CSAT survey template
You want to measure one specific interaction — usually a support ticket — right after it happens, and act on the bad ones the same week.
What this template is for
Satisfaction after a support interaction is driven by two things that a single score cannot separate: whether the problem got solved, and how much work it took the customer. This template asks all three — satisfaction, resolution, effort — on one short page, and forces a follow-up when the issue is still unresolved so the response becomes a work item rather than a data point.
Questions
Every question below is part of the actual survey definition — the same one the preview and “Use this template” use.
How satisfied are you with the support you just received?
Rating · 1–5 · Required
Why this question: A 1–5 scale is deliberate: with 7 or 10 points, respondents cluster in the middle and the extremes stop meaning anything. Five points is enough resolution for a per-interaction measure.
Was your issue resolved?
Single choice · Required
Why this question: Satisfaction and resolution come apart more often than people expect — a polite exchange that solved nothing can still score 4. Asking separately lets you find the cases where the customer likes the team and is still stuck.
Watch out: Keep "Partly" as an option. Forcing yes/no pushes the ambiguous cases into "yes" and hides them.
How much effort did you personally have to put in?
Rating · 1–5 · Required
Why this question: Effort predicts churn better than satisfaction in most support research. It also points at process problems (repeating yourself, handoffs) that satisfaction alone attributes to the agent.
What made this harder than it should have been?
Multiple choice + Other
Shown when: Unsatisfied
Why this question: Shown only to low scores, and offered as choices rather than free text so the causes can be counted. Free text alone makes every week a manual reading exercise.
Watch out: Keep "Other" enabled — the fixed list will miss causes, and the write-ins are how you learn what to add.
What still needs to happen for this to be resolved?
Long text · up to 500 characters · Required
Shown when: Not resolved
Why this question: Required when the customer says the issue is not resolved. This turns the survey into an escalation path: the response contains what still needs to happen, in the customer's words.
Anything else you want the team to know?
Long text · up to 500 characters
Why this question: Optional catch-all. Kept last so it does not absorb answers that belong in the structured questions above.
How did that go?
How satisfied are you with the support you just received?
Was your issue resolved?
How much effort did you personally have to put in?
What made this harder than it should have been?
What still needs to happen for this to be resolved?
Anything else you want the team to know?
When to use this
- Immediately after a defined interaction: a closed ticket, a chat session, an onboarding call.
- You can act on individual responses, not just the aggregate — an unresolved issue should reach a human this week.
- You want to compare channels or teams on the same scale.
When not to use this
- You want to understand the overall relationship with the customer. Ask NPS instead; CSAT right after a resolved ticket mostly measures that one ticket.
- The interaction has not finished. Sending this mid-thread produces scores about an incomplete experience, which are not comparable with the rest.
- You send it to every ticket for the same customer every week. Survey fatigue lowers response rate and biases who answers toward the angry.
Branching
Low scores (1–3) see the cause checklist. Anyone who says the issue is not resolved gets a required "what still needs to happen" question. Everyone else finishes in three questions, which is what keeps the response rate usable.
Validation
Score, resolution and effort are required — a CSAT response missing any of them cannot be compared with the others. Free text is capped at 500 characters so responses stay scannable when a week's worth arrives at once.
What to look at once responses arrive
Separate unresolved from unsatisfied
Filter to responses where resolution is "No" regardless of score. These are open problems with a customer waiting, and they need routing this week — not a monthly review.
Compare effort against satisfaction
High satisfaction with high effort is a warning: the customer likes the team and is compensating for a broken process. That combination degrades quietly.
Count causes, do not read them one by one
The cause checklist is countable. Ranked by volume it usually shows two dominant causes; fixing the top one moves the score more than agent coaching.
Crosstabs worth running
Was your issue resolved? × How satisfied are you with the support you just received?
Finds the polite-but-stuck cases (resolution "No" with a score of 4–5) that a score-only report hides completely.
What made this harder than it should have been? × How much effort did you personally have to put in?
Shows which causes actually cost the customer work. Handoffs and repetition usually dominate here even when they are not the most frequent complaint.
Charts worth building
bar — What made this harder than it should have been?
Cause frequency, ranked. The top two are the process fixes worth funding.
line — How satisfied are you with the support you just received?
Weekly average, to see whether a process change moved anything.
Customise it with AI
Paste this into SurveyZero’s assistant to adapt the template to your product. It keeps the parts that make the results comparable and changes the parts that should be specific to you.
Adapt this CSAT survey for a self-serve product where support happens in chat rather than tickets. Keep satisfaction, resolution and effort as separate questions, keep the required follow-up when the issue is unresolved, and rewrite the cause options for a chat context (bot handoff, waiting for a human, being sent to docs).
Related templates
- NPS survey template — You need a recommendation score you can track over time, and you need to know what to do about it — not just the number.
- Churn survey template — Customers are cancelling and you need to know which cancellations you could have prevented — not a list of complaints.