I recently flew across the country and made a pit stop to take care of business in the bathroom. As I walked out, there were four buttons at the door that would take my temperature of satisfaction, from a yellow happy face to an angry red face. The use of self-generated data as a method of assessing my selection was very simple, and efficient, I conducted a single, non-intrusive customer satisfaction questionnaire.
Being aware of the attitudes we readers respond to with our wallets and emotions is what makes all the different when enhancing the user experience. That I bring you to the definition of a customer satisfaction survey and key considerations while developing the same.
The following is a breakdown of some of the policy changes I’ve examined so that you don’t have to. Below are some of the dos and don’ts from my experience as a layman and as an employee. I will also have other some experts to comment on it. Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
What is customer satisfaction survey?
Overview of Why Carry Out Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Examples of Customer Satisfaction Survey, Techniques, and Sample Templates
Customer satisfaction Question types & Survey Design
Customer Satisfaction Survey Best Practice
Creating Customer Satisfaction Surveys with Help of Artificial Intelligence
How to Apply and Utilise Surveys
In our everyday activity, people complete customer satisfaction questionnaires without noticing it several times per day.
For instance, if, having located the nearest cafe, I sign up for an Uber driver to drive me there and drop me off, I will be asked to rate my driver. Once I have placed my ordering my cup of joe the coffee shop might request me to rate my coffee or the server who brought the coffee to me.
If organisations are posing questions about how satisfied we are with their products and services so regularly, they cannot be harmful, can they? You bet.
Throughout my experience as a marketer and an entrepreneur at Omniscient Digital, I’ve relied on multiple forms of surveys, from a single question survey to a multiple-part question survey to try and understand customer experiences as deeply as I possibly could. Here’s why they matter.
Customer satisfaction surveys: Why they are important.
Surveys about customers can be much more than learning just how much your customers adore your product. Let me enlighten those about what their actual usefulness is.
1. Making your customer happy enhances your product and their experience as well.
From my marketing background I do know that customer feedback is not only a wealth of information about satisfaction but much more. If you let the customers describe what they felt about the products or services they consume, you will learn what needs to remain and probably what might not need to be changed.
To get an actualist’s views, I interviewed Amy Maret who works at HubSpot as a principal researcher for trends and anti-pioneer thoughts leadership and also a ex- market research subordinate. Maret tells that satisfaction surveys help to monitor the one and most valuable relationship – the business- customer one.
“Again and again we observe that offering the very best customer experience is crucial to business success, and therefore the ability to monitor in real time how your clients feel, identify problems as they develop and respond immediately as soon as the satisfaction rate starts worsening is a real boon to any organization,” Maret says.
With Maret I have the same opinion regarding customer relationships, and in my view, one can certainly create a stronger bond with customers by just listening to them.
2. It of course can be helpful in terms of improving customer retention.
The problem with becoming oblivious to why customers leave is that I am unable to prevent such a loss — or attract them back if they are already gone. Ideologically, a customer’s thoughts cannot come directly from me if the customer does not unveal them.
Consider my case with a new coffee shop. I began attending the place for my Coffee fix often until one day a barista informed me that they no longer offer oat milk. They gave me options but I didn’t want them and changed stores.
What’s the lesson? I am not the kind of person who tends to fuss over petty things but if I were offered a customer satisfaction survey I would have made a fuss over my problematic milk.
Maret did confirm that they should ask whether their consumers are happy, she added that they should wonder why not. Indeed, according to Maret, the most effective surveys do more than track the KPIs and, instead, determine which factors influence customers’ satisfaction.
“The instant the business spots unsatisfied customers from their survey, they are able to delve deeper into what exactly is causing that dissatisfaction and then solve those problems – which, as we have seen, results in increased customer satisfaction and therefore reduced customer attrition,” Maret says.
If the right survey is given at the right time, then you will know of the issues and deal with same thus being able to improve on customer retention.
3. Feedback can point at happy customers who in turn can become a reference.
If the customers are for real happy with your goods or service, chances are they are using it not because there’s no other choice, but because they really want to, and these very customers become a part of your marketing arsenal.
