55 insightful customer service survey questions

Customer service surveys help businesses gain insights into numerous elements of their operations, including marketing, sales, customer support, and product development.

Every customer service survey question should be crafted carefully. You don’t have multiple opportunities to receive direct feedback from your audience, so the questions are valuable. From the wording of the question to the answer options you provide, every detail requires precise calibration.

Let’s explore the most effective customer service survey questions that generate valuable data for analysis.

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Many businesses base their entire marketing and sales strategy on customer satisfaction, so having an opportunity to hear what these customers think is priceless.

By implementing comprehensive customer service surveys, you can maintain an open line of communication with your audience and collect data for actionable insights.

Streamlining strategies

Your sales and marketing teams monitor multiple metrics to gauge their performance, but customer service surveys may tell a different story. You can identify gaps in your tactics and adjust your sales and marketing strategies by evaluating what your customers have to say.

You can also find out which tactics bring the desired results and use this information to guide budget allocation.

Getting inspiration

Customer service surveys don’t just provide valuable insights into your operations. They can also offer inspiration for new products, services, and approaches.

You can design customer service survey questions to gain access to customers’ ideas and suggestions. They could reveal a new and better direction for your business. They can also lead you to uncover new trends, enabling you to react to them promptly and stand out from your competition.

Retaining customers

Customer surveys work both ways. While you are gathering valuable information, your audience sees that you are interested in what they think. This can establish loyalty between your customers and your brand and improve retention.

The key to unlocking this benefit is acting on what your customers tell you. This type of reciprocity can increase customer lifetime value (LTV) and turn these people into brand ambassadors.

Continuous learning

Customer surveys can generate considerable amounts of useful information for analytics. With the right tools, you can gain insights into many aspects of your business strategies. The more surveys you implement, the more data an AI-powered analytics tool can leverage to help you make educated conclusions.

As you continue learning about your audience’s preferences, you can make adjustments to your strategy, discover unexpected segments of your target audience, review product development ideas, and much more.

Uncover hidden data

Research suggests that only 4% of dissatisfied customers share their complaints with the business. Meanwhile, each of those dissatisfied customers tells 16 other people about their negative experience.

A customer survey can bring you information you wouldn’t have received otherwise. This creates an opportunity for quality improvements.

Depending on the goals you want to achieve with the customer service survey questions you ask, you can divide them into several categories. When designing your survey or questionnaire, select the most suitable question(s) from each section.

Problem resolution questions

If a customer contacts the customer service team with a question or a problem, you should ask them the following questions:

1. Was your issue resolved to your satisfaction?

2. On a scale of 1–10, how would you rate the effectiveness of our customer service in resolving your problem?

3. Did you receive clear and concise information regarding the solution to your problem?

4. Were you offered options to help prevent similar issues in the future?

5. Did the resolution meet your expectations?

6. Did the resolution address the root cause of the problem?

7. Were you satisfied with your overall interaction with our customer service team?

8. Would you recommend our company’s customer service to others based on this experience?

Responses to these questions can help you evaluate your problem-resolution system’s design and effectiveness.

You can also add an open-ended question at the end of the survey to allow the customer to share their concerns, which generates more useful detail. For example, “What would you like our management team to know about this problem-resolution experience?”

Agent-specific questions

Often, each of your customer service representatives will have their own approach to solving problems. To gauge your team members’ performance, you could ask questions directly related to their work.

1. On a scale of 1–10, how would you rate the overall helpfulness of the customer service agent you spoke to?

2. Did the customer service representative listen attentively to your concerns?

3. Did the customer service agent understand your problem?

4. Did the customer service agent offer a relevant solution to your problem?

5. On a scale of 1–10, how satisfied were you with the agent’s ability to resolve your issue?

6. Did the agent demonstrate a professional demeanor throughout the conversation?

7. Did you receive clear guidance on how to address your problem?

8. Did the customer service agent actively listen to your concerns and ask clarifying questions when needed?

9. On a scale of 1–10, how would you rate the agent’s expertise in handling your specific issue?

10. Did the agent follow up with you after the initial conversation to ensure your issue was fully resolved?

At the end, you can ask an open-ended question about the customer’s experience with this particular agent. For example, “Would you like to share something that can improve your next experience with this agent?”

CES questions

In the context of customer service, the customer effort score (CES) allows you to evaluate how much effort the customer had to exert to resolve a problem or get an answer to their question. CES questions can help you figure out whether your customer service response structure is yielding the desired results.

You can generate a CES score using the following questions:

1. On a scale of 1–10, how easy was it to reach our customer service representative?

2. How quickly were you connected to a customer service representative after making the call?

3. How would you rate the simplicity of the instructions provided by the representative?

4. Did the representative understand your problem quickly?

5. Were you able to resolve your issue without needing to be transferred to other representatives?

6. On a scale of 1–10, how satisfied are you with the level of effort you had to put in to resolve your problem?

At the end of this section, you can ask an open-ended question, like, “Please tell us what difficulties you faced (if any) when trying to get an answer to your question.”

Demographic questions

In any survey, demographic questions can help you gather valuable information about your audience. Adding several demographic questions to each survey without overwhelming the customer allows you to tweak your buyer persona.

Depending on how you want to analyze and cut your data, the following could be useful:

1. How old are you? (You can provide ranges or ask for their year of birth)

2. Which city/country are you located in?

3. What is your highest level of education?

4. What is your employment status? (Provide options)

5. What is your annual household income? (Provide ranges)Are you a new customer? (Yes/no)

6. How frequently do you interact with our products? (Provide ranges)

7. Which industry do you work in? (Provide options, including “other”)

8. How did you hear about our company? (Provide options, including “other”)

Demographic questions are personal, so answers shouldn’t be mandatory. To improve your chances of getting answers, provide reply options.

