Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Definition & Questions Examples

Your business's most important task is determining the factors influencing the consumer's decision to purchase or refuse your products or services. But no one can tell you about these factors better than the consumers themselves. And here, the customer satisfaction survey comes into play. It allows you to obtain first-hand information that is more valuable than any hypothesis. 

The buyer directly interacts with your product, advertising, sales touchpoints, and support teams. Therefore, the opinion of each of them is the key to a transparent and unbiased assessment of customer satisfaction with your business. In this article, we will tell you about this survey and its types, provide the rules for conducting it, and explain the best questions to include.

What Is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?

A customer satisfaction survey is a set of carefully designed questions companies create to track, measure, and analyze customer satisfaction with a product, service, and overall experience with a brand. Since customer surveys provide quantitative indicators of satisfaction, their periodic conduct allows you to obtain statistically significant information to control customer attitudes towards your business at different stages, understand their current needs, timely identify and respond to possible issues indicated by your audience, and constantly discover areas for improvement.

Why Should You Use Customer Satisfaction Surveys?

Surveys are not just interactive elements but powerful tools in your overall strategy. By conducting them regularly, you can make a difference in your business, and this means:

• Build rapport. 77% of customers say they are loyal to brands that invite them to share feedback and, just as importantly, take their feedback into account for the future. And this is not surprising because all people need to be heard. Thus, a customer satisfaction survey is a proven way to show your customers and prospects that their opinion matters to you and retain their loyalty.
• Identify areas for improvement. Sometimes, neither you nor your team can be unbiased when evaluating your product, service quality, and strategy. Therefore, the survey may point out mistakes you did not know about. But this opens up new possibilities. First, knowing your weaknesses, you can correct them. Meanwhile, 70% of dissatisfied customers are ready to give the brand a second chance if their problem is solved. Second, you no longer need to puzzle over what went wrong, as customers will tell you about it personally.
• Retain customers. If a customer has left a negative review, you are FORCED to respond, at least to save your reputation. But if you initiate regular surveys yourself, then you WANT to know more about their customer satisfaction. Do you see the difference? Customers also see and, therefore, are ready to forgive your mistakes if you want to correct them. Meanwhile, retaining customers is 5 times cheaper than attracting new ones. Thus, conducting customer satisfaction surveys and considering their results prevents the loss of clients and money.
• Understand your customers. If customers say that your "super-innovative" feature actually interferes with the use of your app, you should listen to them. Your product/service is intended for customers, which means their opinion is much more important than any of your hypotheses. In turn, any customer satisfaction surveys are aimed primarily at understanding the real-world experience of interacting with your brand. And this approach pays off well. In particular, customer-centric businesses are 60% more profitable than those that do not put the customer first.
• Get valuable data. Even those examples of customer satisfaction surveys that only include yes-no options are a transparent and fair way to collect audience data, unlike purchasing this data from third-party sources. And today, 82% of customers are willing to share personal data for an improved experience. So surveys are a great way to prepare for a cookieless future, build customer trust, and gain enough data to deliver personalized experiences to your audience. Claspo has an ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certificate, so you can ensure your customers’ data is reliably protected when conducting your surveys using our pop-ups.

Conduct a survey directly on your website

Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

So, how do you understand that your clients are happy, satisfied, loyal, and ready to recommend your services and products to their friends? Well, you have to run surveys to find it out. Here are the best four surveys that will help you understand your clients.

1. CSAT — Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer Satisfaction Score, also known as CSAT, is the customer satisfaction survey index. This is an indicator by which you can evaluate the quality of your company at all levels.

Often, business owners feel they are in control of their team and know the strengths and weaknesses of the company. But experience has proven that such knowledge can be false, and weaknesses are revealed unexpectedly in the process of interviewing customers. Even employees who interact with customers on a daily basis may not adequately assess the company's position due to their subjective perception.

To avoid misunderstanding the processes of your own business, you need to communicate directly with customers. That's what CSAT is for. This score instantly identifies pain points and performance gaps.

The CSAT may be in the form of pre-formulated statements that the client agrees or disagrees with. For example, "I am satisfied with the quality of service at all stages" or "The manager answered all my questions, and I was satisfied." A questionnaire with such statements can be given to all customers in an offline store or interview customers in a messenger using a bot.

