Create effective survey questions for your company

If you take the time to formulate good questions, you’ll be well on your way to getting the reliable results you need to achieve your goals.

First, you need to choose which question type to use. HeyForm: one of the best Survey forms in the market offers both open-ended questions, where respondents are expected to make personal comments, and closed-ended questions, which give respondents a set number of answer choices. Response options for closed-ended questions include yes/no, multiple choice (multiple answers), a Likert rating scale, etc.

But that’s not all. You also need to decide how to ask your questions. Tips on how to properly write questions can be outlined below. If you follow the tips, you’ll be able to create questions like a pro in no time!

5 tips for creating surveys

1. Formulate the questions objectively

If you imply an opinion in the question (or ask a leading question), it may lead respondents to give an answer that does not reflect their actual feelings and attitudes.

Suppose you ask the following leading question:

“We think our customer service representatives are really great. How great do you think they are?”

This question conveys an opinion that you want respondents to agree with. The following wording change makes the question objective:

“How helpful do you find our customer service representatives?”

2. Use mostly closed questions

Open questions (with freely formulated answers) require more effort (including time) to answer. Too many open questions can cause respondents to stop answering early.

Ask a maximum of 2 open-ended questions per survey and position them on a separate page at the end, if possible. In this case, even if respondents then abandon the survey, you can still use the answers on the previous pages.

3. Don’t inquire about two things at the same time

If you confuse respondents, it’s just as bad as influencing their answers. In both cases, they’ll opt for answers that don’t reflect their actual opinions and preferences.

A common cause of confusion is a so-called “double question,” where respondents are asked to evaluate two things at once. Example:

“How would you rate our customer service and product reliability?”

Customer service and product reliability are two different topics. If you mix the two topics in one question, you may force respondents to rate only one of the items or skip the question entirely.

Fortunately, this problem can be fixed quickly. Simply ask separate questions for both topics:

“How would you rate our customer service?”

and …

“How do you rate the reliability of our products?”

4. Stop using the same questions all the time

Suppose you are asked the same questions over and over again.

At some point, you get annoyed by this, right?

That’s how respondents may feel if you keep phrasing questions in the same way or with the same answer options. Either respondent drop out of answering, or they give answers that they don’t give enough thought to and are therefore worthless to you.

You can prevent this by working with different question types, varying your way of asking questions, and not asking similar-looking questions in immediate succession.

5. Make answering the questions optional for most questions.

Respondents may not be able to answer all questions or may be reluctant to answer in some cases.

Keep this in mind when determining which questions are mandatory to answer. If you are not sure whether a particular question should be optional or mandatory, make it optional. According to our findings, forcing respondents to answer makes them more likely to stop answering or arbitrarily select any answer.

Conclusion

Hopes these tips will definitely help you create a logical survey question for yourself. Use HeyForm to create beautiful and elegant survey questions for more response and get to know what are your customers thinking about you and your company.