Time-related questions

Time is always of the essence during customer service interactions. You can add a selection of the following time-related questions to your list:

1. How long did it take for a customer service representative to answer your call?

2. If applicable, how many times were you transferred from one representative to another?

3. Did the representative provide a solution to your problem during the first call?

4. How long did the entire conversation with the representative last? (Provide ranges)

5. Were you placed on hold during the call?

6. If you were placed on hold during the call, how long were you on hold for? (Provide ranges)

7. On a scale of 1–10, how satisfied are you with the time it took to solve your problem?

Answers to these questions will help you understand how to structure your customer service team training to speed up response time, if necessary.

Open-ended questions

Open-ended customer service survey questions are highly valuable. However, not many customers are willing to spend time typing out answers. To avoid survey fatigue, don’t add more than two open-ended questions to one survey. Here are some examples:

1. What aspects of our customer service impressed you the most?

2. What aspects of our customer service disappointed you the most?

3. Is there a particular customer service representative who stood out to you?

4. Can you provide any suggestions on how we can enhance our customer service to better meet your needs next time?

5. Did our customer service team exceed your expectations in any way?

6. Is there anything else you would like to share about your customer service experience with us?

While answers to open-ended questions may seem long and complex, you can easily analyze them with advanced AI-driven analytics tools.

Loyalty questions

These questions can help you understand how loyal your customers are to your business. They can help you determine your net promoter score (NPS) and get a broader view of your customers’ loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm.

1. How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend?

2. How likely are you to continue using our services in the future?

3. How satisfied are you with the quality of our customer service?

4. How likely are you to choose our company over a competitor?

5. How likely are you to leave positive reviews about our company online?

6. How likely are you to leave a negative review about our company online?

7. How satisfied are you with the value you receive in exchange for the price you pay for our product?

8. How likely are you to engage with our company’s promotions, offers, or loyalty programs?

9. How satisfied are you with the level of personalization we offer in our customer service interactions?

Answers to these questions should be on a scale of 1–10, or you can ask the customer to respond with one of the following: highly likely, likely, neutral, not likely, or highly unlikely.

Identifying relevant customer service survey questions is just the first step in designing an effective survey. You need to implement best survey practices to ensure data quality.

When to send customer service surveys

Send the survey at the right time to get as many responses as possible. The best time is right after you provide the service.

The maximum time you can wait before sending a survey is 24 hours. Ideally, a customer should receive it as soon as they hang up the phone or close the chat window. This way, you can gather relevant information while it’s still fresh in the customer’s mind.

Pay special attention to the channel you are sending your survey through. If a customer has a negative experience, they may not visit your website or social media page again. If your interactions occur through your app, they may delete it right after the call. Consider sending the survey via email or a messaging service like WhatsApp.

A/B testing customer service surveys

You can’t ask lots of questions in each survey without risking survey fatigue, but you can run A/B tests.

These tests are a great way to figure out which survey questions work best and bring more responses. A/B testing compares two versions of a survey to find which performs better, allowing you to optimize your decision-making based on data-driven insights.

You can adjust the wording, play around with the number of questions, or change the question order.

Comparing the results of similar surveys can help you choose the best option and improve the quality of data for analysis.

Thanking customers for taking the survey

To secure your customers’ loyalty, consider thanking them for completing the survey. While a simple “thank you” can go a long way, you may want to offer some tangible gifts, such as discounts, free content, or deals.

You may also want to incentivize participation in feedback surveys by offering the chance to win prizes like gift cards. This approach can help you gather sufficient feedback to effectively evaluate the performance of your customer service operations.

Avoiding leading questions

Bias is a serious issue with survey questions. You shouldn’t in any way push the customer to give you the answer you want. Survey questions must be free of any unnecessary details. The shorter you make them, the easier they will be to answer.

For example, instead of asking, “Did you like our experienced customer service representative?” you should ask, “Did you like our customer service representative?”

You should also avoid asking double-barreled questions that may confuse the reader. For example, instead of asking, “What did you like or dislike about our customer service?” ask two separate questions:

1. What did you like about our customer service?

2. What did you dislike about our customer service?

While this approach will increase the number of questions in the survey, it’s more likely to bring you clear answers.

Test your survey

Before sending a customer service survey, test it or at least soft-launch it. This can help you catch errors and avoid misunderstandings. Share the survey with three to five people and get their feedback. Here are some feedback questions you should ask them afterward:

• How easy are the questions to answer?

• How long did it take you to complete the survey?

• Did any of the questions make you feel uncomfortable?

• Did any of the questions confuse you?

• What would you change about this survey?

People who create surveys shouldn’t be involved in testing them. Consider asking other departments to take the test.

Customer service surveys can help you achieve many marketing and sales goals. The valuable feedback you receive from your audience is the foundation of many successful strategies.

While highly useful, customer service surveys don’t always yield the expected results. The problem usually lies in the quality and quantity of the questions. By taking a comprehensive approach to structuring your surveys, you can source high-quality data for effective analytics.

In a consumer survey, you should ask questions that rate the customer’s satisfaction with your services.

Here’s a simple question that can help you gauge your performance: “On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend our service to a friend?”

A 1 to 10 survey question asks a customer to rate something on a scale of 1–10. For example, “On a scale of 1–10, how satisfied were you with our customer service?”

A five-point survey is a set of questions that use a Likert scale for answers.

The customer chooses between five answers—two are negative, one is neutral, and two are positive.

For example, to the question, “How satisfied are you with our customer service?” the answers would be “very satisfied,” “satisfied,” “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” “dissatisfied,” and “highly dissatisfied.”