Product survey questions

What answering costs you a year: $875.52
Answers you should expect from one round: 144
Of those, answers that need a person: 29
And answers at the top of the scale: 65

The worksheet works entirely from the figures you enter about your own customers. Csatzo publishes no benchmark scores: what a good score is in your trade is a measurement of somebody else's customers, and we hold none of those.

Your numbers

Customers you will send it to The list for one round, not your whole database. Asking everybody every time is how a list stops answering.Share of them you expect to answer, percent Your own figure if you have one. In-product and at-the-counter asks answer far better than email, and a first send always beats the fifth.Share of answers you expect at the top of the scale, percent On an eleven-point NPS scale these are the nines and tens. On a five-point CSAT scale they are the fours and fives.Share of answers you expect at the bottom, percent NPS counts zero to six here. These are the answers that need a person, which is what the rest of this sheet costs.Minutes to answer one unhappy customer properly Reading the comment, finding the account, replying, and telling whoever caused it. Be honest rather than optimistic.Loaded cost of that person's hour, dollars Rounds a year

$875.52: the figures shown are a worked example on one business's own numbers, not a benchmark for anybody else.

Download the Product survey questions worked example (CSV)

The Csatzo workspace, Surveys and response sheets, showing one saved round for a three-site dental practice: the seven figures entered (customers to send it to, expected response rate, the shares at the top and bottom of the scale, minutes to answer an unhappy customer, cost of that hour, rounds a year) beside the eight worked out from them, including the answers to expect, how many need a person, and what answering costs for a round and for a year. — What Pro kept: one round sized before it was sent, filed against the practice and the round it belongs to.

Product survey questions are easy to write and easy to write badly, and the commonest failure is length: every extra question costs you answers from the people who were going to tell you something useful. This worksheet does the arithmetic behind the decision instead. Put in the size of the list, the share you expect to answer and the split you expect between the top and the bottom of the scale, and it shows how many answers one round produces, how many of them will need a person to reply, and what that follow-up costs across a year of asking.

Where the constants in this tool come from

AHRQ: CAHPS surveys and guidance, on fielding standardised satisfaction surveys.

FTC: the Endorsement Guides, what people are asking.

Product survey questions: what the person sending the survey asks

How many customers should I ask? Enough that the answers are worth reading and few enough that somebody can reply to the unhappy ones. The worksheet gives you both numbers from your own list size and response rate, which is the honest way round.

What response rate should I put in? Your own, if you have asked before. If not, be pessimistic: an email to a cold list answers in low single figures, while an in-product or at-the-counter ask answers many times better.

How many questions should the survey have? One score and one open follow-up will get answered. Anything past about five questions starts costing you the responses you wanted, and a grid of matrices costs you most of them.

Should we offer an incentive? You can, and if you do, say so plainly. Incentives change who answers as well as how many, and if you also ask people to post publicly, the FTC's endorsement guides apply to what you offered.

Csatzo Pro

Keep the answers, not just the score

You keep the worksheet. Pro holds the responses themselves, so six months later you can say who was unhappy, whether anybody replied, and whether the score moved after you fixed the thing they complained about.

Take the responses away as a file whenever you want them
Send a customer a survey with nothing on it but your business
Come back next quarter and find the last round still there
Put your name and logo on what customers see and managers read
Export every round, response and reply at once, so leaving is never a hostage situation
Send the round from the record it will come back into

$17per month, whole team

Start Csatzo Pro Pricing

Csatzo Pro is $17 a month, billed monthly, and it renews on the same day each month at the same price until you cancel. The price and this renewal are shown again on the checkout page before you pay.

Keep every response and what you did about itWork out how many replies you will get