Customer Service Surveys: Measuring Agent Feedback To Boost Customer Relationship

A truly exceptional customer service experience is unexpectedly rare. And when you come across a brand that has mastered its customer service, it leaves a mark on your mind.  

Today, 96% of customers recognize customer service as paramount for brand choice and loyalty. , it's no surprise that a majority of businesses are prioritizing customer service performance. They know the importance and benefits of delivering outstanding customer service- increased customer retention, more recommendations & references, increased sales, and better business outcomes. 

At the heart of delivering customer-centric services and experience lies a potent tool- customer service surveys.

By actively asking customer service survey questions, businesses can not just collect customer feedback but also get a holistic idea of where your service team or process is making and what can be done to improve it, and help you guide your business decisions.  

TL;DR

• A customer service survey enables businesses to gauge the effectiveness of their customer service and support teams. The data collected can help measure service quality, prevent customer churn, improve standards of service, and overall, increase customer retention.  
• With customer service representatives being the frontline workers of your company, these surveys can help you build a stronger customer relationship and boost agent satisfaction.  
• When collected using the right service survey questions, these surveys can help you improve the overall agent, self-service articles, and help desk's effectiveness and performance. 
• Brands like Amazon, Lululemon, Birchbox, and others are leveraging these surveys to improve their services and enhance the overall experience. 
• You can use templates to create your surveys by simply signing up with Zonka Feedback for a 7-day free trial. Or, you can book a demo to understand how you can create your surveys from scratch or using templates.  

Measure Customer Service Performance

Improve your customer service and grow your business with real-time feedback.

So, if you are also looking to capture all the data from your customers and improve your customer service experience, this blog is for you. It covers the major customer service survey questions, examples, best practices, and quick-to-use templates. 

What is a Customer Service Survey?

A customer service survey is an effective approach adopted by businesses to gather feedback and insights from customers about their experiences with the company's customer service interactions like the frontline, helpdesk, service agents, and more. 

The primary goal of a customer service survey is to gain insights into how well the customer service department is performing, identify areas of improvement, and ensure that customers' needs are being met effectively.

These surveys typically have a set of quantitative and qualitative questions that cover various aspects of the customer service experience, such as satisfaction levels, issue resolution, communication effectiveness, agent professionalism, and more. 

Significance of Customer Service Surveys

Conducting customer service surveys can offer numerous benefits to a business that strives to attract and retain customers while maintaining steady growth. By gathering feedback from customers, businesses can gain valuable insights that can help them improve their customer service processes and enhance the overall customer experience of interacting with your brand.

By asking the right survey questions and following best practices for survey distribution and analysis, businesses can leverage customer feedback to enhance their customer service processes and ultimately grow their business.

Here are a few ways in which you can measure the customer service metrics you can improve your business using surveys -

• Lower Churn Rate: Conducting frequent customer service surveys can help you track your agents’ performance and the performance of your Customer service processes. It can help you deliver enhanced services or products to the customers, resolve their queries more quickly, and improve their overall satisfaction and experience with your business.
• Identify Areas of Improvement: Surveys to measure customer service performance can uncover those areas and processes in your workflows that need improvement. Whether it is a bug in your product, unavailability of required customer service representatives per ticket, improved knowledge base, or poor training, you can use the product feedback results to bring the much-needed changes that can make the customers more satisfied.
• Increased Referrals: When you manage to deliver excellent customer service to a customer, they remember. Taking customer feedback into consideration, implementing changes, and keeping customers informed can go a long way in gaining their loyalty. A loyal customer is more likely to refer your business to their friends, colleagues, or family.
• Improve Standards of Customer Service: Conducting customer service surveys can help you keep track of your satisfaction level with your services and products and how your agents are performing. Doing this frequently enables your organization to keep high standards of customer service and ensures customer delight.
• Measure Agent Performance: The analytics and reports received from your service survey can help measure agent performance. It can connect the responses with each agent and help you identify their shortcomings, the info they lack, and what are the areas that require training.  

