50 Examples of Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

  • Updated: March 19, 2024
Andrew Dennis
Andrew Dennis
Customer survey questions

Organizations often make assumptions about their products and services, and overestimate how satisfied their customers are. 

This is highlighted in a Bain & Company report that found 80% of companies believed they delivered a “superior” customer experience. In reality, only 8% of customers agreed. The same report found that while 95% of high-level management teams claimed to be “customer-focused”, only 30% maintained customer feedback loops.

This satisfaction gap creates rifts between perception and reality and leads companies down the wrong paths, resulting in customer churn and misaligned products and services. The answer is often quite simple – simple surveys to collect customer feedback for gauging sentiment and satisfaction.

But what types of questions should you ask your customers? 

In this article, we present examples of customer satisfaction survey questions to help companies collect actionable feedback that highlights needs, closes sentiment gaps, and bridges customer needs to product and service development.

What Is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?

A customer satisfaction survey enables companies to measure and understand customer sentiment toward products and services, as well as overall customer experience. Customer satisfaction surveys are crafted to gather detailed feedback that informs specific goals, such as evaluating customer preferences, identifying behavioral trends, creating user journeys, and analyzing the effectiveness of a particular solution. Surveys are delivered directly to customers through in-app pop-ups, chatbots, email campaigns, and other types of survey mediums.

50 Examples of Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

Your customer survey questions will depend on your product or service, the survey medium you’re prompting users with – for example, in-app survey questions – and more. However, there are default, straightforward survey questions you can tweak for your contextual customer sentiment feedback survey.

We’ve curated a list of common customer sentiment survey questions across buckets of categories, including:

Examples of Customer Experience Survey Questions

  • How would you describe your overall experience with our company?
  • Can you tell us about a positive interaction you’ve recently had with our company?
  • Are you satisfied with the quality and speed of our service?
  • Could you navigate our website/mobile app easily? 
  • Did you encounter any challenges during the purchasing/checkout process? 
  • Did our product/service meet your expectations? 
  • How likely are you to recommend our product/service?
  • On a scale of 1 to 5, rate how seamless your experience was with our product/service. 
  • Could you find the information you were looking for easily?

Examples of Customer Sentiment Survey Questions

  • On a scale of Very Unlikely to Very Likely, how likely are you to continue using our product/service in the future? 
  • On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our product/service?
  • Does our product/service help you meet your goals as a [job title]?
  • Are there specific features of our product/service that you’re most satisfied with?
  • Did you find our product/service user-friendly? 
  • Do you find that our product/service provides good value for its price?
  • On a scale of 1 to 5, how well do we tailor our features/offerings to meet your needs as a [job title]?

NPS Surveys and Customer Loyalty Questions

  • On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to others?
  • For Detractors: Please explain why you gave a rating of [customer’s rating]. What can we do to improve? 
  • For Passives: Can you provide additional feedback on what we can do to make you more likely to recommend our product/service? 
  • For Promoters: What do you value most about our product/service? 
  • How does our product/service/company compare to others in the market? 
  • On a scale of ‘Never’ to ‘Very Often,’ how often do you actively promote or talk about our products/services to others?
  • How likely are you to explore other products/services our company offers? 
  • Would you consider our company your first choice for similar needs in the future?
  • On a scale of ‘Very Unlikely’ to ‘Very Likely,’ how likely would it be for you to switch to a competitor if they offered a similar product/service?

Questions for Collecting Product Feedback

  • On a scale of ‘Never’ to ‘Very Often,’ how frequently do you use our product/service? 
  • What use cases/goals/tasks do you typically use our product/service to achieve? 
  • How has our product/service positively impacted your day-to-day responsibilities? 
  • How satisfied are you with [specific feature]? 
  • Would you like to see improvements made to [specific feature]? 
  • Would you be open to providing a testimonial or review for our product/service?
  • What improvements would you suggest for the user interface or design?
  • Please rate the following features on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is ‘Not important at all’ and 5 is ‘Extremely important’.

