Customer Feedback Surveys: Types, Questions, and Templates

Customer feedback surveys serve as invaluable tools for gathering actionable insights directly from your audience.

However, it’s important to know when and how to trigger the forms to gather user feedback, for increased response rate and data credibility.

In this article, we explain the definitions, types, examples, and best practices of customer feedback questionnaires to help you increase your response rate.

TL;DR

• Customer feedback forms gather user insights and sentiments that allow you to improve your product/service.
• Collecting customer feedback helps to build user-centric products, measure satisfaction, identify areas for improvement, and boost user retention.
• Types of surveys include:
  1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Track overall satisfaction with your product or service.
  2. Net Promoter Score (NPS). Measure customer loyalty by asking how likely they are to recommend your product to others.
  3. Customer Effort Score (CES). Determine your platform’s ease of use.
• Survey questions can be closed- or open-ended. These indicate how the question is formulated.
  1. For close-ended questions. Use a Likert or rating scale, give dichotomous options, or offer multiple choices.
  2. For open-ended asks. Allow users to answer using their own words.
• The questions vary depending on what you’re measuring. Take a look at these examples to gain feedback on your:
  1. Onboarding. Rate from one to five your overall satisfaction with the onboarding process.
  2. Customer service experience. Overall, how would you rate your experience with our customer service team?
  3. Product usage. Have you encountered any issues or challenges while using our product? If yes, please describe.
  4. Product usability. Did you find it easy to navigate through our product?
  5. Quality. Which specific aspects of our product do you find most valuable?
  6. New feature release. Were there any features or functionalities missing from the new release that you would have expected to find? If yes, please describe.
  7. Customer experience. How was your experience with our product?
  8. Customer loyalty. On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your overall experience using our product?
• Best practices for feedback collection involve triggering the surveys in context, keeping them short, avoiding leading questions, and closing the feedback loop.
• To collect user feedback by building in-app surveys and keep track of your analytics in the same place, try Userpilot. Get a demo.

What are customer feedback surveys?

Customer feedback surveys are a way of gathering user insights and sentiments about your product. Through a customer satisfaction survey, companies can determine what’s working and what’s not and plan for new features or improvements.

For example, a poor result in onboarding overall satisfaction shows that you need to offer a better experience to new users.

Why should you collect customer feedback?

Collecting customer feedback allows you to build user-centric products that serve them better. But also, you should launch a customer survey to gather feedback and:

• Measure customer satisfaction over time. Stay on top of the CSAT and your NPS rates by using surveys to discover user expectations and feelings. Use the same scale over time to compare year-on-year results.
• Identify areas of improvement. Gather actionable analytics, review the customer sentiment, and determine which aspects of your platform could use more work.
• Increase user retention. Collect customer feedback to build a direct line of communication with your users. Showing that you listen to their ideas can help improve your customer retention.

Types of customer satisfaction surveys

There are different types of customer satisfaction surveys in SaaS depending on the insights that you want to get.

For example, you’ll ask different questions to measure customer satisfaction vs. to track whether or not they’d recommend your platform to others.

Here are the types of questionnaires to keep in mind when creating customer satisfaction surveys:

1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) surveys

The CSAT is a metric that reveals overall satisfaction. To determine your business’s CSAT, ask different questions to your users via a customer satisfaction survey.

It’s crucial to ask users to answer on a rating scale of five or seven points to get quantitative answers. Look at this CSAT survey template for inspiration.

The question usually starts with “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with X?” or “Rate how satisfied you are with X.”

The X can change depending on your goals, i.e., to measure post-product upgrade satisfaction, interactions with your customer service teams, or your onboarding process.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys

This type of customer satisfaction survey measures customer loyalty and retention. You get an NPS by asking users how likely they are to recommend your platform.

The NPS is tracked on a scale of one to ten and separates the answers into three groups:

• Detractors. Customers who feel dissatisfied with your product (ratings from one to six).
• Passives. Indecisive or not overly satisfied, but also not unsatisfied customers (seven and eight ratings).
• Promoters. People who are excited about your product, are loyal, and will recommend it to others (ratings nine and ten).

Choose one of the types of NPS surveys (relationship or transactional) that fits your goals best. Also, compare your NPS with benchmarks of customer satisfaction in the industry.

3. Customer effort score (CES) surveys

The third type of customer satisfaction survey measures the CES. This KPI determines product ease according to users.

You can get this score by asking questions such as: “On a scale of one to five, how easy did you find it to complete X?”