Customer Service Survey Questions You Should Ask

When it comes to conducting customer service surveys, there are a few key questions that you should definitely include in order to effectively assess your customer service team's capabilities. These questions will not only help you gauge customer satisfaction but also provide actionable insights into areas of improvement for your support and success teams.

By incorporating these essential customer service survey questions into your surveys, you can gain crucial data of your organization's performance and make informed decisions to enhance satisfaction.

1. Did our customer service agent address all of your concerns adequately?

Asking this question in your customer service surveys is more than just a courtesy; it can help you measure customer service performance and how effectively issues are getting resolved by your support team. Once you have satisfied customers with the resolution offered by the service agent, they're highly likely to stay connected and continue their journey further. 

Respondents can answer with "Yes" or "No," providing a clear indication of whether their concerns were satisfactorily addressed. Based on the response received, you can analyze the data or get a survey report to identify which agent's query resolution received a better response and which agent requires further training. 

2. How satisfied are you with your recent interaction with our customer service team? 

This is another crucial question to ask your customers to understand their satisfaction level with your customer service and support team. It seeks to capture the customer's general sentiment and impression about the interaction they had with your customer service representatives. The question is typically presented with a range of response options that reflect different degrees of satisfaction. 

Customers can choose the options that best align with their feelings about the customer service experience they had with your service team member. You can analyze the responses received from this survey question to identify patterns and trends that can help you make informed decisions to enhance the service process. 

Remember, a satisfied customer is a recurring customer, who is more likely to pay. 

3. How much effort did you put into getting your query resolved?

Customer Service Surveys can help you identify the amount of effort put in by the customers to get their queries resolved. The less effort they put in, the happier they’ll be with your business. And you cannot get enough of happy customers. 

In fact, less effort from customers not only means that they are able to get quick support but also indicates that your workflows are smooth. It can eventually lead to an increase in the retention rate.

4. How responsive have we been in answering your concerns regarding our product?

Asking this question immediately after customers' interaction with your service team shows that you prioritize their satisfaction and value their feedback. It demonstrates your commitment to providing excellent customer service and shows that you are genuinely interested in their experience.

By asking for customers' opinions, you create a sense of importance and encourage them to share their thoughts openly, thereby ensuring customer retention.

This question also allows you to address any issues or concerns they may have had during their interaction, giving you an opportunity to improve your processes and enhance the overall customer service experience. By showing that you care about their feedback, you build trust and loyalty with your customers, ultimately leading to long-term relationships and increased customer retention.

5. To what extent do you agree with the following statement: "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue."

CES survey questions like these allow you to assess multiple areas of your business. You can figure out the effectiveness of your product or service, find out issues that are more complex to solve, know if the customer service agents have adequate training to handle customer queries, and so on.

Furthermore, these customer effort score questions can help you gauge the level of training and expertise of your customer service agents. By asking customers about their interactions with your support team, you can determine if your agents have the appropriate knowledge and skills to effectively handle customer queries.

This information can then be used to provide additional training or support to your agents, ensuring that they are equipped to provide the best possible customer service experience, all while keeping safety triangle principles in mind.

6. Based on your recent support call, how easy or difficult was it to interact with our agent?

Such agent feedback survey questions allow you to measure the performance of your Customer Service agents and their efficiency in handling client concerns. By asking customers about their interactions with your support team, you can assess the efficiency of your agents and identify areas for improvement.

Understanding how customers perceive the performance of your customer service agents can help you identify any gaps in training or knowledge that may exist. This information can then be used to provide additional training or support to your agents, ensuring that they have the necessary skills and expertise to deliver exceptional customer service.

7. Were you able to reach our frontline staff easily when you needed assistance?

This question helps you understand how much effort the customer had to put in in order to reach your frontline staff. By gauging the ease of access to your frontline staff, you can gain valuable insights into the efficiency of your customer service channels.