Questions on Customer Support

  • On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate the responsiveness of our customer service team?
  • Did our customer service team resolve your ticket/inquiry to your satisfaction?
  • Can you recall a specific positive experience with our customer service team?
  • Did you find our self-service resources and FAQs helpful?
  • Are you satisfied with the availability and responsiveness of our customer support channels?
  • Did our customer service team exceed, meet, or fall short of your expectations?
  • How likely are you to seek assistance from our customer service team in the future?
  • Did our customer service team keep you informed about the status of your inquiries or issues?
  • How would you describe how our customer service compares to other companies in the market?

Marketing Research Questions

  • What factors influenced your decision to choose our product/service over competitors? 
  • How did you first hear about our company/product/service?
  • What companies/products/services did you evaluate before deciding to purchase our product/service? 
  • Can you share examples of how our product/service offering has made a difference for you?
  • How would you describe your current perception of our product/service within the market landscape?
  • Are there emerging trends or features in the market that you would like to see in our product/service?
  •  Who or what most influences your purchasing decisions for products/services similar to ours? 
  • Which online platforms do you use most frequently to research or learn about similar products/services?

Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys may only need a few straightforward questions, while more complex products or questions require longer qualitative responses to gather actionable feedback.

You could also opt for brief surveys at specific parts of your customer journey and more comprehensive product feedback surveys during others. These stark differences are influenced by factors such as the behavior or preferences of your target audience, the type of product or service you’re delivering, or the kind of insights you want to explore.

Let’s explore a few different types of customer satisfaction surveys that you can start building today:

1. Multiple-choice questionnaires

Companies who want to collect quantitative data or analyze apparent trends can use multiple-choice questions to collect standardized feedback efficiently. These surveys require respondents to choose from several pre-determined responses.  

For example, you can drill down on your customer experience for a specific transaction or determine a feature in your product or service that customers like best. Surveys with multiple-choice questions are a good fit if you’re looking for concise feedback that you can interpret quickly and at scale. 

You can use it to capture pre- and post-purchase satisfaction, demographic information, or customer requests for future product developments.

2. Open-ended questionnaires

Unlike multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions help companies collect feedback on factors that cannot simply be bucketed into a few pre-determined choices. These questions require customers to share their unique opinions and experiences with more detail or context. Instead of capturing obvious trends and patterns, these questions are useful for helping companies understand customer sentiment and perception.

Open-ended responses are much more difficult to analyze, especially at scale. Still, they equip teams with rich information that is sometimes necessary to inform strategic discussion and product explorations.

3. Likert-scale surveys

These survey questions measure a specific range of agreement, satisfaction, or likeliness. For example, you can use a Likert scale to see how likely customers will recommend your product to their peers. 

The response to this question would include a scale of text or numbers depicting the intensity of your customer’s likeliness — from ‘Very likely’ to “Very unlikely,’ for instance. This question type is most commonly used to measure customers’ attitudes or sentiments about your brand, such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey analyzes how likely a customer will recommend a product or service to others. 

You can also use a Likert scale to capture how customers rate a particular product or experience, how often they use a feature, how satisfied they are with product or service quality, or how likely they are to use your product again.

Whatfix-likert-feedback-example

4. Single-choice questions

As the name implies, these questions require customers to select only one response between two options. A single-choice question commonly prompts customers to select between yes and no or true and false. 

These questions can be answered promptly, so they’re suitable for simple surveys that quickly gather real-time customer feedback about specific interactions or transactions. For example, you can use this question to identify if customers found it easy to complete an action or found a customer service resource helpful.

customer-feedback

Benefits of Collecting Customer Satisfaction Survey Data

It’s virtually impossible to track and measure customer satisfaction across different factors without collecting direct feedback. Implementing customer satisfaction surveys at specific milestones in the user journey can help you prevent bottlenecks and anticipate challenges. 

