Updated: June 12, 2023

Customer service surveys are too long.

Some have 10, 20, or even 30 questions. I've seen one with over 100. It takes customers a long time to answer that many questions.

This causes a few problems:

Customers get annoyed.
Many people abandon the survey.
You get a lot of data that isn't useful.

There is a solution.

I'm going to show you how to dramatically shorten your customer service survey. Shorter surveys are easier for customers to complete and far less annoying.

You'll also get better, more useful data.

What is the purpose of a customer service survey?

A survey should help you identify actionable customer feedback. It should help you spot problems so you can fix them. The survey should also let you know what's working, so you can keep doing those things well.

Long surveys often lack a clear purpose. The survey gets bloated with irrelevant questions that someone thinks might be somehow useful.

Here are a few discussion questions that will help you understand your survey’s purpose:

Why do you want to survey your customers?
What do you hope to learn from them?
What will you do with this data?

Knowing the answers to these questions can help you focus your survey and make it shorter. Here's a short video that can help you.

Establishing a survey goal from Using Customer Surveys to Improve Service by

What can you learn without a survey?

You can often get data about your customer’s experience without relying on a survey. Getting this data from other sources allows you to eliminate survey questions.

Restaurants and retail stores typically include a survey invitation at the bottom of the receipt. Many of those surveys ask you to identify information that’s already known:

Store location
Time of day
Items purchased

Those questions can be eliminated if you tie that data to the survey on the backend.

This has an added benefit—customers have notoriously faulty memories and often make mistakes when answering these questions.

There's another source of data you might be overlooking if you survey customers after they contact your customer service department: your customers' own words.

Customers give direct feedback when they call, email, chat, Tweet, or using any other channel to complain or get help.

Check out this interview with customer experience expert Nate Brown, where he shares a simple way to collect and analyze this feedback.

What are the best questions to ask on a customer service survey?

You can get plenty of actionable data from your customers with just two questions. A two-question survey is easy on your customers makes analyzing the data a breeze.

Here are the two must-have questions:

Rating scale
Free text explanation

The rating scale can be any survey type. Functionally, they’re very similar. (Read more on different survey types here.)

This Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey Suunto is a great example. The survey was sent six months after I registered a new watch, which gave me enough time to really experience using it on a daily basis.

The survey has a clear goal to identify what causes people to spread positive or negative word-of-mouth about Suunto and its products.

For example, I answered 9 to the first question (which means I'm a promoter), but I also used the free text question to describe a small issue I had with the battery life indicator on my watch.

You can use the same two question approach with most common survey types:

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The rating scale tells you if the customer is happy, neutral, or upset. You can use the comments to learn more about individual customers, or search the text for trends.

Here's an example of a great NPS survey from Ecobee. It starts with a rating question:

The rating you give then triggers a comment box that asks you to provide more detail:

Ecobee's Senior Director of Customer Experience and Operations, Andrew Gaichuk, told me he and his team analyze survey comments to identify trends.

"We define trends through key words such as Customer Service, Installation, Wifi, etc. to help narrow down what key issues customers are experiencing so we can action it for future improvements. For example if we see any detractor for 'Customer Service' we can investigate the interaction, determine the issue and provide one on one coaching/feedback with the CSR."

Analyzing survey comments like this is surprisingly easy.

Suunto and Ecobee can identify the specific customer giving the feedback because the survey is triggered when a customer registers a new product. This allows them to follow-up with customers if there's a problem, or to ask more questions if they want to get additional information.

Companies don't always have access to each customer's contact information. You can add an optional third question if that's your situation. The third question allows customers to opt-in to a follow-up contact.

Here’s a sample CSAT survey that contains the third question:

Can you have more than three survey questions?

The short answer is yes, but think carefully before making your survey any longer. Here are a few things to consider:

Do you have a clear purpose for asking this question?
Is this the only way to get the answer?
Do you have plan to use the data you collect?

If you answered "no" to any of the above, you probably don't need the question on your survey.

One survey mistake that adds extra questions is to make assumptions about what’s important to your customers. For example, a restaurant might ask questions like these:

“Were you greeted promptly?”
“Was your order correct?”
“How would you rate the food quality?”

Those may or may not be the issues your customers truly care about. You can focus on what truly matters to customers by analyzing the comments in your two-question survey.

Most online review sites use the same two question format.

For example, I was able to review the Yelp comments for a popular San Diego restaurant and quickly learned that reservations were the number one service issue.