This question is a part of your frontline satisfaction survey and allows you to measure the level of effort customers have to exert to get the assistance they need.

Understanding the level of effort required can help you identify any potential barriers or challenges that customers may face when trying to reach your frontline staff. This information can then be used to streamline and improve your customer service processes, ensuring that customers can easily and conveniently access the support they need.

8. Were you satisfied with the time it took to resolve your support ticket?

This question is crucial in understanding the efficiency of your customer service team in resolving support tickets. By gauging satisfaction with the time it took to resolve their support ticket, you can identify areas for improvement and ensure that your team is meeting customer expectations.

If customers indicate that they were not satisfied with the time it took to resolve their support ticket, it could indicate a need to streamline your processes or allocate more resources to handle customer inquiries in a timely manner. On the other hand, if customers are satisfied with the resolution time, it serves as an affirmation that your team is performing well in this aspect.

Measure Customer Service Performance

Improve your customer service and grow your business with real-time feedback.

Other Important Customer Service Surveys Sample Questions

Apart from the questions that we have discussed above, there are some other questions that you can ask your customers to capture their feedback regarding your customer success teams or support processes. Here are some of these. 

a. Simple Yes or No Customer Service Survey Question

These are very popularly used closed-ended questions that can help gauge customer sentiments in terms of a simple yes or no. The binary nature of these questions also makes it easier to analyze and interpret the survey results.

Overall, these yes/no questions are a valuable tool for businesses to assess customer sentiments and make data-driven decisions to enhance their customer service.

• Did our representative resolve your issue to your satisfaction?
• Was the customer service representative friendly and helpful?
• Did you find it easy to get in touch with us?
• Was our customer service representative knowledgeable?
• Is your issue resolved?

b. Overall & Agent Satisfaction Survey Questions

It is absolutely crucial to gauge the satisfaction level of customers once any issue or customer service ticket is resolved. Using agent satisfaction survey questions for your service survey, you can easily identify how satisfied customers are with the support provided. 

• How satisfied are you with the service provided by our agent?
• Please rate your overall satisfaction with our Customer Service Agent
• How well does our Customer Service meet your needs?
• Based on your recent interaction regarding (insert incident), how satisfied or dissatisfied were you with the self-help option?

c. Customer Service Feedback Survey Question to Gauge Loyalty

The next service feedback question you can ask in your survey is to understand how loyal your customers are and their recommendation level. Here are some questions you can ask that revolve around capturing Net Promoter Score as well as overall customer loyalty. 

• How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend, family or colleague?
• How likely are you to buy from us again?
• On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us to someone like you?
• What would you say to someone who asks about us?
• Is there anything else you would like us to know?

d. Questions To Measure Agent Performance

These are questions that help capture the agent's performance, their knowledge, how quickly they resolved the issues, and much more. Measuring agent performance through surveys can provide valuable insights into the customer service experience.

Here are some survey questions you can use to assess agent performance:

• How knowledgeable would you say our service or support team member was? 
• Did the agent provide a clear and accurate solution to your problem?
• How would you rate the agent's communication skills?
• Did the agent take the time to listen to your concerns and questions?

e. Rating Scale Questions for Customer Service

Be it a 1 to 5 rating scale, a 0-10 rating scale, 1 to 10 rating scale surveys, or a three-point, four-point, seven-point, or other rating scale, these can be very effective in capturing quantitative data from your customers about their interaction with the service teams.

You can use different ratings in the scale and ask the customers to rate them based on different parameters. 

These questions could include:

• Please rate the professionalism of the customer service representative you interacted with. (1 to 5, 1 to 10, etc.)
• How satisfied were you with the timeliness of the response to your inquiry? (Poor to Excellent)
• Rate the clarity of the information provided by the customer service agent. (1 to 5, 1 to 10, etc.)

f. Survey Questions on a Likert Scale

Likert scale surveys, with their radio button matrix, help gauge customer feedback based on their interaction on different parameters. You can use the agreement scale, satisfaction scale, frequency scale, and other scales to get customer feedback. 

