Whether you’re running employee evaluations or customer feedback, an effective survey strategy will ensure you collect the right information to make effective change within your business.
To keep your surveys on track, here are 5 of our tips and tricks for creating great surveys.
1. Short and Sweet
Instead, separate your surveys into different themes, then send out a survey that takes half a day to complete. Your goal with surveys is to keep it short enough for a respondent to complete all the fields, but long enough to get the information you need. You’ll see a higher completion rate and more thoughtful responses when surveys are shorter.
2. Closed-ended questions are ideal
Including questions that have pre-populated answers into your survey will make it easier for respondents to reply to the questions by checking a multiple choice box or checkbox questions. Open-ended questions tend to take longer to answer and should, therefore, be kept to a minimum.
3. Avoid double-barreled questions
Separate your questions and make them simple and straightforward. Asking a respondent to give you a, “yes” or “no” answer to “ how would you rate the quality of this product and it’s marketing” could result in them skipping the questions or stopping the survey.
4. Avoid absolutes in your questions
Remove words such as, “always”, “all” and “every”. These words remove the ability of a respondent to give you accurate information. They might not answer, “do you always go for a run in the morning?” because they don’t, but they will answer, “do you run?” because they do run some mornings.
5. Run regular surveys
It is important to run surveys on a regular basis. Avoid only running these surveys quarterly. Regular surveys offer you a more accurate representation of your company and departments. When you observe all the surveys within a quarter, you can track the trends that often happen without noticing – especially if surveys aren’t run regularly.
6. Define a clear goal for your survey
Your survey should not try to answer the big questions such as, “wanting to understand your customer satisfaction strategy”. Instead, you should make your goal based on an attainable answer such as, “we want to understand what causes our customers to visit the website but not make a purchase”. This way, you will create questions that feed information into that goal.