What is a customer satisfaction survey?

Do you know how satisfied your clients are with your services, products and their overall experience with your company? If your answer is “not really”, then you need to take action and find out ASAP.

“Customer satisfaction” is a crucial aspect of your business that you need to assess continuously if you want to survive and thrive in the long term.

And if your company is bigger than a mom-and-pop where you have direct feedback from your clients, then you need to start using surveys.

Customer satisfaction surveys are valuable tools that help businesses discover the level of satisfaction of their clients with the company’s products or services.

Through these surveys, you can discover:

Your happiest clients that you can then turn into ambassadors;
Your unhappy clients and the situations that lead to their dissatisfaction that need to be fixed;
The overall level of satisfaction with your company/brand.

The end goal of these surveys is to give you actionable feedback from your consumers that you can then apply to improve customers experience with your products and services.

Why are customer satisfaction surveys important?

Because they help you determine the level of customer satisfaction, so you know what works, what doesn’t and what you need to improve to offer a better experience for your clients.

Determining CSat (Customer Satisfaction) is crucial to your business because the cost of acquiring a new customer is usually 10x bigger than the cost of keeping one that already bought from you.

People tend to expect things to go well, to receive what they are paying for, so they are less likely to talk about your service or product if all goes well, but if something is off, they are more likely to talk about this with other people about their bad experience which leads to bad publicity.

According to a survey ran by American Express, customers talk on average to 9 other people about their positive experiences and to 16 other people about their negative experiences.

Other stats on how people behave in the case of a bad experience vs. a positive experience show that if the customers are not satisfied, 13% of them will tell to 15 or even more people that they are unhappy.

On the other hand, 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people according to Esteban Kolsky.

Bad experiences are the main reason for a high churn rate (up to 67%) but only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain. The rest just leave.

In conclusion, keeping a close eye on customer satisfaction is mandatory for your success as a business.

Types of customer satisfaction surveys

According to the survey goal

Depending on the main goal of the customer satisfaction survey, there are different types of implementations:

Product surveys

The questions on this type of survey will uncover how your customers feel about aspects of your product such as quality, the length of life, design, consistency, processability, and range of products.

Another factor that can be revealed by this type of survey is the gap between the customer’s expectations and the real product quality.

Staff & service surveys

This type of customer satisfaction survey will reveal how your clients feel about key aspects of your staff and service.

Starting with representative’s availability and knowledge, the reliability of returning calls, courtesy from sales staff, friendliness of the sales staff, complaint resolution, responsiveness to inquiries, technical service and ending with the after sales service

Delivery surveys

Order delivery surveys are key for keeping an eye on the quality of your delivery service. You want to know for example if your clients have received their delivery on time and if the package was intact and not damaged during the transport.

Pricing surveys

What is your customers’ perception of the price they paid? You might want to ask questions about the perceived market price, total cost of use and value for money.

NPS surveys

The Net Promoter Score NPS is a simple metric that is deeply concerned with one thing: gauging customer loyalty. It was introduced by Fred Reichland’s Harvard Business Review article “One Number you Need to Grow”.

You can read more about the NPS score and how to implement an NPS survey using Omniconvert

The single most important question of NPS survey is: ‘How likely is it that you recommend [the company/website] to a friend?’. In addition, for a more detailed analysis, you can ask a follow-up question such as ‘How likely are you to buy again from [the company/website]?’.

The satisfaction score is calculated based upon one question by sorting respondents into Promoters, Neutrals and Detractors, followed by subtracting the percentage of respondents that are Detractors from the percentage that are Promoters.

Survey implementation types

You can do the surveys only on mobile and have mobile surveys, website surveys, or send surveys on email.

According to technical solution

Popup survey

This is one of the most common technical solutions appropriate for short and logic branching surveys, where the next question depends on the answer one chooses in the previous question.

They are a great solution to discover the needs, worries, and concerns of your visitors and treat them on the spot.

Static page survey

A static page survey means that all of your questions are displayed on a single page, on your website. This solution is better for longer surveys, which have more than 5 or 6 questions. Another scenario for when this type of survey can be used is when you’d like to link directly to it either from an email, an article or from the footer of the website for example.

Embeddable iframes

Embeddable iframes allow you to insert another HTML document inside a webpage. This means you can build your survey using your chosen service and then insert it in your website in a specific page.

How often should you run a client satisfaction survey?

There are several recommendations for this question, but the overall consensus is that measuring customer satisfaction should be a continuous process.

Because whatever you find out at a certain moment in time, that survey data will reflect people’s views and your company’s performance at that moment.

But everything changes, including your customers’ needs, views and perceptions of your products and that’s why it’s important to be conducting such surveys on a regular basis.

Here are the three major client survey types that combined will give you the most accurate image of your customers’ satisfaction:

Survey right after purchase – to reveal CS at that particular moment and thus lay the base for a good relationship with those customers.

Periodical surveys – to discover how specific segments of your customers are experiencing your products, at certain moments in time.

Ongoing surveys – so you can permanently take the pulse of your customers’ satisfaction and make sure you are maintaining high-quality standards. The most common type of survey here is the NPS, see below for more details on types of surveys.

Customer satisfaction surveys questions examples

The list below is not exhaustive, but it will give you the main types of questions used in surveys, and a few hints on why and when to use them. Can be considered as a customer satisfaction survey template.

The Dichotomous Survey Question

This is generally a “yes/no” question. For example:

Did you find what you were looking for?
Yes
No

This is a good start to segment your audience from the beginning and addresses each segment accordingly.

To those who answer “no”, you can display a second question to offer customer care assistance for example.

Or you can ask them if they ever bought or not from your website.

The idea is to tailor a custom experience to each segment.

