The Ultimate Survey Do's and Don'ts
Building an effective survey is quite an artform. The following list of best practices can help you to master this skill.
Survey Structure:
1) Keep the more personal questions to the end
Treat your survey like a conversation. You probably wouldn’t start an exchange by asking someone how old they are. So you shouldn’t do so in a survey either. Start with light and straightforward questions, and then slowly move to more personal ones. More about the demographic questions such as age, gender, income, location, etc. here.
Also, your respondent will probably become more prone to fatigue and distraction towards the end of the survey, so keep your most complex or contentious questions in the middle of the survey flow rather than saving them until last.
2) Don’t let your survey get too long
Your respondents are doing you a favor by taking time to fill out that survey. Completition rate is your big goal and directly related to the amout of questions you ask. A rule of thumb says anything if it’s more 7 questions or 2 minutes expect a low turnover.
The more questions per survey, the higher the respondent drop-off rate from start to finish. Also, the more questions you ask, the less time your respondents spend, on average, answering each question. When your respondents, in methodological terms, begin “satisficing”—or “speeding” through a survey—the quality and reliability of your data can suffer. Even more importantly, your sample will probably be biased towards the customers who do finish the survey.
3) Don’t ask leading questions
In other words, try not to put your own opinion into the question prompt. Doing so can influence the responses in a way that doesn’t reflect respondents’ true experiences. For example, instead of asking: “How helpful or unhelpful were our friendly customer service representatives?” Ask: “How helpful or unhelpful were our customer service representatives?”
In particular, scrutinize adjectives and adverbs in your questions. If they’re not needed, take them out.
4) Absolutes can absolutely hurt the quality of your responses
Absolutes use words like “every,” “always,” “all,” in the question prompt. And, essentially, they make the respondent either agree or disagree with a strongly worded question without allowing for more nuanced opinions.
For instance, take the question:
“Do you always eat breakfast?”
a. Yes
b. No
Your respondents might eat breakfast most of the time, half of the time, or on occasion, but you wouldn’t know the difference once the responses come back.
5) Ask one question at a time
Although it’s important to keep your survey as short and sweet as possible, that doesn’t mean doubling up on questions. Trying to pack too much into a single question can lead to confusion and inaccuracies in the responses. Take a closer look at questions in your survey that contain the word “and” – it can be a red flag that your question has two parts.
Here’s an example:
“How would you rate the quality of our product and support?”
How would the respondent answer this question? Would they address the quality of the product? The quality of support? Maybe they’d skip the question or (worse) leave your survey altogether.
You can fix a double-barreled question by either choosing one thing to ask or by breaking the question up into 2 separate ones.
6) Make a good mix between closed-ended and open-ended questions
Closed-ended questions use pre-populated anwer choices for the respondent to choose from—like multiple choice or checkbox questions. These questions are easier for respondents to answer and provide you with quantitative data to use in your analysis.
Open-ended questions (also known as free response questions) ask the respondent for feedback in their own words. Since open-ended questions can take much longer to answer, try to only include 1-2 of them at the end of your survey.
You can always start with some closed-ended questions and then follow up with an open-ended one. For example:
If you received negative review, you could ask: “What did you dislike about our purchase process?” Then follow up with: “You told us you’re unhappy with our service. If there’s one thing we could do to improve your shopping experience with us what would it be?” Or, if you received a positive response, you could ask: “What did you particularly like about purchasing with us today?” or “Which other products would you consider buying from us?”
7) Clear and precise language is key
It can be helpful to mention a specific situation or behavior rather than a general tendency. That way you focus the respondent on the facts of their life rather than asking them to consider abstract beliefs or ideas.
Instead of “How often are you particularly averse to risky situations?” ask “How often do you take risks?”
8) Be specific
Some concepts may mean different things to different people. Try to be as specific as possible when you ask questions. For example, instead of asking “Do you exercise regularly?” you could ask “How many days per week, on average, do you exercise?” This gives you a more precise, objective answer.
9) Make it personal
Sending a personalised email invitation with a unique subject line will help generate engagement with your customers and invite more replies. Here is an example: ‘Hey Jessica! We hope you love your new jeans. Mind if we ask you a few questions about your shopping experience?’ Taking this more personal approach will invite the shopper to engage much more than if they were greeted with a value-taking “Dear, Customer—please "ll out a short survey regarding your purchase on June 11th.” type of message.