You can use a customer effort score survey template to determine how easy it is to:

• Navigate your website.
• Adopt new features.
• Find support.
• Complete onboarding tasks.

Types of customer survey questions

Just like there are different types of surveys, there are diverse forms to ask questions. These can be open-ended or close-ended survey questions.

Here’s a list of five types of survey questions:

1. Likert scale questions

The Likert scale is a method to quantify answers based on a very specific range from five to seven points. These usually help determine a customer’s level of agreement or disagreement.

For instance, a question such as “How satisfied are you with our customer service?” allows respondents to rate their experience along a spectrum of satisfaction – from Very dissatisfied to Very satisfied.

2. Rating scale questions

This is similar to the above, but rating scale questions usually refer to a numerical or a more vague range. E.g., rate from 1 to 5, and use these emojis to determine your satisfaction, on a scale of dissatisfied to very satisfied. For example:

Q: On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with our onboarding guidance?

A: 1 – – – 5

3. Dichotomous questions

Ask questions with two possible answers and let the customer decide between them, i.e., yes/no, agree/disagree, or truth/false.

The goal of dichotomous questions is to gather the absolutes. I.e., overall, is the user more satisfied or dissatisfied with your product? For example:

Q: Did you find the information provided helpful?

A: Yes/No

Use open-ended questions to follow up and gain more information.

4. Multiple choice questions

As the name implies, these questions present customers with several options to choose from. Here, customers can select one or multiple answers that apply to their experience. For example:

Q: Choose one from the list below. Which of the following features do you find most valuable?

A: a. Automated reporting; b. Integration capabilities; c. Customizable dashboards; d. AI-driven analytics; e. Others (Please specify).

5. Open-ended questions

Contrary to all of the above, these are questions where users get to write their answers. The goal of open-ended questions is to gain details and verbatim of the user experience.

These constitute the qualitative part of the survey responses. You can usually add open-ended questions at the end of the survey as a follow-up. For example, you can trigger different NPS follow-up questions depending on the score they chose.

Q: Can you expand on why you wouldn’t recommend the product to others?

Templates for customer satisfaction survey questions

Use these templates to build customer satisfaction surveys and gather insights across the full customer journey lifecycle. Here are questions to ask for different purposes:

For measuring onboarding satisfaction

A good onboarding survey should have around seven to ten questions to maximize the chances of getting answers. So, mix some closed-ended questions with one or two open-ended ones.

Build your internal customer onboarding feedback survey template to measure satisfaction with your customer’s response onboarding experience consistently over time. Examples include:

Rating or Likert scale questions:

• How would you rate the accessibility of resources (e.g., knowledge base, help center) during the onboarding process?
• Rate from one to five your overall satisfaction with the onboarding process.
• How would you rate the onboarding experience compared to similar products you’ve used in the past?

Dichotomic questions:

• Are the onboarding materials (tutorials, guides, etc.) helpful?
• Do you agree or disagree with this statement: The onboarding was comprehensive and contained useful learning materials.

Open-ended questions:

• Were there any aspects of the onboarding process that you found particularly confusing or unclear?

For evaluating the customer service team experience

The best way to reduce the customer service gap is by identifying your customer expectations and needs in terms of the customer support team itself. You can do this through customer service surveys.

Here are some customer satisfaction survey examples for service rating:

Rating or Likert scale questions:

• Based on the recent interaction with X customer service representative, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with our company?
• Overall, how would you rate your experience with our customer service team?
• How would you rate the accessibility of our customer service channels (e.g., live chat, email, phone support)?

Dichotomic + open-ended questions:

• Were there any challenges or frustrations you encountered while interacting with our customer service team? If yes, please explain. (Dichotomic + open-ended)

For determining product and usage frequency

Ask product survey questions to gain insight into your product’s usage. For example, if you want to know which features people value the most.

Product satisfaction surveys are different than heat maps because you get to discover the customer sentiment behind usage.

Examples of questions to ask here:

Dichotomic questions:

• Truth or false: I use X feature every time I interact with the product.

Dichotomic + open-ended questions:

• Have you encountered any issues or challenges while using our product? If yes, please describe.

Open-ended questions:

• Are there any specific tasks or processes for which you primarily use our product?
• Are there any features or functionalities that you would like to see added or improved in our product to better meet your needs?
• Why did you choose our product over your previous solution?
• If you had to modify or add something to our product, what would it be?

Multiple choice questions:

• How often do you use our product every week?
• Which specific features of our product do you use most frequently?