During a transition through my previous company I did not know anyone at the new station from where I could get a recommendation on a good barber. All a sudden everyone became the defender of their hairdresser. I was getting all sorts of information on prices, attitudes of the personalities involved, other implicit prices that I saw it fit to reserve and the free features that were offered such as quality snacks and excellent drinks.
These recommendations were not only genuine, but also impassionate and I was able to correlate with them than most marketing advertisements.
When you know who your customers are that are actively promoting your products, you can thank them and even offer some type of rewards for them doing so.
Customer satisfaction surveys come in a few common forms, usually executed using a popular response scale methodology, like:
- Net Promoter Score® (NPS).
- Another is the Customer Satisfaction Score also referred to as CSAT.
- Customer Effort Score (CES).
Every one of these types of the customer satisfaction survey gauges something slightly different thus in case you wish to make good use of the data, it is advisable to pay heed to the differences.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Technology enthusiasts prefer the NPS as a customer satisfaction research technique more than other methods.
It‘s rare to see a survey that doesn’t use this famous question: “On a scale of 0-10, how possible are you to refer this company to a friend or a colleague?”
Pose these words to your customers with HubSpot’s customer feedback software.
Oh, you’ve caught me there – this first example actually does not directly pose customers’ satisfaction level. However, I also discovered that CR and CS are positively related in most cases.
If it is not pleasing to me I won’t suggest the product/service to friends. Sounds straightforward? Not exactly. When it comes to matters of perception and actual preference there are a few ways to go about it.
For instance, were I to read a new book of a genre that was unbearably quirky, I nonetheless go and tell someone how brilliant the book is even if it is not my cup of tea.
But how does that impact businesses? Well, if you create a great product then you may have great NPS or not every possible buyer needs that product.
Non-supports give you a 0–6, while the 7-8 rating is given to the non-engaged supporters, while the 9-10 rating goes to the engaged supporters. The formula is as follows; Your NPS score is your percentage of promoters minus your percentage of detractors.
Customers’ overall level of satisfaction is well represented by their known Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
In my view, CSAT is one of the simplest customer satisfaction survey kind, which is simple to operate and answer too.
Typically, the form is of a question such as, ‘How satisfied were you with your experience today?’ and the survey scale and the latter is normally ranging from 1 to 5.
Now, let’s what these numbers represent.
1 = Very unsatisfied
2 = Unsatisfied
3 = Neutral
4 = Satisfied
5 = Very satisfied
To get your CSAT score, expressed as a percentage, you’ll need this equation:
(% positive = (Number of positive responses (4 or 5)/ Number of people surveyed) x 100)
There is some variation as to what it should be, so let me give my view that CSAT score should range between 75% – 85%. The closer to 1, the better, but the fact that you need not be perfect (although sometimes achieving 100 percent can seem easier said than done).
Having answered several CSAT surveys myself and given many to customers I have found that while the scores are undoubtedly a good measure of how a particular customer feels at the time the results should be looked at with caution.
For instance, when I go shopping for clothes online and I experience severe problems in the Check-out page (now, you don’t want me to register for something, do you?), I am annoyed. When my payment finally gets processed and I am asked I might say that the level of satisfaction is 1 or 2.
But, I think if the clothes are delivered as quickly as possible, look and fit perfectly, my level of satisfaction can increase significantly. Therefore, you have to ask it this way (for example, ‘How satisfied are you with the checkout process’) or at the right time. (Sometimes it is very simple to just approach your customers and directly ask their opinion about HubSpot’s customer feedback tool.)
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The CES is highly effective in quantifying service experience of a customer. In most cases, your survey answer choices should vary from ‘Very Difficult’ to ‘Very Easy’.
I’ve used these CES options in the following way: could you find on your own what you need using the website? Is it difficult for you to use an app?
A few very difficult are not always an issue, but if you get a big portion of them, it is high time to redesign your product or service.
