Creating the right questions for your survey

If you do customer surveying right, it can help you identify key information about your customers and make decisions that will improve your entire company. However, a poorly written survey won't give you useful information, and may even lead you astray. Below, we'll explore the most important steps in creating the right questions for your survey.Identify Your GoalsNo single survey can do it all. In general, your surveys will be designed to measure one aspect of the customer experience. What was their online checkout like? How satisfied are they with your products? How and why do they use your services? As you analyze customer survey data, you'll be able to draw conclusions, so decide before you write the survey what you want the results to reveal.Design the SurveySurveys should be designed in such a way that they keep the attention of the person taking them. Keep these issues in mind:

• Customers will lose interest in the survey after just a few minutes, so keep it as succinct as possible
• Questions on similar subjects should be clumped together so that the survey flows naturally
• Plan how many questions you'll ask on each subject in advance

Write the QuestionsNow that you've identified your goals and created a rough blueprint of the survey, you can formulate the actual questions. The language you use when creating questions can make or break your survey. Consider the following:

• Questions should be targeted to the educational level of your customers; don't use college-level questions if many customers have a 10th-grade reading level. If you're uncertain, go with simpler language
• Ask only one thing with every question
• Avoid leading or biased language – terms with emotional connotations can unconsciously bias survey-takers
• Questions should mostly have the same response options; for example, don't ask for a 1-5 rating on one question and an “Agree or disagree” on others. Keep it as consistent as the needs of the survey allow for
• Don't give too many options – having more than 3-5 options is normally too many to get good results

In some cases, it may be useful to adapt some common, industry standard questions to your own needs, while also creating your own questions. After you've administered your survey, you'll be able to use data analysis to determine whether or not certain questions gave effective results, allowing you to write even better questions as time goes on.