What Is a Customer Satisfaction Survey? Importance, Types, and Tips

A customer satisfaction survey can help you get the insights you need to improve your offerings and build long-term loyalty.

By Martin DuPont

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A customer satisfaction survey helps you get candid feedback from your customers. It gives them the opportunity to share their needs, preferences, and frustrations. You can find out if your customers are happy (or not) with your business.

Insight about the customer experience is critical. You can’t measure customer satisfaction without it. Our research finds that 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.

Your customer relationship management (CRM) system & customer service software makes it easy to track, manage, and analyze this data in one centralized location. Your whole team has a complete picture of each customer in real time, so they know how to deliver on customer expectations. Let’s look at how you can get the most out of a customer satisfaction survey.

What you’ll learn:

• What is a customer satisfaction survey?
• Why customer satisfaction surveys are important
• How to create a customer satisfaction survey
• Types of questions to ask, plus examples
• Top use cases for customer satisfaction surveys
• How to use customer satisfaction surveys to your advantage

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

A customer satisfaction survey is a tool businesses use to gather feedback from customers about their experience. These surveys typically ask customers to rate their satisfaction with a product, service, or recent interaction.

It can also help you segment your audience in several ways, including demographic, psychographic, product/service usage, purchase habits, and overall satisfaction. This segmentation can help you personalize customer experience to meet the specific needs and expectations of different customer segments to improve loyalty and retention.

A customer satisfaction survey can be conducted through various digital channels, from chatbots to email. The questions can be structured (with predefined response options) or open-ended (where customers can provide detailed answers).

The goal is to get service intelligence from quantitative and qualitative data to learn more about the customer experience, see what’s working, and identify areas for improvement. A customer satisfaction survey helps businesses make informed decisions to enhance the customer experience and deliver good customer service.

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Why customer satisfaction surveys are important

Customer satisfaction surveys are a key part of understanding the customer experience. They help you measure customer satisfaction and let you know what’s working and what’s not so you can constantly improve. You can use these data insights to make better decisions on how to deliver better products, services, and experiences.

They also help you better understand customer preferences so you can tailor your offerings and personalize their experiences. You can even find out how you stack up against your competitors.

Most importantly, customer satisfaction surveys show your customers that you care about them and their experience with your business. This helps to strengthen customer relationships and build loyalty, which can lead to increased revenue.

How to create a customer satisfaction survey

Your customer satisfaction surveys will vary depending on what your company wants to know. You may design one to get a sense of overall customer satisfaction, and another to dig into specific parts of the customer, product, or service experience.

To save time, you can use generative AI like Einstein GPT to create surveys for you. For example, you might ask: “Write me a survey for customers who called about product x, but who have a low customer satisfaction score in the past year.” Be sure to have a human review the survey for accuracy.

You can also use generative AI to help you decide which customer surveys go to which customers by segment. Generative AI can analyze customer data to identify patterns and preferences within different segments. For example, it can recommend that one survey be sent to customers with a past high CSAT and another for customers with a past low CSAT. Sending your survey to the right customers can improve the likelihood of getting more meaningful insights.

No matter your objective, here’s how to set up for success:

• Define a clear purpose: Before you begin, decide what you want to know. For example, if you want to know about how easy customers find their self-service experience with your company to be, focus your questions on self-service ease of use only.
• Keep your survey short: Your customers may want to give you feedback, but if you make your survey too long or complicated, you may not get enough responses or quality feedback. Limit the number of questions — whether you use structured, open-ended, or a combination of both types. Let them know the time it will take for them to complete your survey.
• Mix quantitative and qualitative questions: Each question type provides unique insights. Quantitative questions provide numerical data that can be analyzed and measured in a customer satisfaction score (CSAT). Qualitative data helps to explain the “why” behind quantitative. Ask your customers to rate their experience on a number scale. Finish with a question that prompts open-ended feedback, so they can explain what they mean in their own words.
• Personalize, and be specific: Our research finds that 61% of customers say most companies treat them as a number. This is where the power of your CRM and automation comes in with the ability to send personalized emails with customer names and previous interactions with your business at scale. A personal touch can bump up response rates by making your customers feel like they matter as people. This also helps to improve customer engagement and build stronger relationships.
• Choose a delivery method: Your delivery method should match your audience’s communication preferences, whether it’s voice, email, social media, or live chat. If you don’t know the best method, test different options to see which gets you the most responses.
• Timing is everything: Send your survey when the experience is still fresh in customers’ minds but gives them enough time to form an opinion. Getting in touch after an important conversation or milestone can help you gather more accurate and useful responses. Tools like Service Cloud let you automate and send responses when it matters most, so you can reach customers at the right time. It can also send a reminder to complete the survey, in case someone doesn’t respond.
• Act on feedback: The point of collecting data is to do something with it. When you make changes based on customer feedback, let them know through personalized emails, in-app notifications, or social media announcements. Showing customers how their feedback influenced change builds trust and makes it more likely that they’ll refer you to others — and respond to future surveys.
• Reflect on previous surveys: Not all surveys provide will provide the data you want. Look at past surveys to see which have worked well before and what could be improved for stronger results.

Dig into our latest customer service research.

High-performing service organizations are using data and AI to generate revenue while cutting costs — without sacrificing the customer experience. Find out how in the 6th edition of the State of Service report.