This proactive approach to customer engagement provides organizations benefits such as:

1. Grow revenue and reduce churn

Customer satisfaction surveys give businesses direct insight into what customers want. Your organization can identify pain points to prevent customer churn. These surveys also allow you to proactively spot trends that you can turn into opportunities for increasing customer engagement, improving service quality, and ultimately attracting and retaining customers by building trust in your brand. 

Equipping yourself with deep visibility into customer sentiment and satisfaction helps you prioritize projects and initiatives that impact your bottom line, whether by driving more sales pipeline, expanding opportunities with existing customers, or strengthening your product or service lines through strategic partnerships. Not to mention, good survey responses serve as great proof points to leverage as you build these relationships.

2. Build customer loyalty

From strong customer service to corporate social responsibility, incentives, and technology availability, customer loyalty is born out of holistic brand experiences that cover all bases. For example, strong value alignment with a brand isn’t enough to result in returning customers if a poor experience on a mobile application or website inhibits them from exploring products while they’re on the go. With so many factors to consider when managing customer expectations, customer satisfaction surveys give businesses a clear avenue to gather feedback regularly. Product or customer-facing teams can capture and document complaints, wins, or ideas businesses can use to inform and implement more customer-driven strategies.

3. Iterate and improve products, processes, and services

You can’t improve what you aren’t measuring. You can gain a holistic view of your business by combining quantitative product data from product analytics software and end-user behavioral tools with qualitative data from customer satisfaction surveys. 

You can also deploy targeted surveys to supplement your analysis on specific product paths, website experiments, customer journeys, or workflows. This feedback is crucial in giving you realistic and contextual information from end-users that you can use to improve existing procedures — technical processes in your product, internal collaboration, or back-end and front-end operations. 

With Whatfix’s digital adoption platform (DAP), you can create a customer feedback loop with its in-app surveys and end-user behavioral event tracking to understand where customers are experiencing friction and frustration with your products, digital processes, and services.

whatfix-flow-and-survey

Collect in-app feedback with native surveys, create contextual user onboarding experiences, drive feature adoption, and provide self-help support with Whatfix

Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that enables product managers with a no-code platform to create and launch in-app feedback surveys, product tours, user onboarding checklists, interactive flows, announcements, hotspots, tooltips, self-help wikis, and more – all without engineering dependencies. Analyze your product usage to identify friction areas, understand engagement, and build user cohorts.

Request a Whatfix demo now!

Whatfix also enables organizations to close that feedback loop by making data-driven product decisions based on those qualitative insights and quantitative data to create and launch in-app guidance and contextual support experiences at the moment of need, directly inside their app or website UI. 

For example, imagine your customers are experiencing a high drop-off rate after converting to your paid subscription. You hypothesize that they’re not experiencing early value, and are churning – but you’re not exactly sure where this user friction is occurring. 

Between Whatfix’s Analytics and in-app Surveys, you can collect qualitative customer feedback, as well as quantitative feedback for your dropoff points by exploring customer segments and your journeys.

 

With Whatfix’s Visual Editor, you can create contextual product tours for different end-user segments. Each can include an in-app Task List that provides these new users with specific action items to complete upon signing up for your product – again, each contextual to different types of personas or end-users.

whatfix-visual-editor

Each Task List action item can prompt an in-app Flow that provides step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish a workflow – reducing time-to-proficiency for new end-users by guiding them to their “aha!” moment.

task-list

4. Identify trends across customer segments

Customer satisfaction surveys allow you to access rich data on how customers interact with your product regularly. Depending on the scope of your survey, you can use your survey questions to narrow down on specific behaviors, actions, preferences, and more. 

Analyzing this data set regularly keeps you on the pulse of customer trends and helps you familiarize yourself with your ideal customer persona. You can use customer surveys to enhance your competitive intelligence and adapt your product to market shifts and evolving customer cultures. You’ll also be better positioned to identify patterns or irregularities in customer behavior that can lead to growth opportunities and business risks.

