How to Get Valuable Insights from a Customer Satisfaction Survey

An organization invests serious capital in developing its product. The purpose of that is to create happy and loyal customers. A customer satisfaction survey is a tool that helps companies measure how satisfied the customers are with their products/services.

Depending on how you execute your survey, it can provide a treasure trove of information. This information plays a strategic role in the future of the product and the organization as a whole. This guide will unravel everything you need to know about conducting a customer satisfaction survey, tools to use, and more.

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

The customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey helps you know whether the product or service fulfilled its purpose for your customer. You can conduct customer satisfaction surveys by sending the CSAT survey forms over email, in-app, or text or you can do it via phone calls through a VoIP. However, because of customer attention span and availability, CSAT sent using AMP emails offers deep insights and has a better chance of success. We will explore why later in this guide.

Why is a customer satisfaction survey important?

Understanding if your product or service is meeting its objective is a fundamental question. A customer satisfaction survey helps to get insights into these questions. It helps to determine whether your product or service is doing the job well. If not, why? If yes, how? Is it working only for some types of people? What type?

Once you have the insights from the CSAT survey, it can work in two ways. One way is you tweaking the product to meet the requirements of your target consumer. Second, you focus on the type of consumer your product IS working on and market to them. Which roadmap to take depends on what you want to achieve as an organization. And all of it starts with the customer satisfaction survey.

Types of customer experience surveys

There are different types of customer experience surveys depending on what type of insights you want to gather from the activity.

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a relatively straightforward feedback form. It has one or two questions at most. Its main objective is to know whether the customer seems likely to refer the product to others. Without going into details, this is the fastest way to know if your customers are happy with your product/services.

2. Multiple choice questionnaire

This type of survey offers more freedom to ask different questions concerning the specific information you are aiming to collect. In any case, the guideline is to keep it straightforward so that it is easy to answer from within the multiple options of answers.

3. Multi-step questionnaire

In case you want a more detailed and conditional survey, use a multi-step survey where questions change based on the answers given on the first page. Such surveys help a more detailed insight into the information you require.

4. Likert scale

The Likert scale is another popular survey type. It is also a multiple-choice questionnaire, however, the answers range from ‘most likely’ to ‘highly unlikely’. This type of survey is designed to get more information from the customers, by making it very easy to answer.

5. Rating scale

It is an objective, multiple-choice questionnaire, designed to make it very easy to answer. However, on the rating scale, survey participants have to rate using numbers instead of having answers in the range of likelihood. NPS is a type of rating scale. This type of survey is useful when tracking progress over time. The same survey can be sent to the same target audience over a period. Transition in response ratings is an indication of services/products getting better or worse.

Related guide: 4 Effective Ways to Improve Your NPS Survey Response Rate

5 customer satisfaction survey examples

Here are a few examples of customer satisfaction survey templates.

1. CSAT survey

The template below is a single-page product feedback survey. It uses different answering formats in combination, to engage the target audience better. The questions in the example are about the product, overall experience, net promoter score, and product suggestions.

2. Interactive multi-step survey

The CSAT below is for an organization that offers a variety of products in different packages/bundles. It is a multi-step survey, where the questions on the second page are determined by the answers on the first one.

3. NPS survey

This is an example of a standard NPS survey. It uses some space to communicate your intent to the customer followed by whether they are likely to recommend you to others for your products/services.

4. Event-triggered CSAT survey

This type of CSAT is triggered based on an event like a store visit, customer support interaction, some days before subscription renewal dates, etc. It is focused specifically on the event that triggered it and not based on the overall product experience, like this customer feedback form.

5. Rating scale

The template below is an example of a survey where the answers are in terms of a number rating given to an experience with the product/service. While this example is using a rating scale, a similar survey works for the Likert Scale with answers going from ‘highly unlikely’ to ‘highly likely’. Since these answers are relatively easy to give, you can also convert this to an interactive, multi-page survey, like this event feedback form, should the need arise.

