CSAT Questions: Measure Customer Satisfaction Properly

Even a single question, if it is open-ended, can help users describe their user experience and this simple question can build trust between you and your customer, which is direct path to providing exceptional customer experiences and getting more happy customers.

Nevertheless, it sounds simple in theory, but measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT) efficiently is sometimes difficult. The main issues that are awaiting you in this case include low customer engagement and low response rate with CSAT surveys, inability to analyze customer data by the customer service team, highly subjective opinions of customers which makes it impossible to get a realistic picture of average customer satisfaction score. There are different examples of customer satisfaction surveys, thus choosing the right survey tool and type of questions to get valuable feedback is the only way to measure this customer experience metric. 

Thus, it is very important to ask right customer satisfaction (CSAT) questions - as these questions determine the accuracy of customer service surveys and their results. Therefore, we are going to provide you with the best CSAT questions you can use to improve engagement with your best CSAT questions in surveys and to measure customer satisfaction effectively.

What is customer satisfaction survey?

Customer satisfaction survey is a questionnaire that offers customers to measure how satisfied they are with your product quality or service. Thus, customer satisfaction surveys are one of the most widely used tools to collect customer feedback, but yet they are focused on measuring customer satisfaction - one of the key components of customer experience. In other words, any customer satisfaction survey example is a type of customer feedback survey with different types of questions to find out whether this exact interaction was a positive experience for a client or a bad experience. 

CSAT survey questionnaire uses a scale that allows users to measure their customer satisfaction level on a scale of 1 to 5, or 1 to 10 - these two models are the most popular. Afterward, business usually measures average customer satisfaction levels by calculating average result of all customer satisfaction surveys processed.

Effective customer satisfaction survey can contain one or a few customer survey questions, which regard to the quality of work of your customer support team, product features, product offerings, customer service interactions, customer service experience, some even include demographic questions to analyze customer segments, and so on. Relevant questions can be either open-ended, or use rating scales, or rating scale questions to let potential customers or current clients provide their honest feedback. 

Why is it important to conduct customer satisfaction surveys?

Customer satisfaction, as we have already mentioned, is one of the most important components of customer experience (CX), which makes it impossible to measure customer experience without tracking customer satisfaction. Nonetheless, there are also numerous precise benefits in measuring customer satisfaction. Let’s discuss them:

1. Improved customer loyalty - loyal customers are born when regular clients they see how business shows customer care, and one of the best ways to do so is to measure customer satisfaction. Nevertheless, it is never enough to just track customer opinions - you have to improve your products and services in order to reach to higher customer satisfaction scores.
2. Improving customer retention - customers aren’t willing to pay to a business that doesn’t pay attention to customer expectations and wishes. Measuring customer satisfaction is the first step on the path to identifying the problem areas and reducing customer churn.
3. Better understanding of customer behavior - sometimes it is normal that customers are satisfied at one stage of customer lifecycle, while there is problem on another - for instance, everything was okay until the customer service stage began.Customer satisfaction surveys allow you to find these improvement areas quickly and take needed measures to eliminate issues.
4. Improve customer experience - it is obvious that if customer satisfaction is a key component of customer experience and customer sentiment, then by improving customer satisfaction, you also improve customer experience.
5. Enhance employee performance - customer satisfaction is often lowered due to bad performance of customer service agents or sales agents. This is also why measuring customer satisfaction is a great way to find imperfections in the individual performance of different departments or employees.

Thus, let’s move straight to the topic - to the best CSAT questions you can ask to collect CSAT feedback.

CSAT questions: Types of customer satisfaction survyes

1. Rating CSAT questions

This is one of the most common, yet one of the best CSAT questions and answers you can use - you just need to design a survey with a scale from 1 to 5, or 1 to 10, and use only one question for the survey. It can be “On a scale from 1 to 10, please rate how satisfied you are with the response time?”.

The issue is that this type of customer satisfaction survey is highly individual in terms of evaluating customer service quality - while for some people 8 can be considered as “very effective customer service”, because they never rate anything at 10, for others 10 will not mean that everything was perfect. It is especially important for you to consider the differences in mentality and culture in different countries- for example, some Asian cultures embrace politeness, which means you be will hardly likely to receive low scores, while other people can rate your service lower than it deserves because of many reasons.

2. Likert CSAT questions

This is another one of CSAT question examples that is extremely popular and provides an actionable insight into customer opinion and customer experience. It is designed in following way - you use a scale from 1 to 5, or 1 to 7, which includes verbal description for each number on the scale. For instance, while 1 will stand for “extremely dissatisfied”, 5 will mean “totally satisfied”.

This scale is more useful for measuring average customer satisfaction levels among your clients, and it is also customizable, which means it can be used in any industry and for any service, as well as the previous scale.

3. Multiple-choice grid CSAT questions

Multiple-choice questions for customer service are used for more consistent and detailed survey responses in the customer satisfaction survey, as it allows to measure customer satisfaction for different aspects of customer-brand relationships.

How does it work? Well, you provide customers with a scale which includes different aspects of customer-brand relationships, such as price, quality of the product, customer service, ease of use, and so on. Each of these attributes has its own scale, often from 1 to 4, or 1 to 5, where customer can evaluate each aspect of business separately.

