4 Customer Survey Types: When and Why to Use Each

There’s an ongoing debate around which customers to survey and how often to survey them. One side says to only survey every 6-12 months and only poll key individuals. The other side says to survey everyone and often! Is there even a side to choose? In fact, there are four types of customer surveys. I’d like to guide you in choosing which to use and when to use them.

Step 1: Define the Why

The first step is to define your objectives for running customer surveys:

What would you like to learn from your respondents; what are you measuring?
What will you be doing with the information, and in what timeframe?
Who in your company will consume the results?

Step 2: Determine the What and When

There are four main types of surveys that are popular today. Each survey type has a unique role to play in gathering feedback from your customers (I wrote a deep dive blog on the four types in a previous blog here).

CSAT –> Key stakeholders within an account –> Biannual to Annually

Customer Satisfaction surveys help your company to seek feedback on several different facets of your relationship with each customer. Because they are more involved and questions about sales, onboarding, etc. are presented, it’s typically directed to key stakeholders and delivered no more frequently than every 6 months. Biannual to annual distribution alleviates survey fatigue.

NPS® –> All users of your product/service –> Quarterly

As long as you are disciplined and only ask the Net Promoter Score℠ question, you can actually get away with asking this question much more frequently than annually or even biannually. Send this survey out quarterly to every user to identify potential churn and upsell. Frequent surveys of your whole customer base will provide broad understanding of loyalty and a trended analysis of how NPS scores are changing over time.

CES / tCSAT –> Key stakeholders involved with an event –> Post transaction

Customer Effort Scores (CES) and Transaction CSAT (tCSAT) surveys are mostly used as a post transactional survey to gauge the customer’s satisfaction with an interaction with your company. Generally, that interaction was with a support agent or a contact center.

Because they are transactional, it’s hard to put them on a delivery cadence. To get the most out of these surveys, distribute them based on a trigger event in your company such as a support case closing, or an onboarding project’s completion. The recipient of this survey is the person(s) involved in the event.

tNPS –> Key stakeholders involved with an event –> Post transaction

Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) is deployed similarly to CES or tCSAT surveys in terms of being a post transaction survey (event based). Likewise, the recipients of the survey will be the person involved in the transaction. These surveys are great for measuring key touch points, especially during the customer journey.

Step 3: Choose the How

There are two popular survey mediums for distribution; email and in-application. There are good applications for each medium type.

NPS or a post transaction survey can be the easiest to deliver via in-app. Delivery spread and positioning of the survey in your app will dictate response rates. Typically these are settings in whatever tool you might be using. Don’t be afraid to put the survey on the top of your product screens so that it’s front and center for your end users. After all, they are more prone to giving you a response while they’re using your product.

For CSAT and surveys that are asking more than one question, you’re best served to stick with email.

Getting great response rates via email can be tricky. I use the following email cadence for driving response rates (yes it’s aggressive…):

Day 1: Initial invitation to complete survey
Day 4: First follow up
Day 9: Second follow up
Day 13: Final follow up with additional call to action or content delivery included





Keri Keeling

Keri is a results-driven Customer Success leader with deep experience in helping SaaS vendors build and grow their Customer Success team's operations and strategies. With over 21 years of experience, she has built Success teams for companies that range in size from start up to publicly-traded.

Ora Chaiken - March 8, 2016

Thanks for the post, Keri.
In addition to the helpful summary above, we’ve found the following regarding getting the best response rate. The customer is most likely to respone when the person sending the email is the customer’s known Customer Success manager, rather than someone not personally known to the recipient.

Keri Keeling - March 9, 2016

Great point, Ora! The “from” on a email based survey campaign is very important. Having messages come from the CSM is a great practice. Companies that have a long tail may not have that ability as there is likely no CSM assigned to a long tail account – having the message come from the CEO or a Chief Customer Officer would be a good alternative.