Response Options:
10) Avoid using grids or matrices for responses
Grids or matrices of answers demand a lot more thinking from your respondent than a scale or multiple choice construction. They need to understand and weigh up multiple items at once, and oftentimes they don’t fill in grids accurately or according to their true feelings.
Another pitfall to be aware of is that grids aren’t mobile-friendly. It’s better to separate questions with grid responses into multiple questions in your survey with a different structure such as a response scale.
11) Keep your answer choices balanced
Using answer choices that lean a certain way can result in respondents providing inauthentic feedback.
Let’s revisit our prompt: “How helpful or unhelpful were our customer service representatives?”
Here’s how a set of unbalanced answer choices (that lean towards being too positive) can look for that question:
a. Very helpful
b. Helpful
c. Neither helpful nor unhelpful
And here’s how they’d look once balanced:
a. Very helpful
b. Helpful
c. Neither helpful nor unhelpful
d. Unhelpful
e. Very unhelpful
12) Use more interval questions
One simple way to take your survey from good to great is by changing your Yes/No and multiple choice questions to interval questions. Make a statement, and ask people to answer it on a 1-5 scale, like “Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Agree, or Strongly Agree.” This allows for more nuanced answers.
Then, instead of looking at each question individually, like most people do, you can add on another layer of analysis by looking at how questions relate to one another. When you ask interval questions, you open the door to check correlations, which allow you to say “People who are more likely to ABC are less likely to think DEF.” If you’re a statistics whiz, you can run a linear regression and say “Factors G, H, and I have the biggest impact on J.” More simply, you can take averages and say things like “Junior employees, on average, exercise more often than senior employees.”
Housekeeping:
13) Timing is key
Survey response rate increase when you ask for feedback right after the purchase and/or after the goods or services have been delivered. People have terrible memories, the longer you wait the more compromised their responses. Reminder allowed! If they don’t reply the first time, don’t give up but send out a reminder.
Especially CES surveys should be deployed immediately after interactions or specific touchpoints like a product purchase or an interaction with customer service. When a customer interacts with your company, simply asking them how easy it was to get their issue resolved can indicate if they’ll return as a customer. To take the survey one step further, you could ask why they rated the interaction easy or difficult so you know how to improve or close the loop on the interaction.
14) Show a progress bar
One of the easiest ways to keep people motivated as they move through your survey is to show a progress bar and give a time estimate. Enabling progress bars is pretty easy in most survey apps. Keep the Goal Gradient Effect in mind, which basically says: People are motivated by how much is left to reach their target, not how far they’ve gone.
15) Make sure your survey works on multiple devices
If respondents will be using a variety of devices to take your survey, be sure to choose an app that’s responsive or that has desktop and mobile versions. When you’re thinking about what devices your respondents may be using, think about when and where they’ll be taking the survey (from work, from home, etc.).
Speaking about where you ask for feedback, there are several options:
Pop up surveys or small widgets embedded on your web pages will make it easy for customers to get in touch with you. It shouldn’t be hard for customers to leave feedback on your site or product.
Email is a simple yet focused way of collecting valuable feedback. Study by Forbes says email is one of the popular ways to engage customers.
Social media polls conducted across main social media platforms engage customers informally through easy questions displayed promptly a!er the customer votes.
Video chat customer feedback method helps to get authentic feedback in real time by face to face interaction with the customer.
Live chat is becoming a predominant customer feedback channel and gaining more preference because it is the best way to ask customer feedback through rating the customer service.
16) Consider including a survey incentive
If you’re keen on getting a lot of responses, an incentive in some form can prove helpful. Potential incentives range from entering respondents into a sweepstakes drawing to giving respondents a gift card if they answer all of your questions. To learn more about the different types of incentives you can use, and how to make the best use of them, check out this article.
A few examples you could try:
Gift cards: Works for brands that offer a subscription service or e-commerce
Charitable raffles: If you’re participants are executives or those making large but infrequent purchases, it might be a good incentive to offer making a charitable contribution in their name or donating to a charity of their choice.
Run a lottery: Anything goes, from vacation trip to free selection from your online shop.
Share the survey results: Works best if you’re in a position where you’re something of an industry leader and your results might be valuable for your audience.
17) Pretest your survey before you send it
Imagine sending your survey only to realize that you forgot to add a question. Or that you didn’t include a few essential answer choices for one of the questions you asked. In either case, you’ll probably end up being frustrated and get results that fall short of what you need.
To prevent any mishaps in your survey design, preview your survey. Even better, share it with others so they can catch any mistakes you might not find on your own.
The sources I used for this post: