Surveys are a great way to assess customer satisfactions, marketing channels, product potential, price ranges, website audiences, and much more. But there’s a right – and a wrong – way to phrase survey questions. The way you word your survey questions has a direct impact on both the response rate and the usefulness of the responses that you get.
Getting started with business aurveys.
Most businesses use online survey tools rather than someone canvassing the mall or calling homes to ask questions. Online surveys are less intrusive than personal calls or questions, and they’re easy to create. Tools like SurveyMonkey can get an online survey up and running in a matter of minutes, and a basic account is free.
Even though you can publish your survey quickly, it’s better to take your time and craft effective, thoughtful questions that will generate useful answers for your business. The right survey questions can make a big impact on your business.
Related: How to Determine If There’s a Market for Your Business Idea
5 types of survey questions.
Not all questions are created equal. There are five types of survey questions. Each type provides different insights into customer responses. Choosing the right type is half the battle to creating great survey questions. The five types of questions are:
1. Open-ended questions: Open-ended questions prompt responses on how someone feels about an issue. They require more than a simple “yes/no” type of response. Respondents write their answers in their own words rather than choose from a predetermined range of responses.
2. Multiple choice questions: Multiple choice questions provide a range of responses. These are useful to find out demographic information about respondents or when there is a specific, measurable set of responses to the question.
3. Ordinal scale questions: Ordinal scale questions ask respondents to rank their answers on a specific scale. A sequence of ideas is presented and people are asked to rank them in order of choice. Asking coworkers to rank their choices of chicken, steak, or seafood meals for a business meeting is an example of an ordinal scale.
4. Interval scale questions: Interval scales offer pre-set ranges from which to choose a response….