Customer satisfaction surveys: Questions + templates

Customer satisfaction surveys provide clear, actionable information into how customers perceive your product. It is a way to find out how happy your customers are and also lets you know about their needs and preferences.

Customers expect a certain level of experience and these experiences if satisfactory dictate your company’s health and image. Thus, insights into these experiences become valuable as they help you measure overall customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction surveys also narrow down which areas you should focus on to improve customer service or which new product feature or development your teams should pick up.

But we have all been there, when we’ve been in a hurry, have given unclear, poorly written or generic answers. Such surveys do not give a complete picture of customer experience, your quality of customer service, therefore their satisfaction using your products or services.

Asking specific and well structured questions can help. Understand why customer satisfaction surveys are important and how you can get the most out of a customer satisfaction survey.

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

Customer satisfaction surveys measure how customers feel about your product or service. They collect feedback to assess satisfaction, loyalty, pinpoint pain points, and enhance experiences. For companies, these surveys are vital tools for improving retention, reducing churn, and fostering long-term customer relationships.

Customer satisfaction surveys are more than just forms. They’re strategic tools that capture your customers’ voice. These surveys can:

• Highlight friction points in onboarding.
• Reveal what features delight your users.
• Expose gaps in your customer support.

It can also help you understand demographics, product usage, their needs and gauge overall customer sentiment. A customer satisfaction survey can be collected through emails, chatbots, and other tools having questions that can have a structure with pre-defined response options or open-ended questions for detailed answers.

5 benefits of customer satisfaction surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys play a key role in understanding customer experiences and help businesses to make better decisions, improve customer service, and shape product decisions. Below are a few more reasons why businesses should consider customer surveys to make themselves truly customer centric.

1. Common themes and customer sentiments

Customer satisfaction surveys give you an overview of what your customers are satisfied or frustrated with. It provides an unfiltered view on your customer perception. Summarizing these surveys can pinpoint what you need to resolve or continue doing to improve customer satisfaction.

Use a Sentiment evaluator, such as DevRev to help identify common themes and customer sentiment trends, and get feedback from a customer conversation.

2. Identifying and resolving churn risks

Customers will leave if they don’t feel like their experience was worth it. Churn often stems from unresolved frustrations. Surveys help identify dissatisfaction early so you can act before customers leave. Gathering feedback regularly helps you monitor and fix issues before they shape up into bigger problems.

3. Build customer loyalty

Surveys dig deeper into user sentiments, uncovering specific issues or opportunities. A great way to build customer loyalty is to show your customers you care about them by acting on the collected feedback. When your customer feels that their feedback was beneficial it helps strengthen customer relationships, retain customers better and build loyalty.

4. Guiding product roadmaps

Surveys highlight features users want most, helping prioritize development. Customer feedback informs product roadmaps by prioritizing features that users need most. Structured surveys reveal patterns, while open-ended responses provide context for preferences.

Surveys reveal trends you can act on. Whether it’s improving usability or adding sought-after features, feedback drives smarter roadmaps.

Example: After collecting survey data, a SaaS company added a top-requested reporting feature. Adoption rates increased by 30%, driving customer satisfaction.

5. Mapping customer journey

Mapping your customer journey is critical for understanding how customers interact with your brand and building out a comprehensive customer lifecycle. Customer satisfaction surveys help you gauge customer sentiment at every stage—from their first interaction, through customer support, to making a purchase. It also helps you capture these insights, revealing where your journey map needs updates for maximum impact.

With all the benefits, custom satisfaction surveys provide information on how you can delight customers which leads not only to retention and loyalty but also spreading words of recommendation from satisfied customers.

How to create and measure a customer satisfaction survey

Creating and measuring customer satisfaction surveys requires a clear goal, the right questions, and smart tools. Businesses should align surveys with key metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES for actionable insights.

Step 1: Define your goals

What do you want to learn? For example:

• Are users satisfied with onboarding?
• How likely are they to renew?

Step 2: Choose your survey type

• Use NPS for loyalty.
• Use CSAT for feature or interaction-specific feedback.
• Use CES to measure support or task simplicity.

Step 3: Keep questions simple

Don’t overwhelm users. Use clear, targeted questions like:

• “How satisfied are you with [feature]?”
• “What could we improve in your experience?”

Step 4: Automate survey delivery

GenAI tools like DevRev lets you capture CSAT on conversations, ticket resolution and even sends a Slack notification whenever a negative CSAT score is received in a conversation for timely action on customer responses.

To streamline this process of measuring customer satisfaction effectively during interactions between the customer experience engineers and customers, use DevRev’s CSAT on conversation snap-in. This innovative tool simplifies the measurement of customer satisfaction levels, enabling you to gather valuable feedback.

You can also enhance your customer service strategy with DevRev’s ‘CSAT on ticket’ snap-in, a powerful tool designed to measure customer satisfaction for ticket resolutions. It tailors the survey experience to your brand’s identity by customizing both the survey question and response message during installation.

Step 5: Analyze and act

Track customer service metrics like:

• CSAT score: Average satisfaction rating.
• NPS score: Percentage of promoters minus detractors.
• CES score: Average effort rating.
• Sentiment analysis: Overall sentiment.

Step 6: Close the feedback loop

Manage customer feedback effectively. Gather feedback from multiple channels and surveys, categorize it into actionable insights, analyze it using customer feedback tools, take quick actions based on the feedback, and always close the loop by informing customers of the changes made.

Responding to customer feedback promptly and sharing improvements with your users to show them you’re listening.

