Best customer survey questions and a customer survey question bank for every stage of the journey

If you’re searching for the best customer survey questions, you’ll love this guide. I’ve put together a comprehensive customer survey question bank organized by each stage of the customer journey, packed with multilingual question variants and practical tips for maintaining consistency.

Whether you’re building surveys from scratch or leveraging an AI-powered survey generator, you’ll find proven questions and localization advice that scales for any team.

Map your questions to the customer journey

I always recommend organizing your question bank around the customer journey—that’s how you capture the context behind every answer. Why? When you ask questions tied to moments like onboarding or retention, you get sharper insights and fewer blind spots. According to SurveyMonkey, using pre-tested and context-aware questions leads to more accurate responses and lower bias. [5]

Here’s my go-to roadmap for journey-based question mapping:

• Awareness: Are people discovering you? What’s driving curiosity?

• Consideration: What makes them compare options? Where do they hesitate?

• Purchase: What tips the scale? What nearly stopped them?

• Onboarding: Was getting started smooth? What’s still unclear?

• Retention: Why do they stay or leave? What keeps them coming back?

• Advocacy: What turns them into fans who spread the word?

Let’s break down each stage with a few targeted questions for your bank:

Awareness

• How did you first hear about us?

• What problems led you to start searching for a solution?

• Which options did you consider alongside us?

Consideration

• What information was most helpful in your decision-making process?

• Were there any doubts that almost kept you from moving forward?

• Which features mattered most as you compared options?

Purchase

• What persuaded you to choose our product/service at the point of purchase?

• Was there anything that almost stopped you from buying?

• What did you expect upon completing your purchase?

Onboarding

• How easy or difficult was it to get started?

• What, if anything, confused you during setup?

• Were there resources you wish you’d had on day one?

Retention

• What keeps you coming back to use our product/service?

• Have you faced any issues that made you consider leaving?

• How does our solution fit into your daily routine?

Advocacy

• Why do you recommend us to others?

• What’s the main reason you haven’t referred our product/service?

• What could we do to make you a stronger advocate?

When your customer survey question bank is mapped like this, you’re always asking the right question at the right time—no guesswork, just actionable insights.

Essential customer survey questions with multilingual options

Building a question bank that works across teams, products, and languages? I organize my core questions into these categories:

Satisfaction

• Main: "How satisfied are you with our service?"

• Variants:

  • “Rate your overall satisfaction with us today.”

  • “How well does our product meet your needs?”

  • “How happy are you with your experience so far?”

• Multilingual:

  • Spanish: ¿Qué tan satisfecho/a está con nuestro servicio?

  • French: Êtes-vous satisfait(e) de notre service ?

Experience

• Main: "Was anything about your experience confusing or frustrating?"

• Variants:

  • “What could we have made easier for you?”

  • “Did you face any challenges during your journey with us?”

• Multilingual:

  • Spanish: ¿Hubo algo en su experiencia que le confundió o frustró?

  • French: Y a-t-il eu quelque chose de déroutant ou frustrant dans votre expérience ?

Product Feedback

• Main: "What’s missing from our product/service that would help you achieve your goals?"

• Variants:

  • “If you could change one thing about our product, what would it be?”

  • “Are there features you wish we offered?”

• Multilingual:

  • Spanish: ¿Qué le falta a nuestro producto/servicio para ayudarle a lograr sus objetivos?

  • French: Que manque-t-il à notre produit/service pour vous aider à atteindre vos objectifs ?

Support Quality

• Main: "How would you rate the support you received?"

• Variants:

  • “Was it easy to get help when you needed it?”

  • “Did our support team resolve your issue?”

• Multilingual:

  • Spanish: ¿Cómo calificaría la atención recibida?

  • French: Comment évalueriez-vous l’assistance que vous avez reçue ?

With Specific's localization, this process is automatic—set your preferred languages and the platform will keep every question consistent, no matter how many markets you serve. And for follow-up questions that dig deeper into each answer, check out the automatic follow-up feature that adapts to responses in real time.

Three approaches to building your question bank

There’s no single right way to build a customer survey question bank. I see three approaches used by winning teams:

Minimalist approach: Stick to 5–7 essential questions you ask consistently throughout the year. This is perfect for tracking trends and benchmarking over time.

Comprehensive approach: Build up a library of 50+ questions, rotating them based on campaign, lifecycle stage, or specific audience. This works well for teams who need flexibility and breadth.

Adaptive approach: Start with a core set and let AI dig deeper with tailored follow-up questions, giving you richer, more conversational insights—especially effective as your needs grow.

Tools like conversational survey pages let you bridge between these: you get the consistency and structure of a minimal set, but with dynamic, AI-powered follow-ups whenever you want deeper insights. This mirrors what research shows—AI chat surveys produce responses that are richer and more specific than old-school forms. [3] These follow-ups transform static questions into a conversation, surfacing details you’d otherwise miss.

Overcoming question bank limitations

No question bank is perfect—and I see teams run into three big issues all the time:

One-size-fits-all questions
Static, generic phrasing misses the real context. For example, asking “What did you think?” during onboarding isn’t enough. The fix: Make your survey conversational with dynamic follow-ups that adapt to answers, revealing pain points and delight moments you’d overlook in a rigid script.

Inconsistent tone
Different survey authors mean your questions can sound awkward, formal, or all over the place. This erodes trust and can confuse customers. Using an AI-driven survey editor—like the one in Specific—keeps your tone consistent so your surveys always sound like your brand, even as you mix and match questions.

Translation headaches
Manual language localization easily introduces errors or odd phrasing, especially if you have dozens of variants. An AI-powered multilingual engine keeps every question clear and brand-true across languages, automating translation and review so nothing slips through the cracks.

The conversational approach solves these—AI selects the right tone, tailors questions on the fly, and instantly updates translations, freeing you from the chaos of static banks.

Speed up survey creation with AI templates

If you want to move fast, survey templates are my secret weapon. These give you ready-made, pre-tested questions for scenarios like:

• NPS surveys: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”

• Product feedback: “What do you wish our product did better?”

• Customer satisfaction: “How would you rate your experience overall?”

Here’s how the AI builder workflow typically goes: you describe your research goal, the AI drafts relevant questions, and you tweak as needed. This isn’t just faster; it’s smarter. Compared with manual writing, using an AI survey generator saves time and dramatically improves quality—Resume Builder’s recent survey found 65% of managers already use AI in daily work, and almost all of them (94%) rely on it for people decisions. [2]

Some example prompts you can use to turbocharge your question creation:

“Create a customer satisfaction survey for customers who recently completed onboarding, with open-ended and multiple-choice questions.”

“Generate an NPS survey for app users, including automatic follow-up questions in Spanish and French.”

Specific makes this even easier by offering a library of expert-crafted templates and a builder that maintains voice and depth across every question—so your survey sounds right, wherever and however you ask.

Transform your question bank into conversational insights

Great questions are just the beginning—what really sets high-impact feedback teams apart is turning surveys into dynamic, AI-powered conversations. Conversational surveys adapt on the fly, surfacing richer stories and sharper pain points with every follow-up. These dynamic surveys are proven to rival human interviewers in qualitative depth for structured questions. [4]

But the real advantage comes after: AI-driven survey response analysis pulls out actionable insights from all those deeper conversations, letting you segment and chat directly with your own data. If you’re not using conversational