For measuring product usability

The goal of a product feedback survey is to identify key aspects of your product that might be confusing or overly complicated to your users and come up with a plan to fix them.

Here are some customer satisfaction survey templates to determine issues with the customer experience:

Likert or rating scale questions:

• Overall, how would you rate your satisfaction with our product usability?
• How would you rate the clarity of provided instructions within our product?
• Rate your agreement with this phase: I know where to find the help desk.

Dichotomic questions:

• Did you find it easy to navigate through our product?
• Truth or false: The website is easy to navigate.

Dichotomic + open-ended questions:

• Were there any features or functionalities within our product that you found confusing? If yes, please describe.
• Did you encounter any errors or bugs while using our product? If yes, please describe.

Multiple choice questions:

• Which feature did you find easiest to use?
  a. AI-driven analytics.
  b. Interactive dashboards.
  c. Automated alerts.

For assessing your product or service quality

A picture is worth a thousand words but poor quality can cost you thousands. Stay on top of how your users perceive the quality of your product/service over the years. Use their answers to influence future product improvements.

Ask these product evaluation survey questions:

Likert or rating scale questions:

• How satisfied are you with the pricing of our [product/service]?
• On a scale of one to seven, rate your likeliness to renew your subscription or continue using our product/service based on the value it provides.
• How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use our product?

Multiple choice questions:

• Which specific aspects of our product do you find most valuable?
  a. Features.
  b. Integrations.
  c. Ease of use.
  d. Customer service.
  e. Overall customer experience.
• What do you think sets us apart from our competitors?
  a. Features.
  b. Integrations.
  c. Ease of use.
  d. Customer service.
  e. Overall customer experience.

For gaining feature release feedback

Query your existing customers on their satisfaction levels with your new feature right after launch. Measure the effectiveness of the new functionality and assess basic usability through questions of this sort:

Likert or rating scale questions:

• Overall, how would you rate your satisfaction with the recent feature release?
• Rate from dissatisfied to very satisfied, how content you are with X feature.

Dichotomic + open-ended questions:

• Have you encountered any issues or challenges while using the new feature(s)? If yes, please describe.
• Were there any features or functionalities missing from the new release that you would have expected to find? If yes, please describe.
• Are there any additional features or improvements you would like to see in future updates? If yes, please describe.

For evaluating the customer experience

Happy customers have a good experience and recommend your product to others. Create customer experience surveys to collect their opinions on your overall product or service experience.

Here’s a possible customer satisfaction survey template for measuring experience:

Likert or rating scale questions:

• How was your experience with our product?
• How would you rate the helpfulness of our customer service representatives?

Dichotomic + open-ended questions:

• Did you encounter difficulties using our product? If yes, please describe.

Open-ended questions:

• Is there anything else you’d like to share about your experience with us?
• What is one thing we could do to improve your experience with [product or service]?

For tracking customer loyalty

As you know, satisfied customers are usually loyal ones. So, review this metric in tandem with others and segment customers depending on how they feel about your company. Assess their loyalty levels by asking these questions:

Likert or rating scale questions:

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your overall experience using our product?
• How likely are you to recommend our product to others?

Dichotomic questions:

• If you were to change companies and were in charge of using a tool for X, would you recommend us? (Yes/No)

Open-ended questions:

• What is the main reason we won your business?

Best practices to improve feedback collection across the customer journey

To improve your survey distribution and data collection, here are a few best practices we recommend:

1. Contextualize the customer satisfaction survey. Trigger questions based on specific interactions or at certain times during the customer lifecycle. A contextual, in-app survey can increase your response rate and have higher credibility.
2. Keep them short and simple. Avoid asking multiple questions, especially if you include open-ended ones. Try to stick to three to five for in-app questionnaires. This helps prevent survey fatigue and increase completion rates.
3. Avoid leading questions. These are the kinds of questions that hint at the answer. For example, “Our support team solved your problems quickly, haven’t they?” This can result in survey bias and inaccurate survey data.
4. Close the customer feedback loop. Show your customers that you care about them and are willing to fix their pain points by getting back to them. Inform them about changes, plans, or future improvements based on their feedback.

Conclusion

With careful planning and implementation, customer feedback surveys are powerful tools to improve your customer satisfaction survey’s efficacy. It’s also best to use a no-code tool for the automation and scalability of your in-app surveys.

Interested in collecting actionable insights from your users? Get a demo to start building your own customer feedback survey without coding!