How to write customer satisfaction survey questions to master your market (with examples)

You can create happy customers, but to do that you have to truly understand them and what they think about your business. So how do you know what they’re thinking? You have to ask!

To provide an inside perspective on surveying customer satisfaction, we collaborated with Michael Redbord, who helped build HubSpot's support and service teams. Michael was also the General Manager of HubSpot's fastest-growing product, Service Hub, which helps their customers grow through exceptional service.

Both Contentsquare and HubSpot use customer feedback surveys to understand customers and what the market demands. For HubSpot, this approach has driven dramatic changes over the years—taking them from a small marketing app to the more complete front-office software suite they are today.

In this article, Michael shares the most important things he’s learned about customer satisfaction surveys, so you can take some of his learnings and use them to adopt a practice of collecting customer feedback for your business to better understand your market.

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

A customer satisfaction survey is a questionnaire designed to help businesses understand what their customers think about their products or services, their brand, and their customer support. 

Customer satisfaction surveys allow companies to improve products strategically, increase customer retention, optimize the user experience, create customer delight, and deliver exactly what the market demands.

Michael emphasizes how HubSpot uses customer satisfaction surveys to understand the micro-level experiences of individual users and address their concerns, while always returning to macro-level questions like

• Where is the market going?

• How is our product on the cutting edge?

• Where do we need to improve?

4 types of customer satisfaction surveys

There are several ways to understand if your customers are happy, loyal, and satisfied with your product or service, and each helps you learn something about the user experience. Here are 4 of the most effective online surveys you can use to understand your customers.

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT surveys measure your customers’ overall satisfaction with a specific aspect of your business. They usually contain a simple question with a binary response (e.g. yes/no, happy face/sad face) and ask things like “Did our product do what you wanted it to do?”

CSAT scores are usually high (in the 98%+ range), so a sudden spike in negative scores tells you there’s an issue that needs immediate attention.

2. Net Promoter® Score (NPS)

A Net Promoter® Score survey asks customers to rate how likely they are to recommend your company or product to a friend or colleague on a rating scale of 0–10. You then compare your percentage of detractors (0–6 answers) to that of promoters (9–10 answers) to see where your company stands—the more promoters you have, the more you can infer people are satisfied with you. 

Use NPS® surveys to determine whether your business successfully cultivates customer loyalty.

An NPS® survey example from messaging platform Userlike

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score measures how much effort it takes for customers to use your product or fix a problem through customer support.

HubSpot sends a CES survey after they close each support ticket. A CES question will ask “How easy was it to solve your problem?”, and customers are typically given a 5-point Likert scale with response options like ‘very difficult’, ‘somewhat difficult’, ‘about as easy as I expected’, ‘somewhat easy’, and ‘very easy'.

4. Milestone surveys

Milestone surveys are questionnaires sent out at key touchpoints in the customer journey to help you understand the user experience. A milestone can either be time-based (e.g. sending a survey 60 days after signup) or experience-based (e.g. a pop-up survey that’s triggered once onboarding is complete).

For example, you could check in with customers right after they convert with this post-purchase survey.

11 customer satisfaction survey question examples

There are many directions you can take your customer survey questions—and while there are no wrong answers, there are right questions to ask. Depending on the customer insights you want to gather, it’s important to choose the types of questions that will lead to the most actionable results.

For example, if you’re looking for quantifiable feedback that can be easily monitored over time, ask rating scale questions (like NPS® or CES). To dive deeper into customer expectations and satisfaction levels, ask open-ended questions or pair a multiple-choice question with a follow-up question that gets users to describe their experience in their own words. 