2. NPS — Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score, also known as NPS, is a metric specially designed to determine the level of customer loyalty to a product, brand, or company and the willingness to recommend your product or service to friends, family, etc.

The essence of the index is that the client is offered a questionnaire with a single question: is he or she ready to recommend the company/product/service to friends or colleagues? To measure loyalty, a ten-point scale is proposed.

For the first time, the concept of such a loyalty assessment was proposed in 2003 by an employee of a consulting agency, Fred Reicheld. He was the first to think about the lack of a tool for measuring loyalty to companies from different industries or measuring this indicator among customers of different companies operating in the same niche. The advantage of his proposed approach is universality: each client can express his attitude by answering just 1 question.

Many companies use the Net Promoter Score as a tool to study customer loyalty. But it is worth spending resources on collecting and interpreting data in accordance with the proposed methodology only if the business owner is ready to act on the result.

The right approach will help you find new ways to promote, and connect other services, improve existing processes and prepare your business for innovation.

3. CES — Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score, also known as CES, is a customer service metric that measures user experience with a product or service. Clients rate their experience on a seven- or ten-point scale from "Very Difficult" to "Very Easy". This determines how much effort it took to use the product or service and the likelihood that they will continue to pay for it.

There is plenty of evidence that the simplicity of a given experience is a better indicator of customer loyalty than just measuring immediate customer satisfaction (and customer loyalty is the true engine of business in our increasingly competitive environment).

That's why CES is a popular methodology used by teams around the world to work with clients. Instead of asking how happy the customer is, you ask them to rate the ease of the interaction.

Types of Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

The value of the information received determines the success of a survey. And this value is not just about the answers but also your questions for the customer satisfaction survey. If incorrectly selected or formulated, you may miss the lion's share of insights for further analysis. Therefore, before creating a list, familiarize yourself with the main types and examples of customer satisfaction survey questions.

Open Questions

People are expected to write down any extended response that is not planned in advance. Part of open questions are questions that begin with "why". They have the goal of studying the motives of answers, for example, to the question: Why do you need foam when washing clothes?

Open questions require a detailed answer. In psychology, open questions are also called value questions, as they provide useful information to either the questioner (you) or both participants. Let's imagine the situation again. You ask the person you work with: do you see the prospects for our further cooperation? This is a closed question (you can answer yes or no). If the answer is yes, then most likely your interlocutor will not voluntarily develop the topic, and you will not understand exactly what the prospects are. But if you frame the question in a different way: we are already implementing more than the first project together, what other prospects for work do you see? In doing so, you will give the interlocutor food for thought.

Thus, asking open-ended questions is considered one of the best practices for customer satisfaction surveys because they force respondents to dive deeper into the topic and give more precise and thoughtful answers:

• How would you describe your overall experience with our product/service, and what specific aspects exceeded your expectations or fell short?
• Can you share any specific situations or interactions with our team that stood out to you during your recent experience? What made those moments memorable, and how did they impact your overall satisfaction?

Using the Claspo builder, you can always add an open question to your survey pop-up and leave enough space for the customer to answer in detail.

Use this template

Closed Questions

The most widely used type of question in questionnaires, where the respondent selects one or more options from predefined answers. Because of its unambiguity and simple design, these kinds of questions are very easy, fast, and efficient to handle in any type of research.

Closed questions for customer satisfaction surveys are indispensable if you need to describe a precise range of answers. Dichotomous and trichotomous questions are suitable for multiple answer questions, thus being the easiest questions for respondents (it is easy to answer a question with a choice of two possible answers):

• Would you recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague? (Yes/No)
• Did our product/service meet your expectations? (Please select one option: Yes, No, Somewhat)
• Would you recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague? (Please select one option: Definitely, Probably, Not Sure, Probably Not, Definitely Not)

With Claspo, you can quickly create a survey with closed questions. For this purpose, you only need to drag components such as checkboxes or radio buttons into your pop-up layout.

