We’ve all taken them. We’ve all abandoned poorly written, unclear, too specific or too general customer satisfaction surveys. We opened the survey in good faith, ready to provide wisdom to the organisation that seemed to care about our opinion, only to find leading questions geared towards receiving glowing reviews.

There is an art to writing an effective customer satisfaction survey. To that end, we’ve compiled 50 customer satisfaction survey question examples and tips to avoid common mistakes when crafting them.

Customer satisfaction surveys enable you to evaluate customer sentiment at a micro or macro level. This includes customers’ general level of satisfaction with your product or service, their experiences with your customer service, their happiness with your organisation and more. The Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score survey is the most popular customer feedback survey to measure satisfaction.

The Customer Satisfaction Score metric is a measurement that determines how happy customers are with an organisation, its products or services and its capabilities.

CSAT asks: “How would you rate your experience with our (fill in the blank)?”, where the responses range from “Very satisfied” to “Very dissatisfied”.

To calculate your CSAT score, divide the number of satisfied customers by all your respondents and multiply the result by 100. You’ll end up with a percentage; the higher it is, the more satisfied your customers are. Check out our ultimate guide to the Customer Satisfaction Score to learn CSAT best practices, industry benchmarks and more. 

Now that you know about the customer satisfaction survey questions you can ask, let’s talk about common mistakes when building the survey, and what you can do to correct them!

When your answers don’t include the response your participant wants, you’ve created a frustrated experience for your respondents. They're now faced with the decision of answering inaccurately, skipping the question or abandoning the questionnaire altogether. Not very productive. To let your question be inclusive of all opinions, offer an “I don’t know” answer choice or an “other” textbox or comment field. 

This question-writing mistake is as simple as it sounds. Take the following as an example:

What if your service was impeccable but the food was lacking? If there’s no way for the customer to answer this question accurately, you’ll get skipped questions or, perhaps even worse, inaccurate responses. Make sure you’re asking for one distinct answer per question.

Returning to our example, you can break up the prompt:

Yes, it would be great if every single question in your customer satisfaction feedback survey was answered thoughtfully and completely. That just doesn’t happen in the real world; people are busy and get distracted. Sometimes, a question is missed as an oversight; sometimes, the respondent doesn’t want to provide the information; and sometimes, they’re just confused by the question. If you require an answer to every single question – even the most rudimentary ones – you’ll find that many respondents will leave your survey. So keep the required questions to a minimum and let them skip what they want.

Don’t interrogate your kind participants with page after page of highly detailed questions about every aspect of your business. If you keep your client feedback survey as succinct as possible, you’ll have a better chance of obtaining meaningful data. Remember, you can always do follow-up surveys, and you’ll learn more with each poll you do.

It’s easy to ask a lot of questions in order to obtain as much information as you can. But each survey should have a specific goal in mind, one that every question should help achieve. Stay focused on your goal and you’ll obtain valuable information.

It’s hard to be objective when you think your customer service is outstanding. Take a step back from what you think you know and let your shoppers do the talking. Avoid embellishing your questions with superlatives. Take the following prompt:

This is a leading question as it describes the reps as “friendly”. As a result, it isn’t likely to provide accurate results. Instead, ask a focused question about an aspect of your customer service, such as:

It’s hard for most people to accurately determine what they may or may not do in a hypothetical situation. Don’t fabricate customer service “what if” situations that may not have happened to the respondent. Instead, focus on uncovering real customer service issues.

For instance, avoid question prompts like:

And instead, ask:

Pro tip: Use a Likert Scale rating question to ask customers to rate their experiences.

If your participants have to read questions several times in order to understand them, or if they’re repeatedly asked to write essay-like responses, you’ll end up with a lot of abandoned questionnaires. Write questions that can be easily scanned and that don’t require a lot of time to answer.

To make this point more concrete, let’s compare two question prompts that are ultimately asking the same thing. Here’s one that’s direct and simple:

Now see what happens when you make it ultra-specific and long:

You’re probably eager to collect as much information as you can from each survey, but avoid the temptation. Customer service surveys that veer off course and ask seemingly unrelated questions can distract or confuse the respondent and, in some cases, may even evoke suspicion.

The examples are seemingly endless and can be anything from…

to…

You could ask the following question with “yes” or “no” answer options:

But there’s a subtle spectrum of positive and negative responses. To obtain even richer data, try asking a “how” question with available responses such as “extremely professional”, “somewhat professional” and “not at all professional”. In short, modify the question prompt to “How professional is our company?”

At SurveyMonkey, we’ve developed a collection of methodologist-certified customer satisfaction survey templates to get you started quickly and easily. Of course, you’re always welcome to customise the questions to make your survey as specific as you’d like.

Use this customer satisfaction survey template to measure consumer satisfaction with your company, product and services. Use skip logic to allow your customers to answer questions about products or services they’ve used and to gain insights for improvement.

See how your frontline customer service and support agents are doing. Measure customer service hold times, problem resolution, product/service knowledge and representative attitude.

This customer satisfaction survey template is designed for when your clients aren’t just clients; they’re businesses too. Identify how satisfied your customers are with your timeliness, professionalism and service.