Share A customer satisfaction survey is one of the most effective ways to measure how happy your customers really are with your service. When designed well, these surveys do more than just surfacing a single satisfaction score. You can dig deeper into customer sentiments on specific product attributes like design, durability, price, and usability. Alternatively, you can zoom out to identify key areas for improvement and assess broader metrics like loyalty and likelihood to recommend.
But even if you understand the value of customer satisfaction surveys, getting started can feel overwhelming. In this article, we’ll cover five essential considerations when designing your first CSAT survey, from structuring questions to including critical profiling questions.
① What should you ask? Structure questions around your objective
Start by considering your main goals. What do you need to ask customers in order to get meaningful data that addresses your objectives?
Do you want to compare satisfaction against competitors? Identify product and service improvement areas? Share growth trajectory forecasts with executives? Improve usability to reduce churn? Each of these goals would require a different set of questions.
If you’re unsure where to begin, start by listing up what you’d like to know. Then, break each item down into a specific question.
For example, say you want to understand overall satisfaction with your online shopping platform and why users feel that way. Here’s what you might want to learn about your customers:
- Overall satisfaction
- Most satisfying aspects/dissatisfying aspects
- Reasons for why they were/weren’t satisfied with
You might also want to ask how customers felt about a recent marketing event.
The following is an example of a question set that addresses your objectives:
In the above example, we asked customers to rank points of satisfaction/dissatisfaction, but you could also measure satisfaction levels for each individual aspect. This allows for side-by-side comparisons across your company and competitors. You’ll be able to identify how your brand is faring in areas like product selection, delivery, and marketing. You can also add Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions to gauge customer loyalty and business growth potential.
Here’s how your survey might look with those additions:
② 5-point, 7-point, or 10-point? Choose the right rating scale
Satisfaction surveys commonly use rating scales, but which one should you be using? 5-point, 7-point, 10-point, or even 11-point scales?
Many companies, even those with experience in surveys, struggle with this question. Some switch scales based on the latest trend, while others try out different types to offset potential drawbacks of each scale.
What’s important to remember is that consumer surveys are not about academic precision — they’re about quickly and effectively identifying customer sentiments.
So consistency is key. If you’ve been using a 5-point scale, it’s best to continue with it. That way, your data stays comparable over time and you won’t miss important shifts in patterns.
What if you’re new to customer satisfaction surveys? If so, it’s best to use the most widely adopted scale — meaning one that has been used frequently enough so that industry norm data is available. You’ll have a better understanding of what constitutes a “high” score, how much variance from competitors matters, and whether small changes are significant or just within the margin of error.
Which scale is most commonly used? Based on Opensurvey Dataspace’s satisfaction surveys conducted in 2020–2021, the 5-point scale was used in 79.0% of cases. This was followed by the 7-point (9.0%), 11-point (7.2%), and 10-point scales (2.3%). If you’re new to satisfaction surveys, we strongly recommend starting with the 5-point scale unless you have a clear reason not to.
③ Add profiling questions to unlock deeper insights
Sometimes your satisfaction survey responses can’t be linked to your internal customer database. In these cases, it’s difficult to analyze which type of customers are more or less satisfied, who might be facing challenges, and whether trends differ between new and loyal users. Including basic questions like gender and age allows you to later analyze patterns across segments.
What sorts of profiling questions should you include? Choose attributes based on how you’d like to segment and analyze the results. You can keep it simple by including just questions on gender, age group, and location. But if you want to dig into job types, household structure, purchasing channels, or whether users shop from competitors, you’ll need more detailed questions.
That said, don’t go overboard. If your survey starts asking for too much personal information, respondents might drop out or have a negative impression of your brand. A lengthy survey may also result in incomplete or low-integrity responses due to fatigue. Review your customer profiling questions carefully and make sure they’re essential.
④ How many questions is too many? Use market averages as a reference
One of the most common questions from companies new to satisfaction surveys is: “How many questions should we ask?”
While more questions provide more data, they also increase fatigue, reduce response quality, and hurt completion rates. We analyzed 1,100 satisfaction surveys conducted by Opensurvey Dataspace in 2020–2021 and found that the average number of total questions was 24.7, and that the average number of open-ended questions was 2.2.
Assuming a survey with 25 questions including two open-ended ones, the estimated completion time would be around 5 minutes. This is short enough for participants to complete during a short break, while still staying focused and engaged.
⑤ Set the right target audience and sample size
Finally, don’t forget to define who should respond to your survey and how many responses you need.
To get meaningful results, you must ask the right respondents—those who can provide relevant feedback. For instance, if the survey is about product A, then users who mainly purchase product B or C should be excluded. Even among product A users, you might narrow it down to those who bought it in the last month—or widen the scope to the past year. Your survey goal should guide this decision.
You also need to decide how many responses to collect. If your sample is too small, the results may lack statistical significance, meaning they won’t be reliable or representative. While 30–50 responses may suffice for academic purposes, we recommend securing at least 100 responses per analysis unit for actionable business insights. This way, one response represents just 1%, reducing the risk of over-interpreting any single data point.
Learn more about customer satisfaction surveys
In this article, we explored how to design customer satisfaction surveys—from structuring questions and selecting the right scale, to deciding which profile questions to include. We hope you have a better understanding of how to build a questionnaire that can address your research objectives.
With Dataspace, you can easily create, launch, and analyze customer satisfaction surveys from start to finish. You can use your existing customer database, customize your survey to reflect your brand identity, and analyze results quickly through an intuitive interface.
Start your customer satisfaction assessment journey today with Dataspace.