What is a customer service survey?

A customer service survey is a questionnaire that helps you gather customer feedback about user experiences with your company’s customer service department.

The aim is to identify service areas for improvement and ensure customers are satisfied with the level of service they receive.

Why are customer service surveys important?

It takes so much effort and resources to continuously roll out customer service surveys that users are willing to participate in. That’s not to mention the time you’ll spend analyzing the results to generate insights.

Is the effort worth it?

Here are four reasons why the answer is a solid yes.

• Retain customers and revenue: Research by the team at Qualtrics and ServiceNow reports that 80% of respondents have switched brands due to bad customer service experience. Based on this data, imagine how much your company might be losing to poor customer service! Moreover, their negative experience might discourage their network from doing business with you. Enhancing your customer service will help you retain customers, gain free word of mouth, and boost revenue.
• Gather customer feedback to improve services: Your surveys let you hear from the horse’s mouth. With the data obtained, you can see where your service team is performing well and flag areas that need improvement. Acting on the data helps you enhance the customer experience.
• Identify changing customers and adjust accordingly: Customer needs and preferences keep evolving. By regularly pushing out surveys, you’ll spot trends in customer expectations and needs. This equips you to make changes and stay competitive. For example, through your surveys, you might discover that users are engaging more with your mobile app and need it to be better optimized for efficiency. Act on this insight to delight users.
• Get more referrals and new customers: As mentioned previously, satisfied customers are often willing to recommend a product or service to their network. These referrals can lead to a stream of new customers. Additionally, you can turn positive survey feedback into glowing online reviews, serving as social proof to influence potential customers.

Categories of customer feedback surveys and when to use each

Feedback surveys come in different forms, and understanding the nuances of each category helps you generate the perfect insight. Let’s go over them.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey questions

NPS survey is a customer loyalty survey that measures the likelihood of customers recommending your company, product, or service to a friend or colleague.

It’s an easy-to-fill, single-question survey on an 11-point scale (0 to 10) that asks whether uses would recommend the product to others.

Trigger NPS surveys when you need to gauge user sentiment and measure customer satisfaction with your service.

The image below shows how to calculate your results. Essentially, you’re good when you have more promoters than detractors.

Customer effort score (CES)

CES surveys ask straightforward, short questions to gauge the perceived effort of completing a task. For our context, this means the perceived effort needed to resolve issues when interacting with the support portal or a human agent.

Customer effort score surveys are usually asked with yes/no, agree/disagree, or Likert scale options. You can combine your survey with open-ended questions to get more detailed feedback (the same applies to NPS).

Calculate your CES using the formula below:

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction surveys are more specific than NPS and CES, but you can combine any of the survey types if the data you need demands it.

Like CES, customer satisfaction survey questions commonly have either:

• a binary response for eyes/no or 😊/☹️.
• or a five or seven point Likert scale where 1 means you “strongly disagree” and 5 means you “strongly agree”.

You can combine your quantitative surveys with open-ended questions to get more granular insights.

There are no specific benchmarks for SaaS, but the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) recommends you aim for a customer satisfaction score between 75% and 85%. Anything less than 75% means your customer service needs attention.

Here is how you can calculate your customer satisfaction score.

Examples of customer service survey questions

Ready to get inspired?

This section shows you customer service survey questions to understand customer perception and their experience with your service team, assess your support channels, understand customer preferences, and learn more about product usage patterns.

Customer service team questions

Trigger service team questions to assess the user’s experience with a help agent, customer service representative, or account manager. The data from this will let you know where an agent might be lacking and how to help them improve.

Customer satisfaction survey questions to ask about your team’s performance

1. How helpful was our agent today?
2. How easy was it to contact customer support?
3. Was your agent able to understand your question clearly?
4. How would you rate the product knowledge of your rep?
5. How quickly was your issue resolved?
6. Did the customer service representative go above and beyond to help you?
7. Did our customer service agent provide clear and understandable solutions?
8. How would you rate the politeness and friendliness of the customer service representative?
9. Was the customer service representative knowledgeable and helpful?
10. Were you satisfied with the response time to your inquiry?
11. Based on your interaction today, how likely are you to continue using our product or service?

