you want to learn from it before you do anything.

When it comes to customer satisfaction surveys, keep them as short as possible. Between 3 to 5 minutes to complete, or 15 to 20 questions is ideal.
If a survey is too long, customers probably won’t complete the survey or will provide false answers just to get the survey over with.

Here are some tips to keeping the length of your customer satisfaction survey as short as possible, yet still effectively measuring customer satisfaction.

Take advantage of previous data

If you have surveyed your customers in the past, it is likely that you have previous data from them.

Use it in building your questions. Use this data to pre-populate data right into customer satisfaction surveys or use Routing to route respondents around questions that do not pertain to them.

This feature allows you to shorten survey length by inputting any relevant or known information about respondents (name, gender, age, company name, address, etc.) directly into the survey.

The information will still be collected in the data set ready for analysis and reporting, however, you are shortening the time it takes a respondent to complete your survey. Pre-population of data also boosts your survey relationships because you can identity respondents by name and other personal information.

Limit the scope of your survey

When designing your survey, be sure to narrow your focus. Only develop questions that are pertinent to your research objectives. Decide on the specific area(s) you want to measure and stay focused on those topics.

Don’t stray from those topics. If you’re developing a customer satisfaction survey for a bakery within a grocery store chain, don’t ask your customers questions about the store’s meat selection.

Simplify question wording

Survey language should reflect how you’d speak to a customer if conducting the survey face-to-face.

Respondents may skip a question if they do not understand what it means, it is a long-winded, or it is full of long words and ‘industry-type’ language.

Avoid long introductions

 As with most surveys, we do recommend creating a clear survey introduction detailing what the research is for and how the feedback will be used.

For customer satisfaction surveys, however, the purpose is quite clear.

Respondents know that the questions you’re asking are important and will be used to make continued improvements, so keep the introduction short.

Choose question types wisely

There are a variety of question types, including: single-response, multiple-response, open-ended questions, and grid questions.

The choice of questions and question styles can impact the length of your survey.

Certain question types use drop-down and scrolling menus to save survey space and leverage respondents’ convenience.

And grid format questions allow respondents to answer several similar questions within one question type.

Consider using image questions, which use pictures or graphics to describe survey questions and answers – making the experience fun and engaging for respondents.

What are the common goals of customer service surveys

Any customer service expert knows that each satisfaction project has their own set of unique goals and key drivers.

• Track changes in data over time, across several areas
• Benchmark all data against previous years data
• Benchmark data against competitors or wider industry
• Benchmark data internally
• Identify areas for improvement
• Identify specific dissatisfied customers
• Identify employees who are providing poor customer service
• Discover opportunities to provide better support to customers

It’s also important to determine how a specific service transaction had an effect on the customer relationship.

You should try to learn about customers’ needs and use that data to formulate new products and services.

Happy customers = happy organisations!