Csq Types & Customer Survey Design
Powerful Tool Though, it may sound surprising, survey design plays a critical role in the entire process. Still they are the very basis for your survey, and missteps in their regard may influence response rates and, more importantly, accuracy. If the design is wrong for your data, then your data will not help you answer any questions you have about your customers.
With that in mind, I will explain the various questions that one use in developing the survey.
1. Binary Scale Questions
The first type of survey question is a simple binary distinction:
- “Were you fulfilled in your experience?”
- “Were our expectations fulfilled in terms of a particular product?”
- “Was it helpful for you?”
The choices for all of these are binary in nature, for example yes/no, thumbs up /thumbs down.
I trust that you will also appreciate that the utility of this survey type is in its simplicity. This way, when I utilize this question type, the only thing I expect is to obtain clear, backyard answers from customers.
Now and then, and you find that, in making a survey scale longer, you merely acquire data that are worthless. In the words of Jared Spool, co founder of Center Centre ‘ Anytime you are enlarging the scale to see higher-resolution data, It is probably false That the data means nothing’.
2. Multiple-Choice Questions
The type of questions that have three or more solution options which are not connected with one another in any way are multiple choice questions. These are usually used where the purpose is to gather categorical data such as names and labels.
Although the multiple choice questions often work very well when I am planning on analyzing the results of the survey later on. This is because other modes will let me segment the data according to different categories of variables so that I can arrive at the important insights I am looking for.
For instance, I have an accounting software manufacturing company. I can directly tell the respondents that I want to know what their job title/business industry they are when collecting feedback. Then, when I’m analysing the data, I can look at the difference of the satisfaction scores according to job title/ industry etc. Perhaps I discover that CEOs don’t like a software because it costs too much but their finance departments are happy with it because of what it can do.
3. Scale Questions
A large number of well-known satisfaction questionnaires contain scale questions. For instance, the CSAT would pose the question ‘How satisfied are you with the experience?’ and the interaction experience is graded in a Likert scale from 1-5.
Some possible response types for questions designed on the scale include numbers or words, use of emojis including 😁.
4. Semantic Differential
Like the scale questions, the semantic differential scales involves binary propositions such as disagree but respondents can choose a large number of points in between.
That means there is no need to distinguish one as better than the other – customers can have a value halfway between, which is more suitable for what they got.
Let’s assume a given website owner is experimenting with a new design on the homepage for instance. Thus, they get further asked a semantic differential question “Do you like the new website design?” They allowed the respondents to answer by either selections that favor two poles – “I don’t like it” or “I like it” or several ‘blank’ choices in between.
Using Artificial Intelligence to Create Customer Satisfaction Surveys
The rise of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.ai has transformed how marketers produce content, ranging from blog posts and social media captions to website copy and email newsletters.
Many marketers and customer support representatives are also leveraging AI tools to design customer satisfaction surveys and analyze the feedback they receive. According to our 2024 State of Service report, 92% of customer experience teams utilizing AI report that it saves them time in their roles.
This efficiency stems from AI-driven tools that can automate data collection and analysis, customize questions based on prior responses, and even forecast future customer behaviors using the data collected.
I spoke with several marketers who have implemented AI in creating and distributing customer satisfaction surveys, and here are some advantages they highlighted:
1. Personalization
In Zendesk’s Trend Report, 90% of customers indicated they are willing to spend more with companies that offer personalized customer service. Notably, 68% expect all experiences to be tailored to their needs. By sending personalized customer satisfaction surveys, you can gain insights into the specific challenges your customers are encountering and address them effectively.
AI algorithms analyze past interaction data to grasp each customer’s distinct preferences and behaviors. This enables AI to customize surveys for individual respondents, presenting relevant questions based on their purchasing history, previous feedback, and anticipated future needs.
Michael Rice, the co-founder of Vivipins, mentioned that his team was dissatisfied with the standard survey they sent out via email after a service call due to low response rates and unengaging answers. They switched to an AI-driven survey platform, which significantly improved their survey experience.
The AI can customize the survey questions based on the specific service call. For instance, if it was a late-night lockout, the survey might inquire about the technician’s bedside manner. This level of personalization encourages people to engage more, making them feel that their experiences are genuinely acknowledged, Itzhaki explains.
2. Sentiment Analysis
Using natural language processing (NLP), AI is particularly effective at conducting sentiment analysis on open-ended questions. This technology examines text responses to uncover subtle differences in mood, opinion, and emotion, categorizing them into sentiments such as positive, negative, and neutral.
This capability enables businesses to quickly and accurately analyze large volumes of unstructured feedback, identifying dominant sentiments and emerging themes. Michael Rice shared how this feature has benefited his team at Vivipins.
“The AI-driven survey platform goes beyond just a star rating; it interprets the open-ended comments to grasp the emotions behind the words. Were they relieved? Frustrated? Annoyed by the wait? This insight helps us identify precisely where we are performing well and where improvements are needed,” Michael notes.
3. Automation and Efficiency
AI streamlines the more labor-intensive aspects of the survey process, including distribution, data collection, sorting, and initial analysis. This not only accelerates the overall process but also minimizes human error, allowing team members to concentrate on more strategic activities, such as interpreting insights generated by AI and crafting actionable strategies based on their findings.
Alexandra Dubakova, the CMO at Free Tour, leverages AI in the company’s customer satisfaction survey to enhance their efforts.
“AI assists us in delivering the survey to clients through the most effective channel. Our customers vary, so we often employ three different survey methods tailored to the customer profile,” Dubakova explains.
She also highlights that AI simplifies the analysis of client behavior for the team.
“It reviews their purchase history and applies triggers and rules to ensure the right survey reaches them at the optimal time. It saves time, enhances accuracy, and boosts efficiency,” Dubakova adds.
4. Bias Identification
Even though AI can be biased, it can also help identify potential biases in survey questions or responses before the survey is launched. The algorithm looks for patterns in the wording or structure of questions that might lead respondents to answer in a particular way.
“For instance, in one survey, AI flagged a question that was phrased in a way that pushed respondents to provide overly positive feedback,” explains Jason Brooks, co-founder of UK Linkology. “After we recognized the problem, we revised it to be more neutral and reflective of true sentiments.”
AI has the potential to enhance the objectivity of your surveys, which is where its real value for sales comes in: understanding how your customers truly feel.
If you’re looking for an AI-driven customer service platform to create, implement, and analyze AI-enhanced customer satisfaction surveys, consider HubSpot’s Customer Service Platform.
How To Use and Implement Survey Results
Once your customer satisfaction survey is complete, it’s time to take action. Here’s what you should do:
For quantitative surveys, clean the data and utilize analysis software to uncover its implications. I create reports from the survey data and use them in company meetings or to demonstrate to customers that we value their feedback.
For qualitative surveys, carefully review the results and look for recurring themes in the responses. I often take notes on one screen while analyzing the survey results on another.
Next, compile a list of recommended actions and prioritize them. For instance, if your website has issues with processing payments, that’s a critical concern. However, if a customer offers a valuable suggestion that may require significant investment, you can discuss it further with your team.
Take the necessary actions and inform customers about the steps you’ve implemented based on their feedback.
To gain further insights into how to effectively implement satisfaction survey results, I spoke with Simon Bacher, CEO and co-founder of Ling, a language learning app, to learn about his team’s strategy.
He mentioned that the Ling team analyzes which elements of gamification users enjoy, such as the app’s banana points system and the badges earned by completing challenges.
Starting with a Survey
Customer satisfaction surveys can be very effective if you take the time to design them thoughtfully, distribute them at appropriate times and frequencies, and — most importantly — act on the feedback you receive.
Customers value the opportunity to express their opinions, but in my experience, they won’t feel truly satisfied unless a brand’s products or services align with their needs.
I hope these insights on survey design, usage, and implementation assist you in enhancing your customers’ experience. Many of these strategies have proven successful for me, but I’m always eager to discover new methods to boost customer satisfaction.