Customer satisfaction survey questions

Customer satisfaction survey questions are a key component of any piece of customer satisfaction research, and thus a vital part of customer relationship management. Depending on the type of organisation or company which is carrying out research with its clients or customers, the exact questions themselves will vary. However, there are some basic elements which should be present in almost any customer satisfaction survey. Questions generally relate to customer experience – were staff professional in their approach, quick to respond, generally polite, able to answer any queries; the quality of products, ease of contact, were you treated fairly (if a dispute arose), satisfaction with the website or other forms of customer facing platforms.

Customer satisfaction survey questions also generally include ways to measure the respondents’ overall satisfaction, likelihood to re-commission a service company or return to the same store or brand to buy a product, and likelihood to recommend the product or service to a friend or colleague.

The latter of these questions, relating to likelihood to recommend, is often utilised to give a Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is a good customer satisfaction survey question to employ as it gives, if analysed correctly, a single figure score as to how a company is doing in terms of customer loyalty and likely retention. This figure can then be used to give a year on year (or more frequent) idea of customer satisfaction – it is also generally a good measure to give to senior executives and other non-research personnel as it is very simple to interpret.

Customer satisfaction survey questions can utilise both numerical and word-based rating scales. There are arguments for both approaches, although word-based rating scales remove potential issues with numerical scales such as some people never giving top marks for anything, no matter how good, and the fact that 8/10 for some people will be only a 6/10 for others. Word based rating scales generally allow respondents to say that something was ‘very good’, for instance – which is generally the same across a population.

 It is also often useful to consider respondents’ expectations in addition to their satisfaction – so that key areas for improvement can be identified (i.e. areas where customers expect a lot but the company under-performs, as opposed to areas where the company performs well, but customers do not consider important; which would be lower priority).