A customer service survey helps you get into your users’ minds and understand how they feel about your tool.
From quick quantitative surveys to more in-depth open-ended questions, you’ll glean insights to enhance your support and make customers happy.
This article delves deep into customer service surveys and how to do it right.
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.
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.
Feedback surveys come in different forms, and understanding the nuances of each category helps you generate the perfect insight. Let’s go over them.
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.
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 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now that you’ve gotten several question ideas, it’s time to start building. Follow these simple steps.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 lets users rate its customer service based on:
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 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.
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.