Here is a quick customer service survey example with the Likert scale questions. 

• Please rate your agreement level on the following statements:
  • The customer service representative communicated clearly and effectively.
  • My inquiry was addressed in a timely manner.
  • The customer service representative displayed a high level of professionalism.
  • The customer service representative displayed a good understanding of the subject matter.

Customer Service Surveys Best Practices

When equipped with the right tools or the best survey apps, customer service surveys can be easy to conduct, and so is analyzing their results. There are a few tips and best practices you can follow to improve the effectiveness of your customer feedback survey.

1. Define Your Survey Goals

There’s no point in conducting surveys if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve with them or what to do with the customer's response. Setting clear goals like tracking agent performance metrics, efficiency of the Help Desk, customer success team performance, etc., can help you maximize the value of your surveys.

Make sure you have processes that can help you compare trends and analyze the survey results.

2. Be Transparent

While conducting customer service surveys, be clear about your intentions regarding what you’re trying to achieve and let them know how long it will take to complete the surveys. It will bring you one step closer to getting favorable responses.

3. Avoid Survey Fatigue

Time is precious for everyone, and no one wants to spend 20 minutes filling out a survey form that might not even give them any instant value. So, keep your surveys short and to the point by asking only relevant questions. Reduce the number of open-ended questions and make it as easy as possible for the respondents to fill out the survey within a few minutes.

Doing so can maximize customer engagement and ensure that customers complete the survey.

You can also avoid survey fatigue with survey throttling. It ensures that the customers are not sent surveys in a selected duration. Using Zonka Feedback, you can set up survey throttling in your account and that will apply to all the campaigns and surveys you plan on running.

Based upon the requirement, you can choose the frequency of distributing surveys, for example, you can schedule it for monthly, yearly, or selected dates every month.

Ways to Collect Agent Feedback Effectively 

Leveraging channels that are relevant to your customers is essential for effectively collecting agent feedback and encouraging more participation. By utilizing these channels, you can drive instantaneous action and gather valuable insights from your customers.

Here are some of the channels that you can use:

1. In-signature or Embed Surveys in Email

Sending surveys through email is a common and effective method for collecting agent feedback. You can include a survey link in your email or send out targeted email surveys and encourage customers to provide their feedback on their recent customer service experience. Or, you can embed an in-signature email survey in your emails and have the customer directly respond there. 

2. Live Chat

If your customers interact with your service team through live chat on your website or app, you can prompt them to fill out a survey after their chat session. This allows customers to provide feedback in real time while the experience is still fresh in their minds.

3. In-app/In-product

If you have a mobile app, you can integrate a survey feature within the app itself. This allows customers to easily provide feedback without having to leave the app. Mobile app surveys are a convenient and seamless way to collect agent feedback when customers have interacted via the app itself. Similar to the in-app survey, you can also embed a survey within your product or software. 

4. Website Widgets or Forms

Adding a popup survey right after a ticket is resolved or a feedback form on your website support page is another effective way to collect help desk feedback. You can use website feedback widgets to prompt customers to provide their feedback after they have interacted with your customer service team or received support on your website.

5. SMS or Text Surveys

For customers who prefer to communicate via text message, sending a survey link through SMS can be a great option. This allows customers to provide feedback using their mobile devices, making it convenient and accessible for them.

By utilizing these channels effectively, you can gather valuable feedback from your customers and gain insights into the performance of your customer service team. This feedback can then be used to improve your processes, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive overall business growth.

💡On top of all the above factors, the most crucial factor that can maximize the value of your surveys is robust feedback software. An effective tool can office you flexibility and ease of distributing & handling survey responses.

