50 customer satisfaction survey questions to strengthen CSAT

Half of CX pros believe customer satisfaction has improved over the last six months, but only 18% of consumers agree. In fact, 53% of people say it’s actually gotten worse. That disconnect highlights the importance of listening to your customers (and asking the right questions).

There’s an art to writing an effective customer satisfaction survey. To help, we’ve compiled 50 examples of customer satisfaction survey questions, along with tips to avoid common mistakes and get more accurate feedback.

Customer satisfaction surveys enable you to evaluate customer sentiment at both a micro and macro level. They capture how satisfied people are with your product or service, how well your customer service experience meets expectations, and how customers feel about your organization overall.

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) survey is the most widely used method for measuring satisfaction. It asks customers to rate their experience on a standardized scale, giving you a clear, comparable metric you can track, benchmark, and pair with other signals like Net Promoter Score (NPS®) and Customer Effort Score (CES).

Together, these metrics help teams identify what’s working, where friction exists, and which improvements will have the biggest impact on the customer experience.

Customer satisfaction surveys are important because they measure how well a product, service, or experience meets customer expectations and reveal where improvements will have the greatest impact. They surface what customers value, highlight sources of friction, and create a clear baseline for tracking satisfaction over time.

Organizations use customer satisfaction survey data to:

In short, customer satisfaction surveys turn subjective experiences into measurable insights, helping teams understand how customers feel today and where to focus for tomorrow.

General customer satisfaction survey questions are beneficial. However, tailored industry-specific questions, like financial services and call centers, will get the most accurate data. Here are 50 general and industry-specific customer satisfaction survey questions to get started.

Use these customer satisfaction survey questions when you want a broad read on customer sentiment. They work well for post-purchase check-ins, periodic experience pulses, or anytime you need a trendable satisfaction signal. Keep your scale consistent and add a simple follow-up to understand what shaped each rating.

Customer satisfaction standards vary by industry. These questions are designed to highlight the moments that matter most in each unique environment, allowing you to precisely measure experience across sectors where expectations, regulations, and workflows differ, providing a relevant and actionable score for your market.

In financial settings, satisfaction is defined by clarity, trust, and ease of completing tasks. These questions help you evaluate critical touchpoints—like onboarding, product transparency, and issue resolution—where expectations are high and friction strongly affects loyalty.

Healthcare satisfaction surveys focus on communication, cleanliness, access, and quality of care. These questions help you understand how effectively patients move through appointments, receive information, and interact with medical staff—factors that strongly influence patient confidence and follow-through.

Restaurant and hospitality environments depend on service quality, ambiance, and consistency. These questions assess how well each part of the visit met expectations, from the menu and atmosphere to the attentiveness of staff and the overall dining experience.

Online shoppers expect speed, clarity, and easy self-service. These questions help identify friction in browsing, checkout, delivery, and returns—moments that have an outsized impact on repeat purchases and cart abandonment.

Educational experiences hinge on communication, accessibility, and instructional quality. These questions measure how students or participants perceive course content, support resources, platform usability, and their overall learning environment.

Guest experience is shaped by first impressions, cleanliness, amenities, and responsiveness. Use these questions to evaluate how well the service meets expectations and where service, facilities, or communication can be improved.

Events succeed when logistics, content, and support all work together. These customer satisfaction questions capture how attendees experienced communication, staff helpfulness, programming, and ease of accessing event information, helping you refine future sessions and engagement strategies.

Support interactions are high-stakes moments that influence trust and retention. These customer satisfaction questions measure communication quality, response time, agent helpfulness, and issue resolution—core drivers of satisfaction after a service touchpoint.

Digital experiences rely on clarity, speed, and navigation. These questions help you assess how easily users find information, move through tasks, and complete actions—key indicators of an effective website or app experience.

Perception of value plays a major role in overall satisfaction. These questions help you understand how customers view your pricing, whether expectations match what they received, and where clarity or fairness can be improved.

The Customer Satisfaction Score metric is a measurement that determines how happy customers are with an organization, its products or services, and its capabilities. CSAT asks: “How would you rate your experience with our (fill in the blank)?” where the responses range from “Very satisfied” to “Very dissatisfied.”