The Multiple Choice Questions

The multiple-choice question consists of three or more exhaustive, mutually exclusive categories. Multiple choice questions can ask for single or multiple answers and are some of the most used customer satisfaction survey questions.

Here’s an customer satisfaction survey template example of a single choice question for your survey :

Here is a sample question where you expect multiple choices:

It’s important always to include an “Other” option, where people can write whatever fits their situation, as it’s impossible to cover all the options possible

Likert scale questions

The likert scale questions are questions that ask the respondents if they agree or disagree with a statement. This rating scale usually have 5 or 7 points so there is always a neutral point in the middle of it. So those who don’t have a strong opinion can choose that option.

Advantages:
You can measure either broad areas or specific aspects of your business
They are more precise than the dichotomous questions
Easy to make and extract customer insights

Disadvantages:
They don’t give you customer insights about the “why”
You have to work before launching the website feedback survey to identify what aspects are most important to measure customer satisfaction.

Semantic differential

In this case each end of the scale is marked with different or opposing statements such as “short/long”, “easy/difficult”, etc.

Advantages:
Allows you to assess an intuitive or conceptual response about a product or service
Offers easy to compile results

Disadvantages:
It can be difficult for respondents to choose a survey response if there are too many options
The relativity of what one considers a waiting time “short” or “long” as it’s the case for the above question; someone might feel like “3 minutes” it’s a short time and another might say this too “long”.
Doesn’t tackle the issue of “why”

Open-ended questions

These type of questions don’t offer any predefined answer to choose from. They allow the respondents to freely write about their experience.

Here’s an example:

Advantages
Allows users to define what matters to them
Gives you insights into the exact language they use

Disadvantages
Can be more time consuming for your respondents
Can feel like it requires a big effort and have fewer respondents
Can be difficult to compile and analyze

Sample questions for customer satisfaction surveys

Because the attention span of online visitors gets shorter and shorter every year, it’s important to keep your surveys short, concise and to the point.

It’s important to ask the right questions so you can get feedback (feedback question) on the information that most interests you.

For example, you can choose to ask your clients about their level of satisfaction regarding a particular product satisfaction, a service or their overall satisfaction with your company.

Here are some sample questions. All these example questions are used along with 5 possible answers to choose from, that reflect how much the respondent agrees or disagrees with each statement:

Sample Questions about Client Service Surveys:

Are the client service representatives well trained?
Are company service representatives behaving in a professional manner?
Do the client service representatives act in my best interest of the client?
How satisfied are you with the client service representatives?

Sample Questions about Product Surveys:

Is this one of the best products you could have bought?
Is this product exactly what you needed?
Are you satisfied with your decision to buy this product?

Sample Net Promoter Score questions

The standard NPS survey looks like this:

If you want to get more insights you can, of course, add more questions to this one to get feedback for improvement:

What can we do to improve?
What did we do well?

But the classical Net Promoter Score survey, the one that’s very easy and really quick to fill in, has one, maximum two questions. These are just a few examples of surveys.

You can create your first survey and obtain valuable customer feedback in just a few clicks using Omniconvert, a simple online survey sofware.

In the next section, I’ll show you exactly how to do this, step-by-step.

How to create customer satisfaction surveys with Omniconvert
Try our Customer survey Software!

Log into Omniconvert. Then, simply go to Surveys > Create New Survey. Choose how you want your survey to be displayed, as a pop-up or a widget:

Try our Survey Software.

After you choose the type, you can start writing your questions and choose the types of answers.

As you can see in the image above you can choose between small or large text answer, multiple choices (checkboxes), unique choice, images, dropdown, scale, grid or NPS.

If you want to use the “logic branching/triggering” feature you’ll have to click on the “Advanced settings” and this is what you’ll see:

This is an awesome feature that allows you to create a unique journey for each respondent, according to their answers. You can display to someone who answered “yes” a different next question than to someone who answered “no.” And you can do this for every question, along with the other advanced options available.

In the next step, you can enable the “Lead collector” option if you want to use it. This is how it looks like if you enable the lead capture form. A new section allows you to insert a text before your lead form if you want to.

After you choose the mandatory fields for your lead collector, such as name or email address, you need to decide where those leads will be collected. We have integrations with major email marketing automation providers and with Zapier, which allows you to connect Omniconvert with hundreds of apps and services.

Next step is to edit your survey, so it looks professional and trustworthy. It’s highly recommended to brand your surveys with your company name and logo, so your respondents feel safe when answering.

Then navigate to the “General style” section where you can:

Select the triggering method
Set up the triggering time delay
Insert your logo
Edit the background color, text color, and size etc.

In the “Question screen style” section you have access to preview buttons for “Desktop”, “Phone”, “Tablet”, so you can see how your survey looks like on different screens before you publish it. There are also options that allow you to choose a predetermined color theme in “Themes” or customize whatever you want if you know how to code in the “Advanced CSS” section.

You can also select your audience, the website where you’ll run the survey and how often will people see it, or the percentage of your visitors that you want to be exposed to the survey. In “Scheduling” you decide when your survey will start, for how long and in the advanced part you can choose if you want to exclude certain weekdays and other geeky stuff.

Another cool feature is the fact that you can “Preview” your client satisfaction survey to make sure everything looks fine and then hit “Publish”.

Give Omniconvert a try if you want to create your own intelligent and beautiful surveys. You can sign up for a free trial and play around to see how easy it is to create, run and collect super valuable survey data through customer satisfaction surveys.

We’re a team of people that want to empower marketers around the world to create marketing campaigns that matter to consumers in a smart way. Meet us at the intersection of creativity, integrity, and development, and let us show you how to optimize your marketing.

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

Why are customer satisfaction surveys important?