For instance, with Zonka Feedback, you can easily create engaging surveys and distribute them quickly via channels, including website, SMS, email, mobile, offline, and third-party integrations.

It also offers in-depth analytics and survey reports on the collected data by turning them into actionable insights that can help improve your customer service experience.

Customer Service Survey Templates You Can Use

Zonka Feedback offers a plethora of pre-built templates to build your customer service surveys. Here are some of the templates that you can use to capture the feedback of your customer service agents or frontline staff or the help and support team. 

1. Detailed (Customer Effort Score) CES with Key Indicators

Customer Effort Score (CES) with key indicators like knowledge base, real-time chat with agents, faster resolution, and more accuracy are essential components of a successful customer service feedback survey that you can ask in surveys for customer service.

By incorporating these key indicators into your customer effort score survey or CES surveys, you can gather valuable data on the effectiveness of your knowledge base, the efficiency of your real-time chat system, the speed of issue resolution, and the accuracy of the information provided to customers.

Here is a detailed CES survey template that you can use:

2. Support Ticket Satisfaction 

The next template that you can use is designed specifically to gauge and measure the level of satisfaction that your customers have with the support agent after a support ticket is issued or closed. This template is crucial for capturing valuable feedback and insights into the overall customer experience and the effectiveness of your support team. 

You can create surveys using this template and send them when the ticket status is updated, solved, or closed. This template is an excellent tool for monitoring agent performance and identifying areas for improvement

The support ticket satisfaction template is easy to use and can be customized to fit your specific needs. You can add or modify questions based on your requirements and goals. 

3. Customer Success Program Evaluation Program

By regularly collecting customer feedback, you can identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to enhance the customer experience. This can include implementing additional training for your agents, improving the resources available in your Help Desk, or refining your overall Customer Success strategy.

The customer success program evaluation survey template is a valuable tool that can be customized to fit your specific needs. You can easily modify the questions based on your goals and requirements.

How Successful Brands Use Customer Service Surveys

Many successful brands have utilized customer service surveys to gather feedback and improve their customer experience. By collecting quantitative and qualitative data, brands can gain insights into customer satisfaction, loyalty, and areas for improvement.

Here are some of the brands that have succeeded using a customer service survey. 

1. Lululemon

One of the most popular brands, Lululemon uses real-time customer feedback to design its training programs for the customer support teams. They use the feedback to train their new contact center employees and help deliver better service to their customers. They analyze the feedback and use the pain points and other highlights from the survey reports to let their teams serve better. 

2. Slack

Slack is among the top platforms that know how to get good customer service surveys as it frequently collects customer feedback to improve knowledge base & its experience. The platform even allows you to raise a ticket to request a specific feature to the Slack Team and focuses on closing those tickets. 

3. Amazon

Amazon, being the largest online retailer, also ensures customer satisfaction using Customer Service Surveys. Post every customer service interaction, the company sends the customers a survey as shown above to get feedback on their representatives and provide superior quality service to improve satisfaction and loyalty.

4. Birchbox

The next customer service survey example is set by the brand Birchbox. The customer experience team at Birchbox uses the feedback received from customers to identify how the agents can follow up on the concern. They flag any negative feedback and let the agents or customer service representatives know about the same to help them effectively follow up and also coach the team to avoid such negative responses in the future. 

Conclusion

Offering a great customer service experience starts with taking their feedback at various touchpoints of their customer journey. When you conduct Customer Service Surveys and work on the collected insights, you can make your customers feel valued. Most importantly, when you optimize and improve agent performance, your customers tend to become more satisfied with your business. 

With Zonka Feedback's comprehensive customer feedback software, you can easily create and distribute surveys to capture honest feedback about your services. You can track agent performance and get detailed survey reports.

Zonka Feedback is a powerful survey tool that makes it easy to conduct customer service surveys.

You can also avail 7-day Free Trail of Zonka Feedback and start creating your customer service surveys. Get started now!