Next time you see negative feedback in your customer satisfaction survey, be grateful.
Let me explain why.
Bill Gates once said, ‘Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.’
In other words, customer feedback (both good and bad) helps shape your business’s path forward — you understand what to improve and what to keep doing more of.
And one of the best ways to capture customer feedback is through surveys where you proactively seek feedback to adapt to their preferences and needs.
But what exactly should these surveys include? Which questions should you ask to make the most of it? How should it look? It can be fairly tough to get everything right.
In this blog, we explore the dos and don’ts of setting up a survey and provide 50+ customer satisfaction survey questions you can ask.
I’m sure you’ll have all your doubts resolved.
So, let’s begin.
What are customer satisfaction surveys?
Customer satisfaction surveys are a qualitative tool that helps you understand how satisfied your customers are with your services, products, or websites. Based on the feedback, companies can assess what they are doing right and what they could do better.
Importance of customer satisfaction surveys
There are several advantages to customer satisfaction surveys that businesses might not see unless they have looked into it.
Competitive edge
Listening to your customer allows you to be more agile, responding with the necessary improvement faster than a competitor can. A conversation with your customers provides you with a constant barrage of feedback about what they like and dislike. In turn, it ensures that you are always tuned into what it is your customer wants.
Identify trends
Keeping an eye on consumer behavior changing faster than your competitors can help you spot trends. This gives you time to innovate ahead of the curve and create new services and products to meet customers’ unspoken needs.
Spot negative feedback
Gathering client feedback can let you address complaints before they damage your brand reputation publicly. It’s an early intervention to keep your reputation pure and come across as reliable and trustworthy among your customer base.
Gauge loyalty
Feedback showing appreciation can be extremely satisfying, beyond what numbers can measure. Legitimate expressions of loyalty and appreciation can highlight successes, and can also be leveraged as testimonials.
Shape business decisions
With feedback collected through surveys, you can identify what your customers want and inform your strategic decisions. It ensures that you put your resources into viable ideas and projects to develop usable products and services.
Pro Tip!
Feedback showing appreciation can be extremely satisfying, beyond what numbers can measure.
How to build customer satisfaction surveys
Want to achieve the benefits we described with your website surveys? There are some best practices you must follow. Check them out:
Option to skip questions
Start with asking questions that matter – ‘To what degree are you satisfied with our product?’ and ‘How likely are you to suggest our product to others?’ Give your customers the option to skip the less important ones – ‘Which age group do you belong to?’ ‘How did you get to know us?’
A good mix of open-ended and close-ended questions
Close-ended questions are easy to answer but provide limited insights.
For instance, translating all those ratings into evaluative comments might leave you wondering what, specifically, you need to change. This is where asking open-ended questions that allow your customers to share their thoughts can help uncover what they liked or didn’t like.
Pro Tip!
Ask open-ended questions to allow your customers to elaborate on what they liked or disliked most about their experience on your website. This way, you can capture information that scale ratings might miss.
However, asking too many open-ended survey questions wastes time and can frustrate your customers. Therefore, balance your survey with both open-ended and closed survey questions to get more insights without overwhelming your respondents.
Minimum number of questions
An overlooked mistake is asking customers too many questions.
Customers are often willing to give feedback on your product or services. But don’t spoil their experience by pushing for more information. Survey fatigue kicks in here.
Remember that data quality drops after 10 minutes of fill time, so ensure your surveys can be completed within that time frame.
Simple questions
Your customers are busy. Do them a favor by making your surveys easy to comprehend. If they are faced with a question that they have to think hard about, they will most likely give up midway through a survey.
Look at the options below –
We’re sure you liked the second one.
Avoid asking conditional questions
Avoid asking hypothetical questions, as this approach can make you seem less confident in your business.
For example, a question like ‘If we improve our website navigation, will you engage better and buy from our website?’ comes across as a blatant need for validation.
Additionally, it’s difficult for customers to predict their behavior in a hypothetical situation. Instead, you can ask: “How can we improve our website navigation to make your experience better?”
In this question, the tone focuses on helping customers navigate better and avoids leaving respondents wondering what to answer.
Select the goal of your survey
Yes, customer satisfaction surveys help you assess the satisfaction of your customers, but in which area of your business do you want to assess their satisfaction?
Is it about customer support? Is it about a recent feature you rolled out and want feedback on? Or is it about their overall experience on your website? Your survey should focus on a particular area of your business to ask precise questions and get concrete feedback. This is why you need to make your survey goal specific.
With VWO Surveys of VWO Insights – Web, you can receive AI-generated survey questions tailored to your goals. It doesn’t stop there. You can keep refining them until you’re fully satisfied with their quality. Watch the video below, or if you want to try it yourself, take a free trial today.
