How to create customer surveys: 8 tips + templates

Today, poor service can cost you customers, so collecting real-time customer feedback matters more than ever. Creating and sending effective customer surveys your audience wants to respond to can be the difference between building exceptional customer experiences (CX) and being left in the dust.

Customer surveys focused on past customer service interactions and current products help businesses understand customer needs and expectations. In our guide, we offer tips on how to create customer surveys and measure their effectiveness—plus, we’ve created five customizable customer survey templates to help you get started.

More in this guide:

• What are customer surveys?
• Why are customer surveys important?
• How to measure if customer surveys are effective
• 8 tips for creating customer surveys that get responses
• 5 customer survey templates
• Collect customer feedback right away with customer survey templates

What are customer surveys?

Customer surveys are a method of collecting consumer feedback. They help companies assess customer satisfaction, measure customer engagement, perform market research, and gauge expectations.

Why are customer surveys important?

Customer survey responses provide invaluable (and real) insights into what motivates, excites, and frustrates customers. This awareness also helps businesses uncover why some buyers leave and others stay, enabling them to improve products or services, provide positive customer experiences, and strengthen brand image.

According to Leanne Britton, customer advocacy manager at Zendesk, “Providing customers with avenues of engagement and feedback is important to understand their frustrations and how to provide the best product possible … When people reach out for help or feel frustrated with a product, they want to feel heard and understood at a core level.” Asking for real-time authentic feedback helps customers feel less like a means to an end and more like a company priority.

Customer surveys also help companies prioritize customer focus. Successful customer focus strategies require businesses to put customer needs first, so using surveys to capture and genuinely understand these needs helps teams meet customer expectations and vastly improve:

• Customer service by knowing how to best support customers
• Products and services by tailoring experiences to customer preferences, solving specific problems, or refining functions to better meet needs

Improvements in these three areas directly impact the company’s level of customer care.

How to measure if customer surveys are effective

It’s important to measure if your customer surveys are effective to ensure they are working for customers and meeting your business needs. As the rise of digital channels and AI make it easier to ask for feedback at scale, many companies over-survey customers, which increases feedback fatigue. So, it’s important to know when your surveys are effective and when they’re actually irritating customers.

To measure the effectiveness of customer surveys, consider tracking:

• Response rate: The percentage of people who responded to a survey invite.
• Completion rate: The percentage of people who fill out the entire survey.

You can use customer survey tools to analyze these metrics and determine areas of survey improvement. Plus, companies can measure the effectiveness of customer surveys by:

• Comparing survey results to industry standards

• Identifying patterns in responses to open-ended questions

• Regularly auditing survey and question length

• Analyzing nonresponders and considering potential biases that may alienate potential responders

• Calculating error margins and confidence intervals

By considering these metrics and best practices, businesses can consistently track survey effectiveness and refine forms to better serve their customers.

8 tips for creating customer surveys that get responses

To get customer feedback that’s relevant and useful, you need to offer plenty (but not too many) feedback opportunities, respect customer boundaries, and make it quick and easy for your audience to participate. Here are some tips on striking this balance while creating customer surveys that get responses.

1. Define your customer survey goal

Before you even begin the survey creation process, assess and select the appropriate survey type (with the appropriate questions). Identify the goal of your survey—like collecting customer feedback about a new product feature or the best service channels for your audience—and use this goal to design your survey and inform question type, length, and form.

2. Write clear, unbiased customer survey questions

Vague, leading, unclear, and complicated questions make customer surveys difficult to take and responses unreliable. Instead, write non-leading, easy-to-understand customer survey questions and consider if you should:

• Adjust the phrasing if a question is unclear. Strive for straightforward questions that communicate the intended meaning.
• Remove technical jargon and company-specific language if a question uses confusing terminology. Aim to write for an eighth-grade reading level and use tools to check the readability score of your questions.
• Avoid generalizations and use objective language if a question makes assumptions. Be aware of your own biases and how you express them.
• Simplify your request if a question asks for too much information. Asking for a lot of information can overwhelm respondents.
• Remove non-neutral and unnecessary words from leading questions. Don’t force respondents to give an answer that doesn’t reflect their opinion.
• Tweak a question’s wording if there’s a slight chance it might make your respondents feel uneasy or embarrassed. Be inclusive and avoid offensive language.

Prioritizing clear, unbiased survey questions enables businesses to create more inclusive surveys, enhancing the possibility of diverse customer input.

3. Send customer service surveys in relevant channels

Meet your customers where they are and make it easy and convenient for them to meaningfully respond to customer surveys by placing them on the right channels. Use an omnichannel approach to reach your customers in places where they’re already thinking about your products and services, including but not limited to:

• In-product: Insert a survey invite into the packaging of your physical product or automatically trigger a survey prompt after a certain usage period for a digital product.
• Website: Use a one- or two-question embedded online survey to determine how visitors feel about your website. Ask about their user experience and how you can make it better.
• Email: Directly reach your target audience by sending email surveys. Encourage responses by implementing past feedback and offering incentives.
• Messaging: Use messaging software like WhatsApp, Meta DMs, and SMS to send customer surveys via messaging.

Consider using a combination of channels to increase responses and send reminders through different channels—while keeping feedback fatigue in mind—to nudge customers to complete the survey.