Customer satisfaction survey examples

General customer satisfaction

1. On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with our product overall?
2. How would you describe your overall experience with our company? (Open-ended)
3. How likely are you to recommend us to a colleague or friend? (NPS question)
4. What is the primary reason for your satisfaction or dissatisfaction with our product? (Open-ended)
5. How well does our product meet your needs? (Scale: Very poorly to very well)
6. How would you rate the value for money of our product? (Scale: Very poor to excellent)
7. What keeps you using our product? (Open-ended)
8. If you could change one thing about our product, what would it be? (Open-ended)
9. How satisfied are you with your interactions with our company overall? (Scale: Very dissatisfied to very satisfied)
10. Is there anything else we can do to improve your experience? (Open-ended)

Onboarding experience

1. How easy was it to set up and start using our product? (Scale: Very difficult to very easy)
2. Was the onboarding process clear and straightforward? (Scale: Strongly disagree to strongly agree)
3. Did the onboarding materials (e.g., guides, videos) meet your expectations? (Yes/No)
4. What challenges, if any, did you face during onboarding? (Open-ended)
5. How well did our onboarding process prepare you to use the product? (Scale: Not at all to very well)
6. How helpful was the onboarding team? (Scale: Not helpful to extremely helpful)
7. Were your questions answered promptly during the onboarding process? (Yes/No)
8. Did you feel confident using the product after onboarding? (Scale: Not confident to very confident)
9. What additional support would have improved your onboarding experience? (Open-ended)
10. Was our product setup process quicker or slower than you expected? (Scale: Much slower to much quicker)

Product Feedback

1. How satisfied are you with [specific feature] of our product? (Scale: Very dissatisfied to very satisfied)
2. How reliable do you find our product? (Scale: Not reliable to very reliable)
3. How well does our product integrate with your existing tools? (Scale: Very poorly to very well)
4. Are there any features you wish we offered but currently don’t? (Open-ended)
5. How intuitive do you find our product’s interface? (Scale: Not intuitive to very intuitive)
6. How often do you encounter bugs or issues with our product? (Scale: Never to very frequently)
7. Did you achieve your desired outcomes using our product? (Yes/No)
8. How does our product compare to others you’ve used? (Open-ended)
9. Are there any features you don’t find useful? (Open-ended)
10. How important is [specific feature] to your workflow? (Scale: Not important to very important)

Customer Support Experience

1. How satisfied are you with the resolution of your recent support request? (Scale: Very dissatisfied to very satisfied)
2. How easy was it to contact our support team? (CES question: Scale: Very difficult to very easy)
3. Did you feel that the support team understood your issue? (Scale: Strongly disagree to strongly agree)
4. Was your issue resolved on the first attempt? (Yes/No)
5. How knowledgeable was the support representative you interacted with? (Scale: Not knowledgeable to very knowledgeable)
6. How long did you wait to get a response from our support team? (Open-ended or time-based options)
7. How satisfied are you with the communication style of our support team? (Scale: Very dissatisfied to very satisfied)
8. Did our support team follow up on your issue appropriately? (Yes/No)
9. What could we do to improve your support experience? (Open-ended)
10. How likely are you to contact our support team again if needed? (Scale: Very unlikely to very likely)

Feature-specific feedback

1. How satisfied are you with the latest feature update? (Scale: Very dissatisfied to very satisfied)
2. How often do you use [specific feature]? (Scale: Never to daily)
3. What do you like most about [specific feature]? (Open-ended)
4. What challenges do you face when using [specific feature]? (Open-ended)
5. If we could enhance one aspect of [specific feature], what would it be? (Open-ended)

Churn and retention

1. What was the main reason for discontinuing our product? (Open-ended, for churned users)
2. What could we have done to keep you as a customer? (Open-ended)
3. How likely are you to renew your subscription? (Scale: Very unlikely to very likely)
4. How well do we address your concerns as a customer? (Scale: Very poorly to very well)
5. If you stopped using our product, what would you miss the most? (Open-ended)

5 best practices for customer satisfaction surveys

Best practices for customer satisfaction surveys include keeping them short, asking clear questions, and automating delivery. Always act on the feedback to show customers you value their input.

1. Timing is everything:

Send surveys at meaningful touchpoints, like after support interactions, product launches, or subscription renewals. Well-timed surveys capture real-time sentiment.

2. Make it easy to respond:

Design surveys for simplicity. Ensure mobile compatibility and offer one-click or multiple-choice responses. Easy formats boost completion rates.

3. Personalize the experience:

Use customer data to tailor questions. Address customers by name and align surveys with their journey. Personal touches build trust.

4. Avoid survey fatigue:

Limit survey frequency to avoid overwhelming users. Use segmentation to target specific groups rather than your entire audience.

5. Analyze and act promptly:

Don’t let feedback sit idle. Use real-time analytics to identify trends and issues. Close the loop by sharing updates or changes driven by the survey data with your customers.

Use customer satisfactions surveys to your advantage

With customer satisfaction surveys, there’s no need to guess your customers’ feelings. By asking the right questions, listening to feedback, taking action, and communicating changes, you create a feedback loop that drives constant improvement. When you implement updates based on feedback, inform your customers—it shows them they’re valued and builds loyalty.

Remember, the success of customer satisfaction surveys lies in the quality of the data you collect. Thoughtfully crafted questions, delivered at the right moments, will increase response rates and provide actionable insights. Show your commitment to creating an exceptional customer experience, and your customers will keep coming back.

Promptly respond to inquiries and efficiently resolve issues that are important with DevRev’s CSAT on Ticket snap-in. The simple five-point survey response scale ensures a higher response rate, providing deeper insights into customer satisfaction.

As an integral part of your exceptional customer service approach, this feature allows you to go beyond meeting expectations. It’s about creating a seamless resolution experience where customers feel valued and heard.