5. Validate business decisions

Gathering feedback from your product and customer teams or your executives isn’t enough to validate significant decisions about a product or service. Ultimately, the most critical voices belong to your customers – they’re using your product or service, after all. 

Instead of assembling a focus group or conducting one-on-one interviews with target customers, you can build and deploy a customer satisfaction survey in minutes to get direct feedback from a larger volume of customers. This helps businesses align themselves with customer expectations without delaying project timelines. 

With the right technology, you can increase your response rate from specific customer segments by implementing in-app surveys at high-impact points in the customer journey.

For example, online gaming app PlayOJO used Whatfix’s DAP to target specific segments of their gaming community with contextual promotions to increase user engagement and improve retention rates – creating in-app messages and prompts at specific times in the user journey that nudged customers to continue playing.

Best Practices for Running Customer Satisfaction Surveys

A customer survey can serve many purposes — from calculating your NPS score to modeling customer retention and measuring customer effort scores. Regardless of what customer survey you’re building or the types of questions you’re using to collect feedback, you’ll want to keep the following framework in mind:

  1. Identify your objective and target audience: Your survey’s content, length, and distribution will depend on the audience demographic you want to explore and the type of information you’re looking to gather. Determining these criteria upfront will help your team avoid drastic do-overs and poor engagement rates later. 
  2. Select the appropriate survey and question type: Choose a survey and question type that aligns with the kinds of responses you’re looking for, the behavior of your audience, and the time and place of survey distribution. For example, an NPS survey may only call for a brief Likert-scale questionnaire while a market research survey would require a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions. 
  3. Keep survey questions short and direct: Build a survey that’s easy to scan and engage with on the device type of your audience’s choice. Avoid using dense blocks of text, jargon, and long-winded questions that make your survey look and feel like it would require significant effort. 
  4. Create a smooth and logical flow of questions: If your survey comprises multiple questions, ensure that each question is arranged in a way that’s easy to follow. For example, you can group questions about specific features or transactions to help customers better organize their thoughts and feedback as they navigate your survey.
  5. Determine the right distribution channels: The success of your survey is ultimately driven by the amount of customers that engage with it. Be strategic about when and how you deliver your survey to capture your customer’s attention when they’re most engaged with your product. Digital adoption platforms like Whatfix allow teams to deliver customer surveys using in-app pop-ups and interactive content displayed at high-intent points in the customer journey. You can use Whatfix’s product analytics tool to supplement your survey delivery with customer segmentation and ongoing analytics to optimize distribution to the right respondents consistently.
Collect in-app feedback, create in-app guidance, and analyze end-user behavior with Whatfix

Whatfix helps companies build and deliver in-app customer satisfaction surveys at impactful, strategic points in the customer journey. With Whatfix’s digital adoption platform (DAP), teams can collect qualitative and quantitative feedback with in-app Surveys and Analytics that collect end-user behavioral data and track custom events.

Empowered with this data, companies can overcome areas of user friction and create frictionless customer journeys that drive end-user adoption with in-app guidance and contextual support. With Whatfix, you can create contextual, segmented in-app widgets that overlay your UI including:

  • Product Tours and Task Lists that welcome new users and guide them to their “aha!” moment.
  • Smart Tips that provide additional context at key moments of friction.
  • Self Help that provides real-time customer support in a resource center that aggregates content and links to your knowledge base, FAQs, product documentation, and in-app guided prompts.
  • Flows that walk end-users step-by-step through complex processes and workflows.
  • Field Validation that provide error messages to end-users when they enter data incorrectly.

Whatfix is a comprehensive platform to analyze products and user behavior, create in-app guidance to overcome areas of friction, and engage end-users with contextual help.

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What Is Whatfix?
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that provides organizations with a no-code editor to create in-app guidance on any application that looks 100% native. With Whatfix, create interactive walkthroughs, product tours, task lists, smart tips, field validation, self-help wikis, hotspots, and more. Understand how users are engaging with your applications with advanced product analytics.

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