Use this template

Semi-closed Questions

Semi-closed are the best customer satisfaction survey questions if you want to collect both specific answers (from predefined options) and text answers (provided by customers at the end of the list if none of the presented options are suitable). The main feature of such questions is the “Something else” or “Other” last points where customers can add their unique answers. Using such questions, you can get completely new insights about your audience:

• How likely will you recommend our brand to a friend or colleague? (Not likely, Somewhat likely, Very likely, Other)
• Are you satisfied with your latest purchase from our store? (Yes, No, Your answer)

Claspo makes it easy to add semi-closed questions to your customer satisfaction survey pop-up. Select the text input component in the sidebar and add it after your predefined options.

Use this template

How to Ask the Right Questions for a Customer Satisfaction Survey?

Before moving on to the rules for preparing questions to get a customer feedback survey, it is important to determine what tasks do the “right questions” solve.

What are they needed for? How to understand that these are not just questions for the show but an accurate working tool?

The right question helps to get clear answers to the primary marketing “puzzles”:

• Who is your target audience?
• Is the price of your product or service high?
• What suits and does not suit customers?
• What is the degree of satisfaction with the product and service?

By asking practical customer satisfaction survey questions, you will get answers-solutions. You will find out what your users like, dislike, or lack. You will be able to adequately respond to the requests and wishes of your customers. 

Remember, your goal is to get a quality answer. Not a quick reply, but the truth from the client. And how to do this, we will tell below.

6 Rules for Creating a Satisfaction Survey

How to get customer feedback that will be valuable and relevant to your business? Keep in mind the following rules:

1. The question should be focused on user experience. The website as a whole or a separate product does not matter. You need to know whether your client is satisfied with everything, and whether he is comfortable.
2. The customer satisfaction survey should be short. Don't force clients to waste their time on long questionnaires. Let them spend it on a purchase.
3. Each survey should reflect your specific goal. For example, one survey is about the quality of the product, the second one is about the convenience of the site, and the third is for new customers.
4. Ask questions that require detailed and precise answers. Yes, questions with ready-made answers are more popular among users, but you need to dig deeper. If you want to get more information from your site visitors, ask them, "Why?" or "Why not?".
5. Use plain language. Refrain from getting into complex terminology. The more your survey stresses your clients, the less likely you are to get truthful answers from them. And the less likely they are to reach the last question in your questionnaire.
6. Motivate. Offer a bonus, promo code, or discount. Your task is to lure the customer into answering a satisfaction survey. People like gifts, and you want conversion.

It’s worth remembering that by asking the right questions, you will get valuable answers. Those that will help you understand what is wrong with the website, product, or service.

The Most Useful Customer Survey Questions for Your Website 

1. How did you find out about our product/website?

With this question, you can evaluate your marketing channels and find out exactly where people find mentions of your site, product, or service. You might also reconsider your advertising strategy or target audience selection formats.

2. Will you recommend our product to your friends, family, and colleagues?

Here you will specifically see the user's reaction and the level of satisfaction. If a person does not recommend you to anyone, it means he or she is dissatisfied with something. Ask “why” and find out what you need to improve (invite the person to write or choose from several answers).

3. What associations do you have about our website/product?

This is a great way to understand exactly how users perceive you and how they see your website or product: useful, inconvenient, high-quality, expert, unreliable, etc.

4. Rate our product, and website from 0 to 10

The McDonald's customer satisfaction survey suggests assessing the experience of visiting a restaurant using several criteria. Such a survey is simple for the respondents as they only need to check a box. Besides, it is valuable for businesses as they receive a comprehensive assessment.

5. Which of our competitors did you consider before choosing us?

This is a great way to get to know your enemy in person. Since, sometimes you have no idea who people consider your competitor, this will give you additional benefits, and you might even learn something.

6. Why did you choose us over our competitors?

This is a great way to get to know your strengths in the eyes of your clients. There are dozens of options why people choose you: price, brand, functionality, etc.

Using this question, you will find out exactly how you compare favorably with your competitors. And, therefore, how to use these differences to attract more customers.

7. Is our product/website better than website/product X?

This question will show you the strengths and weaknesses of your product or website. Study the product or website of the competitor you indicated in the question carefully. If the competitor’s website is fairly better, don’t risk boosting their rankings by recommending it to your clients.