For instance, customer can provide 5 for pricing, while only 2 for customer service - thus in one survey you can detect a few issues simultaneously, which means you won’t have to measure customer satisfaction for each aspect of your product or business at all.

4. Binary-scale CSAT questions

Binary-scale questions are the simplest CSAT questions, as they use only one statement, one customer satisfaction question and two answers - “yes” or “no”. Thus, this type of CSAT questions is used to measure customer satisfaction after one of customer interactions and provides data only about satisfied or dissatisfied customers - it doesn’t even contain an option to rate service as “neutral”.

Nevertheless, binary-scale questions have one big advantage - they don’t require time to be handled by customers, and you can quickly measure customer satisfaction for each single customer interaction without disturbing customers.

It works this way: you ask a question, for example, “Are you satisfied with the purchase?”, and two answers possible - “yes” or “no”.

5. Semantic differential CSAT questions

These CSAT questions are a bit different from the binary scale CSAT questions, as they don’t provide two possible answers as “yes” or “no”, they are focused on an essential characteristic of the product, service or business at all.

Thus, if we imagine you have provided any educational resources for the customer, you can ask a question: “Were the materials we have sent you useful or not?”, where the possible answers will be “useful”, “not useful”, and “neutral”.

Thus, such CSAT questions include three options of answers, for instance, satisfied/dissatisfied, secure/insecure, cheap/expensive, effortless/effortful, and one universal answer - neutral.

6. Open-ended CSAT questions

Open-ended questions always make difference, especially when we are talking about customer feedback questions. Answers provided by the customers are much more detailed, and even though it may sound surprising, even angry customers can provide you with very relevant information, as they are those who are more likely to provide detailed and accurate feedback - and this doesn’t matter it is negative.

You can ask a question like “What would like us to improve in our customer service?”, as thus you show your interest in receiving constructive feedback, and that you are not scared of an opportunity to hear criticism.

Open-ended questions are also useful as you can ask everything that is acceptable in normal business relationships, and this won’t be considered strange - what’s more important, you will show your readiness to make changes and to hear your customers, and this is the thing that is always valuable.

Top CSAT questions to use in surveys

1. How satisfied are you with our product/service?, - this is the basic question you will use in most of your CSAT surveys. You can use it in Rating and Likert scales, which are also the most common CSAT surveys.
2. Are you satisfied with the customer service quality?, - this is the question you will also ask frequently, and it can be used in multiple-choice grid surveys, binary-scale surveys, semantic differential questions and open-ended CSAT questions.
3. Are you satisfied with the information and assistance provided before the purchase?, - this is important question to build trustworthiness after the purchase, as it helps to evaluate the work of your sales team. It can be used in the same surveys as the previous question.
4. Are you satisfied with the work of customer success team?, - this is a great question to ask if you want to follow-up with the customer or you want to find opportunities to move to another purchase with this customer.
5. How satisfied are you with onboarding process? - this question can and should be asked during after-purchase surveys. Include it in your multiple-choice grid surveys.
6. Does the product meet your expectations? - this is a perfect question to ask in binary scale surveys, as it allows you to understand what customer expectations are, and how you can meet those expectations.
7. How satisfied are you with the ease of use of our product?, - a good question to ask if you want to improve customer experience, as customer effort scores are another significant component that influences customer experience - in pair with customer satisfaction respectively.
8. How satisfied are you with the features of our product?, - a valuable question to use in multiple-choice scales, which allows you identify where are the improvement areas in your product.
9. What do you want us to add/improve regarding our product?, - a good open-ended question to collect customer expectations and think how you can meet them, and how they correlate with your current product development strategy.
10. What can we improve in our customer service?, - another open-ended question to ask, but focused on customer service - the thing that builds customer retention and loyalty.

When should I send customer satisfaction surveys?

Customer satisfaction surveys should be conducted after customer interaction, especially if those are valuable customer interactions. The best moments to conduct a customer satisfaction survey are:

1. After customer support interactions - this is important because you have to understand whether the customer service representatives meet customer expectations or not, and also to identify negative cases and find solutions quickly, before it will be too late;
2. After purchase - you definitely have to measure customer satisfaction after purchases, as new customers are a good source of information about the quality of your product or service, and this is also the key moment to start building long-lasting relationships with the customer.
3. After events - you should measure customer satisfaction after events you organized, such as webinars, conferences, etc., as such events are often attended by the most engaged customers who are more likely to provide you with detailed feedback.
4. Ongoing customer experience - even if there are no recent interactions with the customer, you can use a customer satisfaction survey template as a follow-up message to reactivate communication - some of clients will even come back for a purchase after this.
5. For inactive customers - as we have mentioned before, you can reactivate some users with customer satisfaction survey templates. Or, to be more specific, let’s say you are trying to reactivate a use by sending marketing emails - and there’s no answer. Then you send a CSAT survey with a question about whether were these marketing materials useful or not - isn’t it a good chance to start a conversation?

Conclusion

As you can see, there are numerous CSAT questions to use, and you can also use you own - your imagination is the only limitation. Remember, that measuring customer satisfaction is one of the most important things regarding customer experience measurement, and thus you should measure customer satisfaction on a regular basis and compare data to find out the improvement areas and problems and to improve your performance against competitors.

However, remember that the key to high CSAT scores isn’t in measuring it, but in resolving issues you identify while you measure it.