Customer Satisfaction Surveys

We here at SurveyRock know how important surveying your customers is to your success so we put together five design principals for your customer satisfaction surveys:

1. Ask overall satisfaction at the start of the survey - This will allow you to measure customers’ overall impressions of your company, product or service before they start thinking of specific aspects of those relationships.
2. Use a 5-point satisfaction scale - Question scales should have descriptive labels associated with the numbers, and the top end of the scale should mean that customers are truly “wowed.”
3. Be consistent with your question wording - Consistency is critical in customer satisfaction research. Question scales should be consistent within a particular questionnaire as well as over time. The key measures of customer satisfaction, including the overall satisfaction question and those asking about specific aspects of the relationship, should all use the same scale.
4. Keep the survey short and focused - Focus on getting a read on your customers’ relationship with you. Avoid the temptation to ask everything you’ve ever wanted to know. The more ground you try to cover, the more likely it is that respondents will abandon the survey.
5. Ask demographic or "firmographic" questions - Inquiring about demographics or firmographics (company or industry type and size) enables you to analyze the data by different subgroups—such as new customers or regional customers. Consider hypotheses about customer profiles that may affect satisfaction and include questions that capture that data.

Remember that your customers’ satisfaction is tied directly to profitability – happy customers buy more and refer other customers. :-)

SurveyRock can help you with:

See our full list of sample customer satisfaction survey templates that you can use to be up and running in seconds!