Here’s a list of example questions to consider when deciding what to ask your customers:

1. Was this article useful? [yes/no]

2. Is our pricing clear? If not, what would you change?

3. What would increase the product quality, according to you?

4. In your own words, how can we improve the onboarding process?

5. Were you able to achieve the purpose of your visit today? [yes/no]

6. What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you from buying from us?

7. Did you get the help you needed during your customer service experience? [yes/no]

8. What persuaded you to complete the purchase of the item(s) in your cart today?

9. How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? [on a scale of 0–10]

10. What's the next feature or functionality we should build? [can be multiple choice]

11. How satisfied are you with the content on this page? [on a scale of 1 to 5, very dissatisfied to very satisfied]

💡Pro tip: there’s a customer satisfaction survey for just about every occasion, whether you’re testing a new feature, analyzing customer churn, or determining what exactly turns prospects into loyal customers. 

When the sky’s the limit, it can be difficult to effectively distill a bigger goal into specific and meaningful survey questions. 

Contentsquare’s AI for Surveys is the perfect tool to turn to—just tell it your goal and watch as it generates a corresponding survey in seconds. And don’t worry about handling high response rates: the AI will automatically analyze all responses and prepare a summary report with suggested next steps to take. Talk about a time saver!

Contentsquare AI helps you generate surveys in seconds and get an accurate summary of survey responses with a single click

How to create effective customer satisfaction surveys

Running customer satisfaction surveys is a great way to gather valuable insights, but it’s easy to stumble into common pitfalls that can impact your results. Here are 5 practical tips to help you gather accurate, meaningful insights:

1. Avoid vague questions

When you're conducting surveys, the quality of your customers' answers flows directly from the quality of your questions. And to get actionable insights, you need them to be specific—which is where most surveys go astray.

Questions that are too general fail to gain any valuable information. Answers to “How satisfied are you?” give you some basic insights, but nothing else: when someone answers “very satisfied” or “very unsatisfied,” you won’t actually know what they’re talking about. They could be rating their satisfaction in terms of the product, customer service, delivery, or something else entirely.

To get specific, try specific satisfaction-centric surveys, like the CES or NPS® ones, and the ‘Would You Miss Us?’ (WYMU?) question, which determines how unique your product is to the market and how competitive your brand is among other providers. 

Each of these questions digs a little bit deeper into understanding a customer’s satisfaction while still keeping the survey short and straightforward.

💡 Pro tip: want to truly understand your customers? An NPS® software tool like Contentsquare can be a game-changer. Not only does it help you gather feedback efficiently, but it also provides the tools to analyze your Net Promoter® Score and uncover deeper insights into customer sentiment.

An NPS® dashboard in Contentsquare Surveys

2. Focus on more than just quantitative questions

While simplicity is great, when you ask your customers to rate their satisfaction, effort, or loyalty on a scale from 1-10, you’ll only get quantitative results.

It's easy to forget to ask the most important question: why? To get this information, simply add a follow-up question to the quantitative survey questions you’ve chosen to include. You can always make these follow-up questions optional, so as not to discourage the people who aren’t interested in writing feedback.

That’s exactly what Userlike did when they sent out their NPS® survey. The goal was to learn the reasons why someone responded the way they did, and so they asked them to share

• One thing the company should quickly improve

• One thing they really liked about Userlike

Open-ended questions give customers the opportunity to share what they really care about

After closing the survey, they went through the responses with a fine-tooth comb. Customer Success Lead Anton collected the themes he saw repeating in the short-answer sections and filed them in a separate spreadsheet.

At the next Customer Success meeting, Anton discussed the service-related feedback with the Customer Success team and later met with the Development and Design teams to give them the more technical, feature-related feedback—none of which would have happened, had they not asked qualitative questions.

3. Segment your survey responses

Your customers are likely not all cut from the same cloth: forgetting to categorize their responses accordingly risks bypassing some valuable insights.

Userlike, for example, has several ways to segment customers. These include industry, team size, product plan, and the individual role of the respondent within the Userlike account.

By re-creating the same survey 5 different times, they could send users of the respective plan level to the right questionnaire. The first one on the left is the total result from all of their respondents. After that, their graphs move from the free plan to the more extensive plans Userlike offers.

The various NPS® scores Userlike collected from a range of users, depending on their plan

This categorization allowed them to spot trends in Userlike being rated better by those with an Admin role than those with an Agent role, which could indicate that the UX design of the Agent-facing interfaces could be improved. The qualitative answers would be useful to reveal what is working for some and not for others.

4. Aim for balanced feedback that represents all customer segments

When going through the results of a customer satisfaction survey, it’s important to question the extent to which they represent your entire customer base. That’s where selection bias comes into play.

Selection bias is a statistical phenomenon in which complete randomization wasn’t achieved in your sample. That means your results may be inaccurately skewed in a particular direction.

The way you collect your responses has a big impact here. When you send out your customer satisfaction surveys via email, for example, there will be those who open that email and those who don’t. And it’s who these people are and why they do or don't open your email that’s important. Those who do open your emails, for example, may be more favorable to your company, skewing your ratings upwards.

Userlike used Mailchimp to send out their NPS® survey in a newsletter. It was a helpful tool to use in this situation because it allowed them to see the percentage of users from each category who opened their email and the percentage who clicked on the link to the survey. 

They noticed a higher open and click rate for their

free and team plans than with their flex and business plans, and then took this data into account when looking at the results.

Click-through rates (CTR) of German-speaking Userlike customers

Selection bias is a tricky obstacle to overcome, since it can hide in plain sight. Optimally you would use a variety of approaches for collecting your answers (e.g. through email, in-app, post-chat, and randomized calling) and assess whether any collection-based trends are visible. If this isn’t possible, make sure your survey responses are collected in the clearest way possible, so at least you get to see which kinds of customers answered and can assess the kind of effect this could have had on your responses.

💡 Pro tip: spot the problem and see the impact with Contentsquare Surveys. 

Got some feedback pointing to an issue? Use Contentsquare to create segments and spot trends behind common responses—like technical issues causing negative feedback. Then, hop over to Impact Quantification to see how it’s affecting conversions and revenue.

Use Contentsquare to quickly find out how many customers feel the same and how it’s affecting key goals

5. Be intentional about collecting feedback and using it to make a difference

If you’re just collecting feedback for the sake of it, you’re wasting everybody’s time: yours, and that of the people who reply.

Anything that you measure for your business should ultimately have some sort of impact on how you move on from here. You can use the information that you’ve collected to help strengthen your customer service team, simplify your website, and/or better your product.

For example, Userlike’s goal when running the NPS® survey was to gather honest feedback from users that they could apply to their product. The open-ended questions in the NPS® survey were a good way of doing it; but thanks to the numerical question, they also got a quantitative benchmark that they can now use to compare their future performance against.

Create a purpose for your survey by asking yourself in the early stages: “What do I want to know by sending out this survey?” By focusing on the purpose, you’ll be better prepared to avoid these pitfalls. After each step of creating your survey, you can align what you’re doing with the purpose you’ve set for yourself beforehand.

And knowing that each step supports the purpose of your survey helps you ensure that you’re on the right track to gaining valuable, actionable feedback.

💡Pro tip: want to make customer satisfaction a daily focus at your business? Automatically share customer feedback results with the rest of your team by integrating Contentsquare directly with Slack or Microsoft Teams. Discuss insights and collaborate on initiatives without opening another app.

Contentsquare lets you get alerted on Slack preferred channels whenever there is a conversion or revenue anomaly on your website or app that requires attention

Taking the next steps

Customer satisfaction surveys are a powerful tool to help you truly understand what your customers think, feel, and need. And by asking the right questions, collecting diverse responses, and using the insights to make data-driven decisions, you can definitely count on more satisfied customers.

But remember, it's not just about collecting feedback—it's about acting on it. With the right approach, your surveys can reveal actionable insights that lead to better customer experiences, improved products, and stronger, more long-lasting relationships.

FAQs about customer satisfaction surveys