Diving into the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey to Improve All Customer Service Sessions

The customer service satisfaction survey is the chief tool to use to assure you offer the best customer service sessions. Your customers are bound to elicit customer service activities with your business, no matter how well they know your products.

Whether it’s for technical support, a glitch in a product or help with your digital properties, seeking out and receiving customer service is a major part of your customer experience. It can occur in all parts of the customer buying journey, including pre-sales and post-sales periods.

As such, you’ll need to optimize your customer service satisfaction, just as you would with any other part of your CX. This is also because customers don’t keep their brand perception to themselves.   

72% of customers will share a positive customer service experience with 6 or more people. However, unsatisfied customers also share their experiences; 13% of unhappy customers will share their experiences with 15 people or more.

To take matters into further perspective, 70% of customers say they’ll support a company that delivers great customer service. 17% of Americans are even willing to pay more for a business that has a good reputation regarding its customer service. 

These statics prove the weight that customer service satisfaction has on businesses. You can optimize yours by gauging this experience through surveys.  

This article explains the customer service satisfaction survey, its importance, when to use it and how to create one. 

Understanding the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

The customer service satisfaction survey is a survey that inquires into customer service satisfaction, as its name suggests. It is a kind of customer service survey, but it should not be mistaken for one, as there are a few distinctions between the two.

The customer service survey is a broader survey type that can be used across the customer buying journey, whereas the customer service satisfaction survey specifically focuses on the satisfaction portion of a customer service session. In this regard, this survey zeros in on support sessions, which are typically conducted after a customer has already made a purchase. 

However, this is not a fast and hard rule, as there are other instances in a customer journey where customers receive customer service. Businesses will need to probe them on their satisfaction with these experiences as well. 

As such, this kind of survey is centered on gathering customer feedback on the satisfaction aspect of various kinds of customer service. Businesses can use it to measure customer happiness and dissatisfaction during the service session, learn how to improve their service and discover how to streamline future customer service sessions. 

When it comes to differentiating from other customer satisfaction surveys, the customer service satisfaction survey entails using customer service representatives to help come up with the questions. This is because you’ll need to use questions specific to the customer service session; otherwise, your customers won’t want to take part in the survey, as it will come across as too generic and not useful to their situation. 

The Importance of the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

The customer service satisfaction survey is critical to use for a number of reasons, including the ones mentioned in the intro.

To piggyback off of the intro, the importance of this survey comes into play, given that you can use it to improve your overall customer experience. Given that customer service sessions involve interacting with a company, usually for an extended period, it plays a major role in CX.

In fact, 1 in 3 customers will leave a business they love after only one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. There are many things that contribute to a bad customer service experience — some aren’t as obvious as others. 

This is where the customer service satisfaction survey is useful, as it helps you find the things that bother your customers, ones which you may have overlooked or never had considered as sources of problems.

A poor customer service experience can be due to the lack of a follow-up. In this case, businesses that have time-poor employees are at a disadvantage, unless they commit to following up with the customers they’ve assisted in a customer service session.

However, even if you follow up with customers you’ve assisted, the customers themselves may lack the time and will to speak with you, if it’s over the phone. Emailing customers is the easy route; however, they may be unwilling to begin an email conversation with customer service agents. 

In such a case, the customer service satisfaction survey is especially useful, as it provides a quick and easy method to follow up with your customers after a customer service session. You’ll show your customers you care about their opinions on their customer service experience without asking them for too much time while reaping the benefits of their insights.

As such, this survey helps build connections between you and your customers. The stronger your connection with customers, the more they’ll rely on your products and services. As such, this survey can be used as a tool that goes beyond merely learning about how satisfied customers were with the customer service they got. It also doesn’t stop at improving your CX. Instead, by building relationships with customers, you’re also building brand trust, the cornerstone of consumer loyalty.  

Loyal customers are far more inclined on making repeat purchases than causal customers. These are the most quality customers you can strive for, as they will continuously purchase from your brand and even become brand advocates. Loyal customers also tend to have a higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). 

Given that this survey can help foster brand loyalty and a high CLV, it will in turn lower customer attrition along with your customer churn rate, as you are retaining your customers.

All brands should use the customer service satisfaction survey, as it can reveal critical insights on how to improve your customer service. 

When to Use the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

You’ve probably had various kinds of customer service sessions with your customers. Sometimes, what may appear to be a regular in-store or online encounter, such as a chat, turns out to be something more significant, as it involves customers interacting with your support or sales employees for a considerable amount of time. 

