Customer experience
Customer satisfaction survey
Rate the parts of the service separately, then ask the one question that predicts loyalty.
Why this survey gets sent
“I know the month was worse than the one before it. I do not know whether it was the waiting, the price or one member of staff, so I cannot fix anything — I can only worry about everything.”
A single “how satisfied were you?” gives you a number that moves and never says why. Splitting the service into the parts a manager can actually change turns the same two minutes of a customer's time into a list of decisions.
What is in it
- Speed, staff, clarity, value — one rating grid
- How likely are you to recommend us? (rating)
- Was your issue resolved? (single response)
- The one thing we should improve (long answer)
- Email, only if you want a reply (optional)
About 2 min to answer
Customer satisfaction survey
About 2 min
How to write this survey
Ask about the parts, not the whole
A satisfaction survey earns its place when every question maps to something one person can change on Monday. “Were you satisfied with your visit?” maps to nobody. “How satisfied were you with the speed of service?” maps to the shift schedule; “with the clarity of the information?” maps to the signage and the script at the counter.
Four areas is the working maximum for a grid. Below four the grid is not worth its space; above six the respondent starts answering by pattern — the same column all the way down — and the data quietly stops meaning anything. Pick the four you would actually act on and leave the rest.
One idea per question
The most common fault in a satisfaction survey is the question that asks two things at once: “Were the staff friendly and efficient?” A customer who met a warm, slow employee has no honest answer. Split it, or drop the half you care about less.
Avoid the question that carries its own answer. “How much did you enjoy our new branch?” has already decided that you enjoyed it. Write the neutral version — “How was your experience at the new branch?” — and accept whatever comes back.
Choose one scale and keep it
Five points, labelled at both ends and in the middle, is the scale most people read without thinking. Label every column rather than only the ends: an unlabelled middle column means something different to every respondent, and a number without a word beside it is not an opinion.
Then keep the same scale next quarter. A satisfaction number is only useful against the last one, and changing the wording of the columns resets your history to zero without telling you it has. In Arabic the grid reads right to left and the survey mirrors it for you — the “very satisfied” end stays on the side the reader starts from, in both languages.
Leave exactly one box to write in
The open question is where the reason lives, and it is also the question people skip. Ask for one thing rather than everything: “What is the one thing we should improve?” is answered far more often than “Do you have any other comments?”, and what comes back is a sentence you can act on instead of a paragraph you can only file.
Keep it optional. A required open question turns a two-minute survey into a chore and costs you the ratings of everybody who was merely content.
Send it while the visit is still in the room
Satisfaction decays fast. A QR code at the counter or a link sent within an hour of the visit gets several times the response of the same survey sent on Thursday about Monday — and the answers are about what happened rather than about how the customer feels today.
Ask for a contact detail only where it buys something: a customer who says the issue was not resolved and leaves an email is a recovery you can still make. Everybody else should be allowed to stay anonymous, and the survey should say so on the page.
Decide what a bad answer triggers before you send it
A survey nobody acts on teaches your customers that answering is pointless, and the second round always gets fewer replies than the first. Before you publish, write down the two rules: who reads the open answers, and what happens when somebody rates an area at the bottom of the scale.
Then report back. A line on the receipt or a note at the counter — “you told us the wait was too long, so we added a second till on Thursdays” — is worth more to the next round's response rate than any reminder email, because it is the proof that the two minutes were spent on something.