CSAT

How to make CSAT surveys, and why they're important

CSAT questionnaires and surveys are essential for capturing what customers think about your product or services.

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1. The purpose of customer satisfaction surveys

CSAT questionnaires and surveys are essential for capturing what customers think about your product or services. With a well-timed, well-crafted CSAT survey, you can uncover reasons why your customers might be about to churn, or why they’re considering renewing their business with you.


You can develop a clearer picture of the needs, wants, and drives of your customers, which in turn can inform product/service improvements. The key is to collect timely feedback, so you can act on it quickly. If changes are made correctly, you drastically improve your odds of building up customer lifetime value.


But there are caveats to be aware of:


1. Before you start asking your customers about their satisfaction levels, it’s critical to establish why you’re doing it.


2. You need to have a plan in place for what to do with the data you collect.


If you haven’t already, check out how to measure customer satisfaction effectively for the full story (it also applies an industry-specific lens to customer satisfaction measurement).


So how can you practically use questionnaires and surveys to uncover insights around the benefits and drawbacks of your product or service? Or to identify power users and customers most likely to be brand advocates?


The key is using the correct survey for the job.

2. Key types of customer satisfaction surveys

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) surveys


…measure how satisfied your customers are—often on a scale of 1-3, 1-5 or 1-7 (there’s no hard and fast industry standard). To get the full lowdown on CSAT scores, check out our CSAT scores 101 page.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys

…measure the likelihood of a customer recommending a product/service/or business to another potential customer. This makes it a great upsell or cross-sell opportunity indicator. It’s usually measured on an 11-point scale, with 0 being Extremely Unlikely and 10 being Extremely Likely.


For more on this, jump to our Spotlight on NPS.

Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys

…measure how easy your customers find using your product or service. Unsurprisingly, low-effort experiences increase satisfaction. There’s no official scale for this—if you want to check out the benefits and drawbacks of different scales, we’ve outlined them on our Measuring CSAT page.

More on metrics…

For the best way to capture and calculate the scores associated with these surveys, head over to our KPIs & Metrics for customer satisfaction page. It also includes the essential non-survey based metrics you need to be aware of, too.

3. When to send a CSAT survey

The right time to seek customer satisfaction feedback depends on the type of survey, its goal, and the distribution channel it’s intended for. For example, if you’re emailing a CSAT survey to assess how satisfied a customer was with a retail order, 3-5 days after delivery is the best time to engage. But if you’re looking to assess how satisfied a customer was with a call with your contact center via SMS, it’s better to seek that feedback immediately.


You can view a detailed breakdown of the different channels and their optimal timings on our Measuring CSAT page .

4. What to include in a customer satisfaction survey

Different question types are best suited to eliciting different types of feedback:

Single questions

Follow-up questions

Simple emoji-based questions

Open-ended questions

Top tips for better results

1. Ask non-leading questions: Many businesses use CSAT surveys to confirm they’re doing the right thing, rather than to seek insight about what they could improve.

Leading questions such as “How great was our service?” imply that the service was great, and can create misleading results. A non-leading alternative like “How would you rate our service?” is far more useful.


2. Keep surveys under 5 mins: Be respectful of your users’ time. If your survey takes more than 5 minutes, you’ll see a big drop off in completion rates.


3. Perform survey immediately: Good experiences have limited “shelf” life in customers consciousness.


4. Use the same channel: The survey should follow up a phone call with an interactive phone survey; a chat interaction with a chat survey; etc.


5. Pay attention to AHT outliers: Shorter Average Handle Times are not always good news for your CSAT scores. You can examine this tradeoff by asking “Did the agent understand your question or concern?”


6. Conduct A/B tests: Trialing different questions, survey types, and reachout timings is a great way to investigate how your customers want to engage with your CSAT program. It’s also vital to use a variety of channels to see which drives the greatest completion rate.


7. Don’t change questions too frequently: It’s difficult to accurately measure progress toward a target goal if the benchmark results were measured with different questions.

5. What to ask in a customer satisfaction survey

There will always be a business and industry-specific angle for exactly what should be in a CSAT survey. But there are some universal questions you should always consider:

Demographics:

Psychographics:

Numerical satisfaction scales:

Open-ended or free text questions:

Want to dive deeper into CSAT measurement? Check out our page on KPIs & metrics for customer satisfaction.

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