You need to start with a strong foundation and appropriate survey questions if you want to create surveys that yield significant results. This may seem self-evident, but it’s critical to your survey’s overall performance. Higher response rates and a better chance of collecting high-quality data that will help your organization thrive are possible when questions are worded appropriately, presented correctly, and thoroughly analyzed from all perspectives.
When survey questions aren’t good, it can have a big impact on your results. Confusing questions may generate survey fatigue in your respondents, resulting in survey abandonment or erroneous results. If your respondents believe you incorporated bias into your survey or harassed them with leading questions, they may get a poor impression of your organization and respond differently than they would normally. In any case, you’ll get survey results that aren’t always insightful, honest, or useful.
Do you want to know how to make sure your survey questions are good? Maction on the other hand, will always provide you with customizable questions based on best practices. Our survey templates include expert-written questions in a variety of categories, including market research, customer satisfaction, product testing, and more. However, there are a few things to bear in mind while you build your surveys in addition to those go-to sites.
What Makes a Survey Question Good?
Several fundamental qualities determine effective survey questions, thus it’s worth asking:
1. Are you sure your questions are clear?
A question should be specific, easy to understand, and unambiguous in its language. Some of the hurdles to straightforward questions include double-barreled queries, double negatives, and jargon.
2. Are your inquiries unbiased and neutral?
How you pose your inquiries has a significant impact on the quality of the responses you obtain. Your results will be muddied if you ask leading questions, loaded questions, or opinion-based queries.
3. Are you utilizing the appropriate question kinds for your requirements?
We understand that there are many different types of questions, and you may not always know which ones to utilize. Getting it correctly, on the other hand, involves designing a superior survey experience with clear questions and findings that are exactly what you need.
4. Is your survey design in line with the survey questions?
It’s not all about the words. Good questions are well-worded, and thoughtful survey design enhances them. Skip logic, response choice randomization, and cautious use of necessary questions are all examples of this.
Types & Tips for Better Survey Questions
A. Open Ended Questions
Do you want to hear what responders had to say in their own words? You’ll need an open-ended question, in which responders must input their response into a text box rather than selecting from a list of answers. Because open-ended inquiries are exploratory in nature, they allow respondents to share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. In fact, good open-ended questions will frequently go into all three of these areas and serve as follow-ups to previous closed-ended questions.
- What adjustments do you think this firm needs to make in order for you to give it a higher rating?
- What is it that this company excels at?
Which open-ended question the respondent sees is determined by their likelihood of recommending the firm; however, both questions provide marketers with a greater grasp of their company’s NPS score as well as more precise information about customers’ likes and dislikes.
Remember that quality, not quantity, is the goal of open-ended questions. Because they take more time and effort for responders to complete, you should attempt to keep the number of them to a minimum. In general, limit yourself to two open-ended questions and, if possible, isolate them from the rest of your survey on a separate page.
B. Close Ended Questions
Closed-ended questions provide respondents a set of options to choose from. They may lack the flexibility of open-ended inquiries, but they are meant to gather decisive answers and data. Consider the difference between being asked which of three specific restaurants you’d want to eat supper at and being asked, “Where do you want to go for dinner?”
Multiple choice questions, Likert rating scales, drop-down, yes/no questions, and checkboxes are all examples of closed-ended questions. The type of close-ended question you use depends on the information you’re looking for.
Because closed-ended questions have pre-determined answer alternatives, you must think about the respondent’s experience and how your wording might be interpreted (or misinterpreted). Closed-ended questions that are good don’t go too far.
Here are three examples of poor closed-ended questions for a questionnaire on employee engagement:
- Our corporate culture is consistently ranked among the best in the industry. What is your opinion of our company’s culture? (a grading system)
- My company’s management is communicative and appreciates excellent work performance. (Strongly agree vs. strongly disagree on the Likert scale)
- How pleased or dissatisfied are you with the level of communication when you collaborate with colleagues from different departments? (Highly satisfied to extremely dissatisfied on a Likert scale)
C. Rating Scale Questions
Rating scale questions are within the category of closed-ended questions (sometimes called ordinal questions). They ask respondents to choose the number that most correctly depicts their response from a scale ranging from 0 to 100 or 1 to 10. Because they use a numerical scale to determine how likely customers are to promote a company’s product or service, NPS questions are a good example of rating scale questions.
Here are a few more rating scale questions to consider:
- On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rank our customer service?
- How likely are you to tell a friend or family member about our website?
- How would you rank the workshop’s instructor today?
D. Likert Scale Questions
A form of rating scale known as a Likert scale is a specific type of rating scale. They’re the “agree or disagree” and “likely or unlikely” questions you’ll see in internet surveys to gauge people’s attitudes and opinions. They use a 5 or 7 point rating system that ranges from one extreme attitude to the other, going beyond the ordinary “yes/no” question. Consider the following scenario:
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
The choice of adjectives in a good Likert scale question is also deliberate. It should be obvious whether the grade is higher or larger—you don’t want your respondents to be confused about whether “very much” is greater than “quite a lot.” Your results will be less accurate if descriptive words are not in an intelligible order with logical measurements.
The Bottomline
One of the most important aspects of a successful survey is good questions. That’s why it’s critical to prioritize well-written questions and approach your survey from the standpoint of your respondents. Keeping an eye out for bias, accuracy, and consistency can help you ask better questions, which will lead to game-changing outcomes that you can apply across your company.