4. Keep surveys short

If you want a high response rate, keep your customer surveys brief. According to Assunta Scala, director of customer listening and insights at Zendesk, “A common [mistake in a customer feedback approach is trying] to capture too much in one survey, which results in a very long survey. Too many questions can be counterproductive and lead to a higher dropout rate or unqualified answers.”

Most surveys should take just a few minutes to complete. Respect your customers’ time by letting them know how long the survey will take to finish. You can include this information at the start of the survey or in the invite. It also helps to provide a progress bar so respondents can see how many questions they have left to answer.

5. Offer incentives

Offering customers incentives to take surveys encourages responses. Incentives can range from monetary rewards like cash, a gift card, or coupons to physical gifts like a free notebook or coffee mug. Some companies even give charitable donations in exchange for survey responses, which is a powerful way to appeal to customers who have a strong desire to help others.

Supporting causes your customers care about—or simply offering fun rewards—can increase the number of potential survey respondents. However, it’s important to remember that incentives can sometimes skew reviews and lead to less authentic feedback.

6. Include a variety of customer survey questions

Boring surveys get boring answers, so don’t base your entire survey on one type of question. Instead, use a variety of question types to encourage participation, including:

• Open-ended questions for detailed feedback and additional insights
• Closed-ended questions, including yes/no, multiple choice, and rating-scale questions, for quick feedback options

Try to have more closed-ended questions so customers can move through your survey quickly, but leave an optional open-ended question or two at the end to encourage elaboration. Including a mix of both open-ended and closed-ended questions will balance out your survey while getting you the detailed information you need to meet your goals.

7. Give your customers options

Give your customers control over their survey experience by offering alternatives within surveys. Make them feel confident in the accuracy of the information they’re providing and:

• Allow customers to skip certain questions. Don’t make all survey questions mandatory. When required to answer every question, a customer might answer inaccurately just to finish the survey.
• Offer an “Other” option in multiple-choice questions. Empower your customers to express their opinions in their own words.
• Let customers pick where they take the survey. Give customers the option to set preferences on future surveys or to opt out of survey requests via specific channels.
• Use inclusive wording and demographic options. Choose gender-neutral pronouns and allow respondents the freedom to own their identities.

While some questions may require specific response types or must be answered, providing space throughout a customer survey for customers to be authentic can improve customer satisfaction and future response rates.

8. Always follow up

Ultimately, it can take time for people to complete surveys (because they truly want to help make a difference, it gets lost in their inbox, or for some other reason). Don’t send out your customer survey and leave it up to chance—invest in customer follow-up software to nudge customers when needed and to thank them for their responses, too.

However, once a customer submits a survey, you should also send more than an obligatory “thank you” email. Close their curiosity loop by informing them of the changes you’ve made due to their feedback.

5 customer survey templates

Consider using one of these customer survey templates to design feedback forms that encourage customer engagement, get responses, and support continued customer relations.

• Customer satisfaction score template
• Net Promoter Score® template
• Customer Effort Score template
• Product feedback survey template
• Post-purchase survey template

Customer satisfaction score template

A customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey indicates how customers feel about products or services through customer satisfaction scores. These surveys can also gauge the quality of customer support experiences.

You can use this template to surface customer satisfaction survey questions like “How satisfied were you with the support you received?” and “How would you rate our product or service?” to your customers. Plus, you can adjust this template for any channel, product, or service.

Net Promoter Score® template

A Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey measures customer loyalty by asking users how likely they are to recommend a product or service to someone else. These surveys use targeted questions to assign a Net Promoter Score® to each respondent and categorize customer types into three categories:

• Detractors or unhappy customers
• Passives or neutrally satisfied customers
• Promoters or highly satisfied, loyal customers

This template can help businesses measure happiness, understand why each customer feels the way they do, and find areas for product or service improvement.

Customer Effort Score template

A Customer Effort Score (CES) survey measures the amount of energy it takes for a customer to use a product or service or receive customer support. The better the CES, the less effort customers make to interact with a brand, meaning they’re more likely to stick around or recommend a company’s products or services.

CES surveys typically measure the ease of your customer experience using rating-scale questions ranging from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree” (or something similar).

Product feedback survey template

Product feedback surveys reach out to specific users to learn more about customer pain points and pleasure points to help businesses refine products to meet customer needs better. To understand product CX, product feedback surveys use a mix of open- and closed-ended questions like:

• How often do you use the product or service?

• How likely are you to recommend this product or service?

• What is your favorite feature?

By understanding what customers like and dislike, brands can prioritize necessary updates, unnecessary features, and more.

Post-purchase survey template

Post-purchase surveys gather customer feedback after they’ve made a purchase and used a released product or service. This survey helps businesses learn if their offerings meet customer expectations. Companies may also distribute churn surveys after a launch to help businesses understand why customers stop using a product or service.

This after-sales service activity should include questions about:

• A customer’s purchasing experience starting with brand discovery
• A customer’s product satisfaction compared to expectations
• The customer service experience during the purchasing process
• How the delivery of the product or service went

Depending on the nature of your survey’s questions, you can offer these surveys on a “thank you” or post-purchase page.

Create better customer surveys with free templates

Creating useful customer surveys that encourage interaction requires the right questions and appropriate and inclusive language. With a customer survey template, you can design surveys that get responses faster, improve CX, and grow your brand.

But don’t stop there—with powerful customer feedback tools, you can monitor surveys and collect, organize, and analyze everything from customer opinions to satisfaction scores. So don’t wait, but invest in customer service software to begin collecting up close and personal customer feedback today.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.