A customer satisfaction survey is one of the best and most straightforward ways to check the pulse of your customers.
Here you can find an example of several customer satisfaction surveys you can use in various situations. You can also customize them based on specific goals.
For now, let’s focus on the universal customer satisfaction survey.
What should you ask?
In general, a customer satisfaction survey should contain both closed-ended and open-ended questions. Closed-ended questions allow you to quantify the visitors’ reactions to your website and identify patterns such as many people complaining about a specific problem. Open-ended questions, on the other hand, allow you to gather valuable suggestions or recommendations from the users.
We created several survey examples you can preview and use.
Post-purchase Customer Satisfaction Survey
When: After the purchase
Placement: Success page, post-purchase email
This is the first page your customers will see if they click on your survey. We suggest adding a small incentive to boost the open and completion rate!
The first question should have the answers that are easily quantifiable. In this case, you are asking the customers to grade the quality of their shopping experience. This will allow you to immediately spot the pattern in customer satisfaction.
The next question refers to customer satisfaction with your website. You want to know whether they found the product(s) and information they were looking for.
Another important factor in onsite shopping experience is being able to find a helping hand if they cannot find what they are looking for or need additional information.
Furthermore, you’ll want to know if there were any difficulties during the purchasing process.
The last question should allow the customer to clarify the problems they encountered or give their suggestions and recommendations.
And finally, an incentive – you can always give your customers something in return for making time to give meaningful feedback.
Of course, what the incentive will be depends entirely on you and your business’ capabilities.
Customer Satisfaction Survey
When: After testing the product
Placement: Follow-up email
Now, let’s focus on the next step. The first survey we’ve shown you focuses on the customer’s interaction with your website and purchasing process. After a while, you will want to know how they feel about your product.
This customer satisfaction survey is what you need for an efficient follow-up.
In this customer satisfaction survey, we focus on the product. Depending on whether you run the immediate post-purchase survey, you can decide whether you will include the first question.
You can ask the customers about the overall shopping experience, or skip it and go straight to questions about the product. Start by asking how long they have been using it. Apart from giving you an idea of how people react to your product immediately, it can also show you if there is a critical point in time when your product starts showcasing flaws.
The follow up questions reserved for concerns or praise can be open-ended.
Finally, you’ve probably heard that recommendation is one of the most powerful drivers of brand awareness, customer loyalty, and sales. According to Nielsen and Roper Reports, 92% of all customers say that a recommendation is the “leading reason they buy a product or service.” So, make sure whether they would recommend your product.
At the end of this customer satisfaction survey, we included an opt-in form, but you can skip it if you already have customers automatically signed up for your newsletter.
Offsite Customer Satisfaction Survey
When: After buying your product
Placement: Newsletter, embedded on your website, social media
Finally, if you sell products and services offline, we made a customer satisfaction survey that is adjusted to the specific needs of business owners with physical stores. For this survey, we used an imaginary coffee shop as an example.
Since this survey isn’t readily available and many of the respondents will have to log into their accounts to fill them out, we recommend that you include some incentive. This is how we did it.
This survey follows a similar template as the previous one. It includes the following questions.
- How often do you come to Donnie’s Coffee?
- How would you rate the quality of our coffee drinks?
- What would make our coffee better?
- How would you rate the quality of our service?
- How could our service improve?
- Which coffee do you order most often?
- Tell us if there are any types of coffee, coffee flavors or snacks you’d like us to add to our menu.
Most of them are closed-ended questions, such as this one…
Or this one, which allows you to nail down your most popular products. You can play around by adding image-based questions.
This survey has 7 questions. Four of them are closed-ended and three of them are open-ended. While the former allows you to quantify customers’ satisfaction and feedback, the latter allows you to make sense of it and gather valuable insight into the direction which your product development should take.
These surveys can be run periodically, and you can send them to your email subscribers, run them as ads or regular content on your social media accounts, and embed them on your website.
Three golden rules
When you make customer satisfaction surveys, you want to make sure you follow three rules.
1. Keep it simple
First, the language you use should be clear, concise, and understandable. Avoid technical words and expressions, as well as jargon. Your questions should be easily understood by any person among your target audience.
Second, keep questions simple and unambiguous. Avoid cramming several questions into one (for example, “is this website informative and easy to use?”). One question, one answer.
2. Keep it short and informative
In general, the less time the survey takes the greater the completion rate. Don’t ask unnecessary questions. Focus on your goals. Do you want to know how the customer decided to buy your product? Stick to that. Do you want to know what the customer thinks about your product? Avoid asking about other things.
If you have several points of concern when it comes to your customers’ satisfaction, simply make several surveys and distribute them in different touch points.
3. Run split tests
Finally, once you make a survey, fine-tune them by running split tests and go with the one that has a better completion rate. Your goal here is to gather as much feedback as possible. Sometimes a little re-wording or switch can go a long way.
What should you know before you start a survey?
Before you make and distribute customer satisfaction survey make sure you as yourself these five questions.
1. Who is your target audience?
Your customers may buy the same product, but they often do it for different reasons and purposes. Each target market consists of several distinct groups of customers (also known as buyer personas) and your survey response rate will be larger if you cater to their specific needs or experiences.
This is why we differentiated the immediate post-purchase survey and product-focused survey. Both measure customer satisfaction, but at different stages of their experience with your business. So, before you start a survey, define who the target customers are – onboarding customers, those that are still trying out the product, or the loyal customers.
2. What do you want to know?
Define what kind of information is the goal of your customer satisfaction survey. For example, our first survey focuses strictly on the shopping experience, while the second one is product related. The third one is not that hyperfocused, as it inquires about the shopping experience, the product quality, and the most popular products.
3. What to do with the results?
Since surveys require work and planning, don’t let it go to waste. Customer satisfaction survey results should serve as a guide for your product and service development, so define how you’re going to put both positive and negative feedback into action.
4. What kind of survey should you use?
Are you going to use a paper-based or online survey? Each has its pros and cons, but online surveys come with significantly smaller expenses.
5. How will satisfaction be measured?
You should set a scale and benchmarks for acceptable results and the results that would prompt you to action.
Conclusion
Now you are all set up to make your own customer satisfaction survey!
Want to try it straight away? All you need to do is sign up here. You get 14 days to try our survey maker for free. You can use the template we provided, edit it, or make as many new surveys, forms, and quizzes as you want! Give it a try!
