Customer satisfaction survey template

The template below is built for service businesses with physical locations or regular customer contact: branches, stores, clinics, service centres, showrooms. It moves from general to specific — first how satisfied the customer is, then why, then what they will do next — because people answer the first question most honestly before they start thinking about details.

Copy the questions as they are, or replace the bracketed parts with your own wording. Questions marked as optional should stay optional: forcing a comment is the fastest way to lose the response altogether.

Full version (QR code, email, SMS link or web) — 10 questions

1. Overall, how satisfied are you with your visit today?
   Answer type: 1–5 smileys (Very dissatisfied → Very satisfied), required
   This is your CSAT question. Keep the wording identical over time so trends stay comparable.
2. What was the main reason for your visit?
   Answer type: Single choice (e.g. Purchase · Enquiry · Payment · Complaint · Collection · Other)
   Lets you split satisfaction by visit type later — a complaint visit and a purchase visit should not be averaged together.
3. How would you rate the friendliness and helpfulness of our staff?
   Answer type: 1–5 stars
4. How would you rate the time it took to be served?
   Answer type: 1–5 stars
   Waiting time is one of the strongest drivers of satisfaction at physical locations; measure it separately from staff.
5. Did we resolve what you came for today?
   Answer type: Single choice (Yes, completely · Partly · No)
   Resolution is the question operations managers act on fastest.
6. How would you rate the quality of the [product / service] you received?
   Answer type: 1–5 stars
7. How clean and comfortable was the [branch / store]?
   Answer type: 1–5 stars
8. How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
   Answer type: 0–10 scale (Net Promoter Score), required
   Adds a loyalty measure next to satisfaction. Satisfied customers are not always loyal ones.
9. What is the one thing we could do better?
   Answer type: Open text, optional
   Use show-if logic to display it only when question 1 is 3 or lower, or ask everyone — both work.
10. May we contact you about your feedback?
    Answer type: Single choice (Yes / No) + phone or email field shown only on Yes
    Contact details turn a complaint into a ticket somebody can actually follow up.

Expected completion time for the full version is around two minutes. If your response rate drops after launch, remove questions 6 and 7 first — they are the least decisive.

On a kiosk or tablet near the exit, people answer while walking. Three taps is the ceiling. The short version keeps the overall score, the single most useful follow-up and a way to flag a problem:

1. How satisfied are you with your visit today?
   Answer type: 1–5 smileys, required
2. What could we improve? (shown only after a score of 1–3)
   Answer type: Multiple choice: Waiting time · Staff · Product / service · Cleanliness · Other
3. Would you like us to contact you?
   Answer type: Yes / No + phone number on Yes

Every question in the template earns its place by leading to a decision:

• Overall satisfaction first. The first answer is the least influenced by the rest of the survey. If you ask about staff, queue and cleanliness first, the overall score tends to become an average of those answers instead of the customer's real feeling.
• Visit reason second. It costs one tap and makes every later number more useful. A branch with many complaint visits will always score lower than a branch with mostly purchases; without this question you cannot tell a weak team from a difficult customer mix.
• Drivers in the middle. Staff, speed, resolution, quality and environment are the five areas operations teams can actually change. Each has its own question so you can see which one moves the overall score.
• Loyalty near the end. The recommendation question measures something different from satisfaction — a customer can be satisfied with a single visit and still be ready to switch. If you want to go deeper on that metric, see the NPS survey template.
• Open text and contact last. By then the customer has already given you the structured data. The comment is a bonus, not a gate.

For more wording options per topic, our list of the best customer feedback survey questions groups more questions by goal.

The same template works across channels, but each moment needs the right version. Ask as close to the experience as possible — memory fades fast, and so does the motivation to answer.

• At the exit of a branch or store — kiosk or tablet in kiosk mode, short version. Place it where people naturally slow down, not where they queue.
• At the counter or service desk — QR code on a stand, full version. Customers waiting for a receipt or document have a minute to spare.
• Within two hours after a visit — SMS link, full version. Works best when the customer's phone number is already in your system for the transaction.
• After a purchase, booking or delivery — email, full version. Send within 24 hours; later invitations get noticeably fewer replies.
• On your website or customer portal — web link or widget, full version. Useful for online services where there is no physical exit.

If you run several channels at once, keep the first question identical everywhere. That single shared question is what lets you compare a kiosk score with an email score later.

The headline number is CSAT: the share of customers who chose one of the top two answers (4 or 5) on question 1. Example: 180 of 240 responses are 4 or 5 — CSAT is 75%. If you are new to the metric, what CSAT is and how to calculate it covers the details, and the recommendation question gives you an NPS alongside it.

A single company-wide score hides almost everything useful. Segment before you interpret:

• By location. Rank branches or stores by CSAT and response count. A small branch with 30 responses moves more from a single bad day than a large one with 600.
• By visit reason. Compare like with like — complaint visits against complaint visits.
• By staff member or counter. Either give each counter its own channel or add a "Who served you today?" choice question. Use it to coach, not to punish.
• By time of day or shift. Morning and evening teams often score differently, and the difference usually points to staffing levels rather than attitude.

Then look at the driver questions next to the overall score. Whichever driver has the lowest rating among dissatisfied customers (scores 1–3) is usually the best place to invest first. Finally, read the comments from the lowest scores every week; they explain what the numbers cannot.

A survey that collects complaints and does nothing with them makes satisfaction worse, because the customer has now told you and been ignored. Set up the loop before launch:

1. Alert. Any score of 1 or 2 on question 1, or a "No" on question 5, triggers a real-time alert to the branch manager.
2. Ticket. The same response opens a follow-up ticket with an owner, a priority and a deadline.
3. Contact. If the customer left contact details, the owner calls or writes back — ideally the same day.
4. Resolve and record the cause. Closing the ticket with a root cause (queue, staff, product, other) builds a list of recurring problems you can fix at the source.

The full method, including response-time targets, is in our guide to closed-loop feedback.

In Qmeter you can build this template in the drag-and-drop Template Builder — Smiles, Stars, Net Promoter Score, single and multiple choice, text and customer-field components cover every question above, and show-if rules handle the follow-ups. Publish it once and attach it to a kiosk, a QR code, an SMS or email campaign and a web link; every response lands in the same dashboard with branch, channel and time attached. Ticket generation rules open a follow-up ticket automatically for low scores, and the survey can run in more than 100 languages. You can set it up during the 14-day free trial.