8. What do you like most/least about our website/product?

You will understand what suits and what does not suit your customers. The question will help you focus on improvements.

9. How easy is our product/site to use?

Suggest the following options:

1. Very simple; 
2. Quite simply; 
3. It is neither simple, nor difficult; 
4. Quite difficult; 
5. It's complicated.

10. What features of our website or product do you like the most?

Thus, you will find out all your advantages. For example, customers may appreciate you for something insignificant to you, but essential to them. Having learned about such small things, you can turn them into benefits so that other users catch up.

11. What qualities of our product/website do you consider not so important?

The answers to this question will help you discard what is unimportant to people and focus on what attracts them.

12. What important quality/function are we missing?

You will learn about the shortcomings and weaknesses of your product. Plus, you can build an excellent strategy for further action.

13. Why did you decide to use our product/website?

This customer satisfaction survey question means “What goal did you pursue by visiting our site or buying our product?”. Your website visitors have different goals. Someone is comparing the prices, others are ready to buy, and some others want to read a blog article. It will be helpful for you to know what exactly attracted your users.

14. Why did you decide not to buy it?

A question that aims to optimize the user journey and increase sales. There are many reasons why a user does not buy. Is it the high price to blame? Or quality? There are lots of options, and no need to guess. Just ask the users.

15. Which payment/shipping method do you prefer?

Clients often refuse purchasing simply because the payment or delivery method does not suit them. Make sure you offer all the options that are popular among your users.

16. Do you understand our prices?

Typically, customers can choose from various packages, subscriptions, and products. But do they always understand the difference in tariffs? Why is one service package more expensive, and another, almost the same, half the price?

17. What was your first impression of the website?

Ask for it on the website's main page, focusing on new visitors.

18. What is missing on this page?

Your website's pages should give users all the information they need. By striving for this and trying to provide a bunch of everything, you can turn the site into a dump of information. You still need to give precisely what customers are looking for. And this customer satisfaction survey question will help to identify the clear needs and interests of users.

19. What are your favorite blogs?

A corporate blog is a great tool to show your expertise and increase audience loyalty and conversion. But which blog will be popular? Ask clients.

10 Extra Questions to Ask Your Customers

1. When did our service, website, or product help you?
2. Have you paid for any of these items or tools?
3. What did you like or dislike about these products?
4. Will you be upset if this product or site is no longer available?
5. What other products do you use to accomplish similar tasks?
6. What would it be if you could change one thing about a website or product?
7. How often do you use the product or website?
8. What surprised you about the product?
9. What tasks do you most often perform using this product?
10. Have we answered all your questions in the article?

How To Use Customer Satisfaction Survey Results

It is clear that the survey results are for more than just informational purposes. They can and should work for you and become a game changer for your business. But this is only possible if they are used correctly after studying.

Take Action Immediately

In the short term, you can use customer satisfaction survey results to identify dissatisfied customers and instruct your support or service department to contact them as quickly as possible. It is essential for two main reasons. First, according to Zendesk, a bad brand experience can cause 61% of shoppers to switch to a competitor. Second, Salesforce reports that 62% of dissatisfied shoppers are willing to tell others about their bad experiences. Thus, a quick follow-up after studying the results can prevent the loss of customers and the spread of negative reviews through word of mouth.

Develop a Long-Term Strategy

Of course, immediately calling and placating disappointed customers is only the first step towards increasing customer satisfaction. At least, their expectations and requirements for your business may change over time. Besides, dealing with the consequences is less effective than eliminating the causes. Therefore, use the data obtained to develop a long-term business growth strategy. 

Yes, changes do not happen overnight, especially if customer satisfaction surveys reveal severe problems or omissions. However, customers' responses give you a robust foundation for future improvements and indicate where to move on.

Provide Insights to Your Team 

Implementing quick measures and developing a long-term strategy is only possible with the involvement of your employees, so discuss the results together. It is vital if customer satisfaction survey questions directly relate to service quality. In this case, you need to communicate the customer's needs to the service representatives and listen to the existing and potential challenges in meeting them. 

However, it is equally important to share these results with the product, marketing, and sales departments since each affects customer satisfaction in one way or another. Through joint discussion and analysis of the results, you can get an agreed action plan and improve the customer experience at all touchpoints with your business.