Pro Tip!
Make your surveys goal-specific with the help of VWO Surveys to focus on a particular area of your business. This way, you can ask precise questions and get actionable feedback.
Align it with your brand theme
Once you have decided what questions to ask, it’s time to decide on the appearance of your on-page survey.
While basic survey-building tools can help you create a standard survey, if you want your survey to be taken seriously, it should reflect your brand identity and have a professional appearance.
Tools like VWO Surveys enable you to create branded surveys. Not only can you customize the appearance of your survey, but you can also save the new custom theme you’ve created for future use. Need to create a survey in a language other than English for your website in a foreign language? That is also possible with VWO Surveys, as they offer internationalization support. Check out more benefits of our survey feature in this blog.
Examples of customer survey questions
You can’t simply pick general survey questions and expect them to work for every website. Every website is different, the problems each business solves are different, and as we’ve already discussed, the goal of every survey is different.
So, here is a pool of questions from which you can select the most appropriate questions to ask based on your industry, page on your website, and customer experience. Hopefully, this will kick off your journey.
Pro Tip!
Create surveys aligned with your brand theme using VWO Surveys, enabling you to customize your survey’s appearance. This ensures your surveys are consistent with your brand identity, making them more engaging and professional.
eCommerce
1. How satisfied were you with your most recent order on our website? (Scale: 1-5)
2. What specific feature did you find most helpful during your recent purchase?
3. How likely are you to recommend our website to someone you know?
4. Is there anything we could improve to enhance your future shopping experience?
5. Did you encounter any difficulties during the checkout process? (Yes/No)
Service
6. How would you rate the service you received? (Scale: Very satisfied to Very dissatisfied)
7. Can you share an instance where our service exceeded your expectations?
8. Were our service experts helpful and knowledgeable? (Yes/No)
9. What improvements do you suggest to enhance our service quality?
10. How likely are you to continue using our services in the future? (Scale: Likely, Unlikely, Unsure)
SaaS
11. How easy to use do you find our software? (Scale: Excellent to Very poor)
12. What features do you find most valuable in our software?
13. Did our software meet your expectations? (Yes/No)
14. Is there any functionality you would like to see added to our platform?
15. How responsive is our customer support to your queries or issues? (Scale: Very responsive to Not responsive)
Travel & hospitality
16. Overall, how satisfied were you with your most recent visit/experience? (Scale: Very satisfied to Very dissatisfied)
17. What aspects of your stay/experience exceeded your expectations?
18. Would you consider booking with us again in the future? (Yes/No/Maybe)
19. Is there anything we could improve to make your next stay/experience better?
20. Did you find our staff friendly and helpful during your visit? (Yes/No)
eLearning
21. Would you be interested in taking additional online courses from us?
22. Which course topic did you find most valuable and why?
23. Did our platform meet your learning needs? (Yes/No)
24. What additional features or resources would enhance your learning experience?
25. How likely are you to recommend our eLearning platform to others? (Likely, Unlikely, Unsure)
When should you show surveys to avoid disrupting the customer journey? Here are some triggers to help you decide the best time to display your survey and increase submissions.
Agency
26. On a scale of 0-10, how satisfied are you with our agency? (0 = not at all, 10 = extremely satisfied)
27. Can you share a specific project where our agency exceeded your expectations?
28. Did our team communicate effectively and respond promptly to your inquiries? (Yes/No)
29. What improvements do you suggest for us to better meet your business needs?
30. How likely is it that you will continue to work with our agency on future projects?
Finance
31. Can you share a positive experience you’ve had engaging our financial services?
32. Were our financial advisors helpful in addressing your financial goals? (Yes/No)
33. Where do you think we can improve in making your finances feel better?
34. How likely is it that you will allow us to handle your financial affairs over the next 12 months? (Likely, Unlikely, Unsure)
35. Is there any additional feedback you would like to provide?
Homepage
36. On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to keep investigating after spending five minutes on our home page?
