A successful survey has a number of components, from its design to the target audience to when it’s sent. Perhaps nothing is more critical, though, than your survey questions. Getting good answers to the right questions is, after all, the whole point of running a survey – but it can often be more challenging than it seems.
In our experience helping customers build, send, and analyze great surveys, we’ve learned what works and what can get in the way of achieving your survey’s goals. These ten best practices will help your CX program gather the meaningful feedback you need to power your customer experience initiatives.
Ten best practices for creating great survey questions
1. Align your questions with your survey goals
It’s easy to dive right in and start building your survey straight away (especially with how quick and easy it is to do so with Alchemer Survey!) However, the first step is to clearly define your survey goals and determine the information needed to achieve them. You can ask customers almost an infinite number of things, so it’s crucial to focus on the specific objectives of this particular survey. We think one clear goal per survey usually works best.
2. Get the right people on the team
You know that saying about too many cooks in the kitchen? The same idea applies to survey creation. Once a broader team of stakeholders has contributed to and approved the goals of the survey (if necessary), we like to use a “tiger team” of one-to-three people to actually build it. If you can, try to include both the people who will be analyzing and presenting the data – since they need to understand where it came from – as well as someone who will be acting on the data, who can also bring important insights to the table.
3. Balance qualitative and quantitative questions
The two main categories of survey question formats are qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative questions aim to ask “why,” often to better understand a sentiment or situation or define a problem. They’re open-ended, with the ability for the customer to provide feedback in their own words in a text box or essay box.
Quantitative questions ask “what,” “when,” or “how” using a predefined scale. They provide less opportunity to gather nuance but are much more straightforward for users to complete and for CX teams to analyze. Example of quantitative survey question formats include radio buttons, check boxes, drop downs, and scales such as the Likert scale.
Which one should you use? It depends on your goals, but in general, both. We like surveys that ask a reasonable number of quantitative questions (up to five, say) followed by a qualitative question that gives respondents the ability to add more detail or explain their previous answers.
One side note: Traditionally, teams tended to use qualitative questions very sparingly because of the challenge of parsing a large amount of unstructured data. AI-powered solutions like Alchemer Pulse are changing that, giving CX practitioners the ability to sort through unstructured data and extract insights efficiently and effectively. Qualitative questions do ask a lot of the respondent, though, so while they’re getting easier to analyze, we still recommend using them strategically.
4. Use clear, straightforward language
No surprise here. Make your survey questions as simple, direct, and relevant as you can. Ask peers or colleagues (even better if they’re in the same segment as your target audience) if there is any confusion about what each question means. Stay away from technical language, jargon, or questions that could lead to responses that are subjective or difficult to interpret. If a customer must pause to think about what you’re asking, there is a high chance they abandon the survey altogether.
5. Construct your questions carefully
This is a big umbrella with a number of good reminders. Constructing your survey questions carefully includes:
- Formatting survey questions consistently. For instance, using the same type of measurement scale instead of 1-5 for one question and 1-10 for another.
- Double checking that multiple choice questions are exhaustive and mutually exclusive, so that every respondent has the chance to answer accurately.
- Giving options for when a question doesn’t apply to a respondent, such as “Not applicable,” “Neutral,” or “Not sure.”
- Marking personal questions, like gender, age, or income, optional. This ensures that privacy concerns won’t prevent people from completing the survey.
- Avoiding redundant or unnecessary questions. There’s no faster route to survey fatigue (see below) than asking the same question in different ways for information that you already have. Review your survey with a fine-toothed comb before sending to make sure that each question is unique, and none are extraneous.
6. Make sure questions are actionable
For many CX practitioners every piece of information about customers is interesting. But just because it’s interesting, doesn’t mean that it’s actionable. This goes back to aligning survey questions to goals. Not only should the questions support the goal, but they should lead directly to clear actions that can be taken to further that goal.
7. Create a good flow
Consider the flow of your survey questions. We recommend starting with basic, high-level questions that users can answer quickly and easily. Then, work up to longer or more complex questions that may take more time and brainpower. If a customer has already invested their time in the first part of the survey, they are more likely to avoid wasting that time by finishing it. Try to keep the topics connected as well, with questions that seem to naturally build on or follow each other.
8. Use survey logic
Survey logic is an excellent way to make the survey experience better for your respondents. We go into more detail in our “11 best practices for the perfect customer experience survey” blog, but at a high level, survey logic lets you build in a set of conditions to be applied to components of your survey, such as skipping questions or pages that aren’t relevant based on a previous response. Leveraging survey logic keeps surveys shorter for customers and gives you cleaner data to work from – a win/win for everyone.
9. Prevent survey fatigue
As CX has become more prevalent, so has the number of surveys that the average person receives. Surveys come over the phone, in our email, in mobile apps – which makes it even more critical that yours are quick, user-friendly, and to the point. Spacing out your surveys goes far in preventing survey fatigue, but your questions matter, too. By following the best practices above, you’ll end up with a simple, concise survey that your customers are happy to respond to.
10. Dig into the data
See where respondents are dropping off or getting stuck and how those questions compare to their counterparts. Observe which questions seem to work particularly well and apply those similarities to other questions or surveys. Alchemer makes it easy to learn from every survey that you send, so that the next one can be even more successful.
Continue reading!
For more information on survey best practices, check out some of our other blogs in this series:
