Survey Pie Chart Example: Charting 5-Point Satisfaction Results

This example charts a classic single-choice survey question, “How satisfied are you with our service?”, answered by 200 respondents on a 5-point scale. The data is illustrative, but the counts are shaped like real satisfaction data, including its habits.

What the chart shows

Add the top two boxes and you get the number this chart exists to deliver: 150 of 200 respondents, 75 percent, are satisfied or very satisfied. Three quarters of the ring in warm agreement is legible from across a room, and it is the reason satisfaction data suits circular charts: the “top-2-box” figure becomes a visible majority arc rather than an abstract statistic.

The internal split of that majority matters too. “Satisfied” (82 responses, 41 percent) outweighs “Very satisfied” (68, 34 percent). That is the difference between a good result and a great one: enthusiasts drive referrals, and here the merely-content outnumber them. Two survey rounds from now, watching whether the boundary between those two slices moves is more informative than watching the total.

At the other end, dissatisfaction is small but not negligible: 22 respondents, 11 percent, across the bottom two boxes, with 6 of them at “very dissatisfied”. Neutral holds the remaining 28 responses, 14 percent. In satisfaction data, neutral is rarely true indifference; it is where politely disappointed customers often park. Reading “neutral plus dissatisfied” as 25 percent of the base gives a more cautious, and often more accurate, picture than the 75 percent headline alone.

Design choices in this chart

Two decisions differ from a default pie, and both are deliberate.

The slices follow scale order, from very satisfied around to very dissatisfied, rather than the size order most charts prefer. Ordered categories keep their order: a satisfaction scale shuffled by popularity forces readers to reconstruct the scale from labels. The cost, slightly harder size ranking, is repaid because the two big slices are adjacent and their combined arc reads as one region of agreement.

Colors also follow the scale. The corporate palette applies its stronger tones to the satisfied end and cooler, grayer tones toward dissatisfaction, so the emotional direction of the data survives even a fast glance. When categories carry valence, color should agree with it.

The doughnut form is the third, smaller choice: the center hole is a natural home for the headline figure when this chart lands on a slide, with “75%” dropped into the hole in the deck.

Recreating it with your data

Load the Customer Satisfaction Survey template and replace the five counts with your own tallies, straight from your survey tool’s summary. Enter raw counts, not percentages: the labels compute shares automatically and round them to total exactly 100, and you keep the option of displaying counts and percentages together.

Put the sample size in the title, as done here. “n=200” is the difference between a finding and an anecdote, and survey-literate readers look for it immediately. Then export, or share the chart by URL so colleagues can open the live version, check the numbers, and adapt it for the next survey wave.