37. What specific information or features caught your attention first when you visited our homepage?
38. Is our homepage a good reflection of our values and brand personality? (Yes, Definitely/Yes, Likely/No, Somewhat unlikely)
Product/Service pages
39. Did you find the product/service descriptions comprehensive and informative? (Yes/No)
40. What additional features would solve the current problem you’re facing?
41. How certain are you that these pages provide adequate information about the quality of our products/services? (Very certain, Quite certain, Not too certain, Not certain at all)
Contact/Support page
42. Was the information you needed, or the support you were looking for, easy to find? (Yes/No)
43. Was there anything on this page that you couldn’t find or understand?
44. How likely are you to contact our support team if you are experiencing discomfort on this page? (Very likely, Likely, Neutral, Unlikely, Very unlikely)
Checkout page
45. Did you encounter any issues or obstacles during the checkout process? (Yes/No)
46. What could we do to make the checkout process smoother and more convenient for you?
47. How satisfied are you with the transparency and clarity of the payment process? (Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Dissatisfied, Very dissatisfied)
See below the checkout page survey on OnePlus’s online store:
Product feedback
48. Can you share feedback on a specific product or feature you recently used?
49. How satisfied are you with our product’s performance and reliability? (Options: Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Dissatisfied, Very dissatisfied)
50. What aspect of our products do you find most beneficial or frustrating?
51. How likely are you to purchase our products again in the future? (Options: Very likely, Likely, Neutral, Unlikely, Very unlikely)
52. What improvements or enhancements would you suggest for our product lineup?
Shopclues, an eCommerce brand, aimed to boost visit-to-order conversions on its website. Before taking action, they conducted in-depth visitor behavior research. Using on-page surveys, they gathered feedback on product filters from visitors on their product category page. Implementing changes based on this feedback, they streamlined the search process. As a result, they achieved a 48% increase in visit-to-order conversions from the category page.
Customer sentiment
53. How would you describe your feelings towards our brand/company? (Options: Positive, Neutral, Negative)
54. Can you share a recent experience with our brand/company that left you particularly satisfied or dissatisfied?
55. How well do you think our company understands and addresses your needs and preferences? (Options: Very well, Somewhat well, Not very well, Not at all)
56. What emotions come to mind when you think about our brand/company?
57. How likely are you to continue doing business with our company in the future? (Options: Very likely, Likely, Neutral, Unlikely, Very unlikely)
Market research
58. What factors influenced your decision to choose our company over competitors?
59. How aware are you of our company’s competitors in the market? (Options: Very aware, Somewhat aware, Not very aware, Not at all aware)
60. Can you provide insights into industry trends or changes that could impact our business?
61. How satisfied are you with the variety and selection of products/services offered by our company compared to competitors? (Options: Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Dissatisfied, Very dissatisfied)
62. What do you see as our company’s unique strengths or advantages compared to others in the market?
Customer experience
63. Can you describe a recent experience you had with our company that exceeded your expectations?
64. On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague based on your overall experience?
65. What specific improvements could we make to enhance your future interactions with our company?
66. How satisfied are you with the navigation of our website/mobile app? (Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Dissatisfied, Very dissatisfied)
67. Is there a particular feature or service you wish our company offered to better meet your needs?
Customer support
68. Were you satisfied with the responsiveness of our customer support team to your inquiries or issues? (Yes/No)
69. How would you rate the effectiveness of our customer support in resolving your concerns? (Highly effective, Somewhat effective, Neutral, Not very effective, Not at all effective)
70. What suggestions do you have for improving the quality of our customer support services?
Customer satisfaction survey response analysis made simple with VWO
What is the right way to analyze the responses from the customer satisfaction survey? You must wonder, ‘Is there no magic wand or the best practice to tackle this?’
Well, the AI feature in VWO Surveys is back to help you again.
Gone are the days of the tedious task of sifting through hundreds of survey responses, because the VWO Surveys would summarize survey responses for you.
It will contain the key insights from the survey, any suggestions your customers may have sent your way, and even what action you can take to satisfy them.
You will now be able to take the next step on the insights you uncover. Watch how it works in the video below.
Further, you can slide and dice reports to see responses for a specific segment. Get more details about advanced filtering in this article.
Conclusion
We’ve given you the what and the how. Now all that’s left for you to do is to start making surveys. The ball is in your court. You know what to do. Take a free trial of VWO, play around a little, and see how it works. If you like what you see, you can move over to a paid plan and explore more advanced features. Either way, no pressure. But get started with your surveys. The sooner you unlock these insights, the faster you’ll start winning. All the best!
FAQ
Q1. How long should a customer satisfaction survey be?
Hitting that sweet spot by asking just enough questions without taking up too much of customers’ time is crucial. According to a study, a survey that runs between 10-14 minutes with 7-10 questions should be sufficient to gather insights without overwhelming respondents.
Q2. When should you send a survey to your customers?
Research has found that sending surveys in the mid-day or mid-week results in greater engagement from respondents. If you want to decide precisely when to trigger your survey on your website, you can choose from various options on VWO. Whether it’s based on the time spent on a page exceeding a certain threshold or when a visitor attempts to close the page, there are many options to choose from.