Channel assessment

Use channel assessment questions to understand the user’s experience with channels such as your in-app support, knowledge base, live agent, and email support.

From the responses, you can know which channels customers love the most, their struggles with different channels, and the effectiveness of your support content.

Customer satisfaction survey questions to assess support channels

1. Are you satisfied with the speed of our response to your email inquiry?
2. Which support channel do you prefer to use and why?
3. Are there specific improvements you’d like to see in any of our support channels?
4. How easy was it to find the in-app support button?
5. Was the information in the knowledge base accurate and up-to-date?
6. Was the information in the knowledge base easy to understand and follow?
7. Is there anything we could do to make [support channel] more user-friendly?
8. How often do you use our resource center?
9. Did you find the support portal easy to navigate and use?
10. Were you able to resolve your issues without needing to contact a live agent?

Customer preferences, behaviors, and habits

Send strategic surveys to learn more about customer preferences relevant to how they’d like to be contacted and where they seek help from the most. This helps personalize the customer service you offer to each of your users.

For example, many users prefer self-service, but you’ll only find this out if you ask.

Sample questions to ask your users

1. Do you have a preferred time of day for us to contact you?
2. What is your preferred language for customer support communication?
3. Would you like to receive proactive updates or notifications from us? If so, how often?
4. Where do you typically look for help or information regarding our product or service? (possible options: knowledge base, online communities, customer support, the company’s website, friends and family, other)
5. Do you prefer video tutorials or written guides when seeking help with our product?
6. Do you prefer immediate assistance through live chat or a slightly delayed but more comprehensive response via email?
7. Would you like us to use formal or informal language when communicating with you?
8. Are you comfortable with receiving SMS from our support team?
9. If you start seeking help through one support channel, how likely are you to switch to a different channel if you don’t get a quick response?
10. Are you part of online communities or user groups related to our product or service? Which ones? Follow up: How often do you seek help or share experiences within these communities?

Product usage

Ask questions to uncover product areas your customers customers need the most help with.

The feedback you obtain from product usage surveys will help your customer-facing teams hone in on some of the more complicated parts of using your tool. Plus, the responses can help enrich your knowledge base with the right information.

For example, you could trigger a survey asking users the integrations they struggle with and need help with the most.

Based on the responses, provide additional tips in your knowledge base that may not be directly related to your product but could help make the integration smoother.

Product usage questions to ask

1. Are there specific tasks or processes within our product that you find particularly complex or confusing?
2. Which advanced features do you believe would benefit from more in-depth guidance or tutorials?
3. Have you encountered any issues while exporting or importing data from [product] to other software? If so, please describe.
4. On a scale from 1 to 5, how easy is it to navigate our user interface?
5. On a scale from 1 to 10, how confident are you in troubleshooting and solving issues on your own?
6. Are there any automations or workflows where you need more guidance or support?
7. Which of the analytics dashboards do you need extra help interpreting?
8. On a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with [feature]?
9. Which of these advanced features do you actively use?
10. Are there any integrations or features you’d like to see added to our product in the future to enhance your user experience and productivity?

How to create a customer service survey

Now that you’ve gotten several question ideas, it’s time to start building. Follow these simple steps.

Choose a survey tool

Pick a platform that allows you to send multiple survey types, offers analytics, and is easy to use. You also want this tool to seamlessly integrate with your product analytics tool so you don’t struggle to interpret survey results and make needed changes.

Userpilot is one such product analytics tool that comes with an easy-to-use survey builder.

Create your survey using templates

The good thing about native product analytics tools is that you’ll have access to customer satisfaction survey templates suitable for your needs. This will save you time and help you focus on other aspects of your customer survey.

You can always create a survey from scratch, but survey templates speed things up. Userpilot also lets you save your custom surveys as templates to use for next time.

In addition, you have multiple customization options with Userpilot. For instance, you can play around with different survey placements, add logic parameters that redirect users based on their responses, use different colors, font types, and more.

Set automatic triggers for your surveys

The most common ways to trigger customer service surveys are immediately after a user interaction with your support team or after a user achieves a key milestone in the customer journey.

