Keep your questions focused

If you ask general questions like “how are we doing?” or “how can we improve?” you’ll get general answers like, “very good” and “be quicker” - neither of which is particularly helpful because you don’t know to which part of your business the comments are directed.

If you ask a more focused question like “How do you rate your experience with the salesperson that attended you?” the answer “very good” becomes far more useful.

Ask one question at a time

If you were to ask: “please tell us how polite & helpful you found our salesperson”, your responder wouldn’t know what answer to give if they found your salesperson to be very polite and not helpful at all. It would be better to split the question in to two separate questions.

Make sure your questions flow in a logical order.

Start with a brief introduction but don’t give away the survey’s objective. Put general questions, such as your responder’s demographic information at the beginning and put more specific questions toward the end. Put any questions asking for contact information last.

Keep question scales consistent.

If you are using scale questions, try to use the same number of points and keep the meaning of the points the same through out, so if the left most point is the most negative answer ensure all similar questions are the same.

Similarly if you use rating questions that ask your responder to rate items on a scale of 1-5, ensure 1 & 5 have the same meaning through out.

Keep the questions simple

Avoid jargon; don’t assume your responders are as comfortable with industry specific acronyms as you are. Short concise questions are far more likely to be answered, and easy to understand questions are far more likely to be answered accurately.

Use closed questions wherever possible.

Closed questions make it easier to analyse your results; a closed question has specific answers like “yes / no” or a scale of 1-5, where as an open question will usually involve your responder typing text into a box.

Use open questions to supplement closed questions with qualitative information, for example: “What was it about the sales person that attended you, that you liked so much?”

Do not use leading questions

Your questions should be non-leading, i.e. give equal weight to answers that are both positive and negative. For example: don’t ask “please tell us how much you liked the salesperson that attended you” and only supply the answers “Ok, Good & Excellent”, because you not allowing your responder to say “poor” or “very poor”.

Don’t over do mandatory questions

Be aware that the greater the number of mandatory questions you use in your survey, the less likely your survey will be completed.

Keep your survey short

A short survey helps with the quantity and quality of your responses. Too many questions and a) your responder will just answer anything to get to the end of the survey, or b) they won’t answer at it all.

Test drive your survey

Practise makes perfect, so we advise you practice on friends or colleagues first - this helps you spot misinterpretations of your questions, along with any other unclear text.