18 customer satisfaction survey questions

It is important to create quick and easy questions to get customers to fill a form. Here are some sample questions based on different contexts:

Product and service

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you with your in-store/online experience today?

2. Would you like to use our product/services again?

3. On a scale of 1 to 10, rate your experience with our services today

4. Which product were you using before ours(enter product name)?

5. Will you refer our product to any of your friends/acquaintances?

6. What did you like when experiencing our product/service?

7. What new feature would you like to have in our product?

Customer support

8. Rate your satisfaction with how our team resolved your issue.

9. How long did our team take to come up with a solution for your issue?

10. Are you happy with the solution that our team offered?

11. How many customer support tickets do you have to raise in a month?

Competition benchmarking

12. Which product were you using before ours(enter product name)?

13. Why did you choose our brand over your previous choice?

Marketing

14. What channel of communication would you like for us to use to reach out to you?

15. How did you hear about our services/product?

Overall

16. An area we can improve upon?

17. What are your biggest concerns, when (usage/feature of your product or service)

Eg: A home services company could ask about a) COVID b)rescheduling appointments c)dissatisfaction with services etc.

18. Do you have any comments/experiences you would like to share with us? (subjective question)

Best practices for creating customer satisfaction surveys

Customer attention span is fickle and precious. Hence, there are some best practices that, if followed, should help to get more responses and better quality data to derive valuable insights.

1. Keep the number of questions to a minimum.

2. Ask to-the-point questions. Avoid asking open-ended questions.

3. Prefer multiple choice answers over subjective answers.

4. Do not ask irrelevant questions. A customer expects you to already have some basic information, like the customer name.

5. Always A/B test your surveys.

Then, there are a few that should help get you a good response in quality and quantity.

1. Use the right channel

Emails are usually the best way to send a CSAT survey because they are non-intrusive, and offer space and opportunity to communicate your message while you ask customers to fill in the feedback form. Even though emails have a lower response rate, the quality of response is high because people who bother to respond to the survey via email are more invested in the brand. However, depending on the customer journey, other channels can also be explored to share the customer satisfaction survey.

2. Avoid redirection to another page

More clicks/breaks in the journey increase the probability of drop-offs. AMP emails bring website functionalities within the email body. That way, you can minimize distractions and drop-offs.

3. Send the survey to the right people

You want to send the survey to someone who has been using your product/services for some time. Such a person has used your product enough times to offer you a quality response and helpful and valuable suggestions. You can segment your audience based on activities or attributes.

4. Send the survey at the right time

You can integrate your automation tool with CRM/Zapier/webhooks. That way you can send the customer satisfaction survey email at the most optimum time to make it most ideal for your customer to respond.

5. Export the responses with integrations

You can integrate your campaign dashboard to excel spreadsheets or other systems and export the submissions. This will help to create instant insights into what your customer is saying about your products/services.

What is the best tool for customer satisfaction surveys?

Email marketing automation tools like Mailmodo are mature, tech-driven, and highly configurable. While a customer satisfaction survey can be conducted in-app or on a redirected link, we have earlier argued that email is by far the most optimal channel for customer satisfaction surveys. That makes it the best tool for customer satisfaction surveys. Here is what you can look for when evaluating a tool:

• AMP emails: No redirection and distraction.

• Interactive form: The form changes based on the previous answer

• Ready to use editable content blocks: Add a survey inside an email. No need to create anything from scratch.

• Collect survey responses directly: Collect them by integrating your app with your marketing automation tool, using Zapier, Webengage, Moengage, Hubspot, etc.

Get more customer feedback with Mailmodo

Mailmodo helps you create AMP emails that are more dynamic and interactive garnering a greater response as compared to other channels. The emails are highly configurable and personalization can be done on the subject line in addition to the text body. Collect CSAT survey responses directly in your app by integrating it with Mailmodo. Check out our guide on conducting surveys with AMP emails to know more.