Implement Customer Satisfaction Surveys and Boost Your Business

Increasing the number of customers is a strategic objective for the business. Therefore, the struggle for consumer preference is determined not only by the quality of products but also by the high-quality service provided by the company's personnel.

For the company, marketing research on customer satisfaction becomes essential to increase the enterprise's competitiveness. By all means, it is necessary to determine the buyer's needs, then analyze the proposed products' compliance with the client's needs, and identify the consumer category. If this stage is completed and "own" consumers are identified, they begin to directly measure customer satisfaction. Consumers themselves are the source of information.

However, don’t forget about the degree of customer satisfaction. Agree there is a difference between a "completely satisfied" client and "just satisfied". The consumer, whose expectations were fully justified, will use the goods and services of the company they like in the future and will become “promoters” of the company among their friends and relatives. Therefore, increasing customer satisfaction is especially important. And, customer feedback surveys, of course help the company become better.

Customer Satisfaction Survey Templates: how Claspo can Help you

You can conduct a survey directly on your website using eye-catching Claspo pop-ups. According to statistics, feedback pop-ups have a 12% conversion rate. So, you can get 1,200 responses from every 10,000 site visitors and use these valuable insights for analysis. Also, Claspo integrates with many CRMs and ESPs, which means customer responses are automatically transferred to the selected system for further interaction with each respondent. But these are not all the reasons to use Claspo for your customer satisfaction surveys:

Simple Creation Process 

Claspo has several ready-made pop-up templates with different types of customer satisfaction survey questions. By choosing one of them, you can always customize all the elements to suit your purposes and adapt the design to your branding. 

But in fact, you can turn any pop-up into a survey thanks to the components mentioned above - radio buttons, checkboxes, drop-down lists, and text input. If radio buttons and drop-down lists allow your customers to select only one of the predefined options, then with checkboxes, they can choose several.

Pre-Designed Respondent Journey

Our smart editor guards the customer experience and your response rate. Using one of our survey templates, you get two more pop-ups. One appears automatically if the customer tries to submit a form without answering the required question. In contrast, the other appears if the customer successfully completes the survey and thanks them for the feedback. Naturally, you can also customize the texts and designs of these auxiliary pop-ups.

Advanced Display Rules 

With Claspo, you can control when and where your pop-up with a customer satisfaction survey appears since pop-ups with the proper context always convert better. 

You can display your pop-up survey if the customer spent a certain amount of time on the website, scrolled down the page to a certain point, or remained inactive. In this case, your survey pop-up can clarify whether they have any difficulties and need help. This survey helps you understand whether your website is intuitive and the user journey is smooth. In the future, you can use these answers to improve your UX design. 

Alternatively, you can invite customers to survey if they intend to leave your site without purchasing. This survey can show you what prevents a customer from making an online purchase - perhaps you have poor product descriptions, your assortment does not meet their expectations, or they are simply waiting for a sale. This way, you will better understand your audience along with their motivations and requirements and be able to adjust your online strategy.

Detailed Targeting 

Claspo allows you to show your customer satisfaction survey to not all website visitors but to a specific segment. 

For example, you ask your Instagram followers to complete a survey for a bonus. Or you launched an email campaign inviting you to take a survey. In both cases, you can specify the appropriate UTM parameters in your pop-up settings, and it will be displayed on the website only for those visitors who came from a specific source or a specific campaign. 

Claspo also allows displaying a pop-up survey depending on the country, region, and city where your customers are located. For example, you can conduct an on-site survey only for an audience from the USA or create different surveys for different countries. Moreover, if your audience is multilingual, you can create one pop-up and add your message in several languages. In this case, your customer satisfaction survey will be displayed in the language selected on your website or your customer's browser.

Redirection Function

Your customer satisfaction survey may include many detailed questions that simply cannot fit into one pop-up. But in this case, you can use a pop-up to redirect customers to your survey page quickly.

Such a pop-up can briefly describe your survey topic, show the bonus that a customer can receive for their feedback, a call to action, and, of course, a redirecting button. However, you can still apply advanced display rules and targeting options to ensure that only the right audience is invited to your survey.