Here are examples of touchpoints that you should set automatic triggers for:

• Product activation
• After customer service interaction
• After onboarding
• Post-account renewal
• After the user integrates with a third-party tool

Pro-tip: Consider always-on surveys, allowing customers to give feedback whenever they feel like it. However, make these discreet so they don’t disrupt the customer experience.

Analyze results to improve your customer service

Once you’ve collected survey results, it’s time to analyze them and identify improvement areas—this can be anything from training your agents for better service delivery to updating your knowledge base and ensuring users easily find help.

When analyzing, look for common themes in the feedback. If many customers are complaining about the same issue, you know where to improve next.

You can also use survey results to track your progress over time. This will help you see how your customer service is improving.

Best practices to increase survey responses

Rolling out a survey doesn’t guarantee responses – users come to your platform to get work done, not to find surveys to fill. So, go the extra mile to make sure they’re motivated to respond.

• Ask necessary questions only: Keep your survey focused by asking only essential questions that align with your objectives. This reduces survey fatigue and encourages more users to complete it, as they won’t be overwhelmed by irrelevant inquiries.
• Use short questions: Lengthy questions tend to be confusing and demand more cognitive load from users. Keep your survey questions short and to the point.
• Avoid leading questions: Leading questions are questions that suggest a particular answer. For example, instead of asking, “Are you satisfied with our customer service?”, try “How satisfied are you with our customer service?”.
• Use simple language: Frame your questions in plain, straightforward language. Avoid jargon or technical terms that might confuse users. Clarity encourages participation from a broader audience.
• Use pre-filled answers: Where appropriate, provide pre-filled answer options for multiple-choice questions. This simplifies the response process and makes it more convenient for users, potentially leading to higher completion rates.

Best customer service survey examples

Now it’s time to see how the experts do customer service surveys. Here’s a look at leading SaaS companies and how they collect feedback from their users.

Notion Chatbot

The Notion bot helps solve common customer queries. Users simply click on the bot and begin conversing with it when they have issues.

Notion designed the bot to make resolutions faster by providing quick options to choose from when seeking help regarding specific topics. This is a normal practice that companies use to improve conversational marketing and boost the user experience.

However, where it gets interesting is that, at the end of every interaction, the bot asks if it was able to help. If the response is negative, users get a feedback form to express their thoughts and receive personalized help.

Hubspot Live Agent

Hubspot is known for its robust customer service. Users have access to an extensive knowledge base, can send inquiries through emails, and also get phone calls from a customer service representative.

The platform provides a unified support inbox that lets users view and manage all their support tickets in one place. And if you want fast resolution, there’s a live chat option that allows you to communicate with agents.

Hubspot automatically asks you to rate the experience every time a conversation ends and a ticket is closed. This helps the team improve their customer service and agent knowledge.

Canva Bot

Canva has a large user base, so they depend heavily on their chatbot to help users navigate the platform and resolve issues.

To improve the experience, the bot triggers a simple customer satisfaction survey.

The survey is quick and simple, making it almost effortless for users to respond. By consistently gathering this data, Canva improves its chat flows and enriches its support with useful content.

Amazon Customer Service

Amazon lets users rate its customer service based on:

• Response speed
• Level of communication
• Resolution

The survey is short and direct, allowing Amazon to know whether customers are satisfied with the interaction.

Pairing the quick quantitative survey with an open-ended question is a good approach to collecting extensive customer feedback.

Monzo

Monzo uses emojis to collect feedback after customer service interactions.

There’s only so much the emojis can explain, so they added a field for users who’d like to provide additional context.

Conclusion

One mistake companies make is to think of customers as a large pool of people rather than individuals who each need attention.

It’s time to switch up that mindset and take customer service seriously. Each interaction with individual users counts, so try to maximize it as much as possible.

And this is where customer service surveys come in. By regularly surveying users, you’d make them feel valuable, learn more about their experience, and find ways to make your product and service better.

Ready to roll out your first or next customer service survey and need a specialized tool? Userpilot can help.

Book a demo to learn how to automatically set and trigger surveys, measure survey results, and implement changes to boost your support.