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Customer feedback is the best way to understand about the expectations, needs, and preferences of the target market. While online surveys are a valuable tool for gathering customer insights, higher response rates and survey completions can be a challenge.
In this blog, we explore thirteen survey best practices that will help you design surveys that are clear, concise, and communicative. Before we dive into the best practices for survey design, let’s understand the 3C’s of survey creation.
Survey design is the process of creating a survey with a concise format and style and clear and communicative language. This step in the survey research process plays a key role in motivating respondents to participate and complete the survey.
So, let’s break down the three Cs to understand how to design surveys that encourage your target audience to provide valuable feedback.
Whether it is the questions or the layout of your survey, it should clearly tell respondents what they are supposed to do. Your survey shouldn’t confuse the participants about the purpose of the survey and how to complete it.
Respondents often drop a lengthy survey as it seems time-consuming. So, it’s another best practice of survey design to ensure your survey is concise. Keep the survey short, mention the time required to complete it, and implement skip logic to shorten the overall number of questions.
The last factor that ensures the success of a survey is whether it communicates the intended message. Your questions should help you achieve the main survey goal, it should produce meaningful insights and be relevant to the respondent’s experience.
The three C’s of survey design best practices will help you improve the quality efficiently. In our next section, we’ll discuss thirteen survey best practices based on these three factors to help you identify the issues that may affect the survey result.
The following are the best survey practices that you should follow to ensure higher participation and completion.
Before designing your survey, you should clearly define the survey goal. The goal of your research will serve as a benchmark to ensure you don’t go off-topic when writing the questions.
Your goals should be precise – “I want to understand customer’s satisfaction with the new mobile app layout” or “I want to evaluate employee satisfaction in the sales team to understand the cause of churn.”
One of the simplest reasons for a lower response rate is when the questions go off-track. It’s important to ask questions relevant to the survey purpose.
Only ask questions you need answers to, not those you can find answers to. For instance, when you are gathering data from your current customer base, it is redundant to ask for demographic data. Do you really need to ask demographic questions? Can you look up the information in any other way?
Surveys are best used to capture data on participants’ needs, preferences, attitudes, behaviors, opinions, and expectations.
It is important to ensure your survey is concise; that doesn’t mean you should include double-barreled questions. Avoid packing too many themes in a single question.
“How would you rate our customer service agent’s behavior and our mobile app’s performance?”
This type of question can confuse participants as they may feel satisfied with the customer service but might find the app problematic.
Additional read: Make the most of online surveys
Open or closed-ended questions: which one should you be using? One of the survey best practices you should abide by is to balance the two question types. Closed-ended questions help you gather quantitative data and make it easy for respondents to complete the survey in less time. On the other hand, open-ended questions generate qualitative data, and participants require more time to complete these questions.
So, the best way to design surveys is by placing open-ended questions toward the end of the survey as they take more time to complete.
Often, researchers let their biases show in the questions.
“We pride ourselves in offering a 5-star experience. How would you rate your experience with our spa?”
The entire question indicates a researcher’s bias and that they expect a 5-star rating from participants.
A key survey design best practice is to ensure the use of natural and familiar language that doesn’t elicit a biased response. Keep the survey language focused on the respondent and their feedback rather than introducing your view.
As mentioned above, a concise survey yields more responses than a lengthy one. If you hope to gather insightful feedback, it’s best to make sure your survey isn’t asking 30 questions.
Expecting that respondents will spend so much time on a lengthy survey will only lead to inefficiency. The most basic survey best practice is to keep your survey short and simple. Remember to maintain a logical order in your questions, and leverage skip logic functionality to only ask relevant questions.
Instead of using absolutes like yes/no or true/false, leverage response scale questions. A modern online survey tool is equipped with questions like Likert Scale, rating scale, satisfaction/dissatisfaction scales, and more.
When you are determining what type of responses you should include, response scales are a better option. This will allow you to gather insight into the respondents’ attitudes toward the topic and capture the intensity and direction of their attitudes.
When your aim is to gather accurate data from the target audience, it is essential that you design inclusive surveys. Two ways to do that is by using images and inclusive language. An image generator can help create visuals that reflect the diversity of your target audience, ensuring that your surveys are more inclusive.
Images can help make your survey more accessible for a less educated audience. It can help communicate the purpose of the question and make it easy to understand.
Additionally, it’s important to use inclusive and appropriate terminology in your survey, especially for demographic questions. For example, when asking about a respondent’s gender identity or race, it is important to include all options.
While creating an inclusive question is a necessary survey best practice, it’s also not possible. There will always be participants for whom none of the options will be applicable. In these cases, including an opt-out answer can help you avoid drop-off or wrong data.
Use opt-outs like – none of the above, I don’t know, prefer not to answer, other, etc. However, be mindful of the opt-out you use; “I don’t know” and “none of the above” reflect different meanings.
The survey should be centered around the respondent’s experience, but this also means you should demonstrate respect towards them.
Don’t assume negativity and write offensive or biased questions. Additionally, be sensitive when asking questions about sensitive topics. Ensure you are using appropriate terminology and provide an explanation for why you are asking sensitive questions.
Incentives and survey rewards are one way to show your appreciation to the respondents who took the time to provide you with valuable insights.
Offer incentives to respondents who complete the survey. Giving participants something in return for their time shows your seriousness regarding the survey and determination to improve their experience.
Survey tools like Voxco offer various incentive types, allowing you to find and use an appropriate reward.
Use online survey tools that will adjust the layout of your survey based on the device the respondent uses. In today’s world, which depends on mobile devices for all activities, creating mobile-friendly surveys is a key survey best practice.
Additionally, this also makes the survey more accessible and allows respondents to complete the survey whenever and wherever they want.
Once you have followed all the best practices for survey design, you need to check in one last time for to ensure a seamless survey experience. By this, we mean soft launch or test your survey by sending your survey via different channels to people in your organization. Read 6 reasons to soft launch your online surveys.
This step will allow you to gather insight into the effectiveness and performance of your survey from multiple points of view. You will be able to capture any possible friction or error that can adversely impact the experience for your respondents.
Now that wraps up the key survey design best practices. You can read about survey best practices for When To Send Surveys For Maximum Impact.
With modern survey software in the market, survey creation is not limited to professionals with knowledge of coding and programming. Anyone can design surveys by simply using an online survey tool and its many functionalities.
Voxco offers a drag-and-drop survey builder that enables you to design professional surveys in minutes. You can also leverage the pre-made survey templates and customize them to suit your purpose.
Take advantage of a platform made just for you and your needs, translate surveys into your preferred language, design branded surveys, add advanced logic, and more.
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