To calculate your CSAT score, divide the number of satisfied customers by all your respondents and multiply the result by 100. You’ll end up with a percentage; the higher it is, the more satisfied your customers are. Check out our ultimate guide to Customer Satisfaction Score to learn CSAT best practices, industry benchmarks, and more. 

Related reading: Calculate customer satisfaction with our CSAT calculator

Now that you know about the customer satisfaction survey questions you can ask, let’s talk about common mistakes when building the survey—and what you can do to correct them!

When your answers don’t include the response your participant wants, you’ve created a frustrated experience for your respondents. They now face the decision to answer inaccurately, skip the question, or abandon the questionnaire altogether. Not very productive. To let your question be inclusive of all opinions, offer an “I don’t know” answer choice or an “other” textbox or comment field. 

This question-writing mistake is as simple as it sounds. Take the following as an example:

What if your service was impeccable, but the food was lacking? If there’s no way for the customer to answer this question accurately, you’ll get skipped questions, or, perhaps even worse, inaccurate responses. Make sure you’re asking for one distinct answer per question.

Returning to our example, you can break up the prompt:

Yes, it would be great if every single question in your customer satisfaction feedback survey was answered thoughtfully and completely. That just doesn’t happen in the real world; people are busy and get distracted. Sometimes a question is missed due to oversight, sometimes the respondent doesn’t want to provide the information, and sometimes they’re just confused by the question.

If you require an answer to every single question—even the most rudimentary ones—you’ll find that many respondents will leave your survey. So keep the required questions to a minimum and let them skip what they want.

Don’t interrogate your kind participants with page after page of highly detailed questions about every facet of your business. Keep your client feedback survey as succinct as possible, and you’ll be more likely to get meaningful data. Remember, you can always do follow-up surveys, and you’ll learn more with each poll you do.

It’s easy to ask a lot of questions in order to get the most information you can. But each survey should have a specific goal in mind, one that every question should help reach. Stay focused on your goal, and you’ll get valuable information.

It’s hard to be objective when you think your customer service is outstanding. Take a step back from what you think you know and let your shoppers do the talking. Avoid embellishing your questions with superlatives. Take the prompt:

This is a leading question as it describes the reps as “friendly.” As a result, it isn’t likely to provide accurate results. Instead, ask a focused question about an aspect of your customer service, such as:

It’s hard for most people to accurately determine what they may or may not do in a hypothetical situation. Don’t fabricate customer service “what if” situations that may not have happened to the respondent. Instead, focus on uncovering real customer service issues.

For instance, avoid question prompts like:

And instead, ask:

Pro tip: Use a Likert Scale rating question to ask customers to rate their experiences.

If your participants have to read questions several times in order to understand them, or if they’re repeatedly asked to write essay-like responses, you’ll end up with a lot of abandoned questionnaires. Write questions that can be easily scanned and that don’t require a lot of time to answer.

To make this point more concrete, let’s compare two question prompts that are ultimately asking the same thing. Here’s one that’s direct and simple:

Now see what happens when you make it ultra-specific and long:

You’re probably eager to collect as much information as you can from each survey, but avoid the temptation. Customer service surveys that veer off course and ask seemingly unrelated questions can distract or confuse the respondent, and in some cases, may even evoke suspicion.

The examples are seemingly endless. And can be anything from…

to…

You could ask the following question with “yes” or “no” answer options:

But there’s a subtle spectrum of positive and negative responses. To get even richer data, try asking a “how” question with available responses, like, “extremely professional,” “somewhat professional,” and “not at all professional.” In short, modify the question prompt to: “How professional is our company?”

At SurveyMonkey, we’ve developed a collection of methodologist-certified customer satisfaction survey templates to get you started quickly and easily. Of course, you’re always welcome to customize the questions to make your survey as specific as you’d like.

Use this customer satisfaction survey template to measure consumer satisfaction with your company, product, and services. Use skip logic to allow your customers to answer questions about products or services they’ve used and gain insights for improvement.

See how your frontline customer service and support agents are doing. Measure customer service hold times, problem resolution, product/service knowledge, and representative attitude.

This customer satisfaction survey template is designed for when your clients aren’t just clients, they’re businesses too. Identify how satisfied your customers are with your timeliness, professionalism, and service.

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