Or, it may be quick, but provided invaluable help for your customers. These qualify as customer service sessions as well.

This begs the question of when is the best time to send a customer service satisfaction survey.

The following lists the most apt times to send a customer service satisfaction survey:

1. After any situation in which a customer received assistance from an employee, whether it is a customer service employee or others.
   1. This can involve solicited help, in which customers set up a call or at-home meeting with a representative, or when your employees approach the customers.
2. Directly after a scheduled meeting, phone call or other customer service session.
   1. It is best to let the customers know that you intend to survey them by emailing them.
   2. This is also a good time to collect their email addresses if you haven’t already.
   3. This usually occurs after a customer has purchased from you.  
3. After a customer sampled your product at a store and spoke with a sales representative.
   1. This occurs usually before a customer has made a purchase and is still deliberating whether to buy from you or a competitor.
   2. This is a good opportunity to understand customer satisfaction with your customer service in the early stages of your customers’ relationship with you.
4. After an impromptu customer service chatting session.
   1. Some chatting sessions can be minor, with customers asking basic questions that can be found elsewhere on your website.
   2. But others are more significant, granting key information to customers about all your offerings.
   3. This can occur at various places in the customer journey, from pre-sales, to after a recent purchase and well after purchasing. 
5. After customers interacted with a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, such as a phone call, or in-person experience. 
   1. At times, your support employees may offer specific customer service during these times, so these sessions can extend beyond customers’ venting about their issues or other feedback. 
   2. You can frame the survey as being sent to better help the customers further, even after they gave their VoC feedback.

How to Create a Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

There are various instances where you’ll need to use a customer service satisfaction survey, as the above section explains. They will help you gauge how satisfied your customers are at different points of being served. 

If you’re not sure how to go about creating this survey and need a few pointers, the following will guide you.

The following explains how to create a customer service satisfaction survey in a step-by-step way. Check out how to create customer service survey questions.

1. Determine a recent instance with a customer, in which they received customer service. 
   1. Refer to the above section to help you decide what to accomplish with your customer service satisfaction survey.
2. Decide on the correct online survey platform.
   1. There is a swath of online survey tools but they don’t all offer the same capabilities, user-friendliness and speed to insights as does Pollfish.
3. In the screener section of the survey, select the demographics, location and other traits with which you’re going to qualify the respondents of the survey.
   1. Use screening questions to select respondents even more granularly, by qualifying only those who answer in a particular way to take the survey.
4. Form a few key preliminary questions for the questionnaire portion and guide the direction of your survey.
   1. These should be based on the nature of the customer service.
5. Choose the survey type you need for your campaign.
6. In the questionnaire section, add in your preliminary questions. Choose from a multitude of types of survey questions. 
   1. Create both general questions and those that are very specific to the customer service session you had.
      1. Your customer service representative will need to come up with the questions. 
      2. As such, this kind of survey will involve more than just your analysts and market researchers, as it will require forming specific questions from sessions with your customer support team.
   2. Use advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their answers. 
      1. With skip logic, you can ask a quantitative question using multiple choice and follow-up with a qualitative, open-ended question.
7. Always make the survey unique to your brand if you send it to specific people instead of mass-sending it as in Step A.
8. Write an effective email invitation by mentioning the importance of the survey and the fact that you value your customers’ time.
   1. You can include survey incentives.
9. Include a call to action (CTA) to an online survey, such as one that exists on a landing page, or post-checkout. 
   1. Be sure it stands out to your respondents. 
10. Thank your customers for taking your survey with follow-up emails and a “Thank You” on the final page of your online survey.
11. Analyze your survey and use it to make changes to improve your customer service satisfaction.
    1. This may include changing your customer service representatives’ tone of voice, their introduction statements to the customers, etc.
    2. This may also lead you to omit certain things your customer service representatives currently use when assisting your customers. 

Forging the Most Satisfying Customer Service Meetings

There are various key aspects that makeup of customer experience; customer service sessions are one of the most important factors, as these meetings allow customers to resolve issues, ask key questions about your products and services, acquaint themselves with your offerings and virtually anything else related to customer service. 

You’ll need a strong market research platform to host your customer service satisfaction survey campaigns. The platform you use should also allow you to survey anyone.  As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. 

This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network. 

It is also important to use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a shoddy mobile environment.  

The online survey platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types and disqualify low-quality data. 

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to measure and improve your customer service satisfaction survey.