How to write better surveys
There’s no shortage of articles out there on How To Write A Good Survey but, despite all that, I often see clients making the same missteps.
Annoyingly you often don’t realise that you’ve stuffed up your survey until it’s too late. When you find yourself looking at the results, scratching your head and wondering why you still don’t have the answer to the one question you really wanted to know.
The aim of this article is to move you past “How to write a good survey” to “How to write better surveys.”
Writing a customer survey can be both really simple…
“Hey dude, why do you like my PRODUCT / SERVICE?”
… and, at the same time, much more complex.
Whether you want to write better surveys to get feedback from existing clients or to test out an idea for a new product or service, these will help.
Sure there are a few caveats and there will always be exceptions but, if you’re a a solopreneur, Coach or, Consultant looking to write better surveys to get feedback from your clients or test out new ideas, as a general rule, all of these will apply.
1 - Before you start thinking about the wording of individual questions, get clear on these three things:
What exactly is it that you want to find out?
It’s not uncommon for businesses to survey their clients and then, when they are looking at the results, realise that they still don’t have the answer to the thing that they really wanted to know.
Spending some time thinking about what you REALLY want to know will not only help keep your survey focused (see #7), but it will make sure that you can do something actionable with the results.
Example:
Do you really want know if people prefer regular coke over diet coke OR do you want to know what soft drink they prefer?
Make sure you ask the MOST important thing that you want to know. (You’d be surprised how often this gets accidentally missed out.)
Why do you want to know that?
Being clear about WHY you want to know something and what you’re going to do with the results will not only help you to get more actionable insights, it will also help to build trust with your clients / customers.
Example:
If you have no intention of providing something, do not suggest that you might:
If you’re genuinely open to offering something else and curious about what your clients might like, try something like this instead – Notice the space for someone to write in their own answer.
What are you going to do with the results?
Sure you can ask for someone’s age but how will knowing that help you?
The length of your survey matters (see #7) so don’t waste space with questions that you’re not going to really get value from.
2 - Talk like a human
Be clear with your question and talk like a human.
EXAMPLE – Don’t do this:
Do this instead:
3 - Regularly, often and sometimes don’t really mean anything
I regularly go to the gym – I go daily
I regularly get my car serviced – It gets serviced once a year
If you mean weekly, say weekly.
If you mean daily, say daily.
BONUS TIP: Avoid phrases like bi-weekly, bi-annually.
This can be interpreted as twice a week or once every two weeks / twice a year or every two years.
When you’re looking at your results you want to be certain about what they mean.
Ordering for an anticipated “twice a week purchase” could mean that you’re left with a bunch of expired stock for something that people actually only buy once every 2 weeks.
So, again, say what you mean.
4 - Open V’s Closed questions
Open question: What did you have for dinner last night?
Closed question: Did you have dinner last night?
Closed questions tend to be Yes / No questions.
Open questions are, as the name suggests, more open.
Open ended questions take longer for people to complete and can make the survey longer. They can also be more involved to make sense of. AND they can give you so much more information then a “which of the following best apply” type question.
Closed questions take less time to complete and are easier to analyse, but you can miss out on nuance. By presupposing the answers and asking people to pick option A or option B, you could well miss out on learning something valuable that you hadn’t thought of.
A middle way is to give a few predetermined responses and then also include an “Other, Please State” answer option where people can type in their own response.
Example:
5 - Avoid double questions
Okay, so say you like chips but not fish, how would you answer this question? Would you say A – Yes, because you like one of the two or would you say B – No, because you don’t like both fish and chips?
If you have a question like the one below and someone shares their details, you can’t be sure if they are interested in your other services or if they are happy to talk to you about their responses.
A better way would be to split each question out:
6 - You only get the answers to the
questions you ask
Say you’re running an event and want to know if people prefer Monday or Tuesday.
Using the question above, you might learn that 60% prefer Monday and 40% prefer Tuesday. You also might never know that everyone could make Wednesday.
Also, if this is a compulsory question, by not adding a third answer option “C – None of the above”, you are also potentially forcing people to pick an answer just so that they can move onto the next question. That 60% who said they could make Monday might turn out to be much lower.
7 - Survey length matters
Test your survey before you send it out.
Go through it as your client / potential customer would and time how long it takes from start to finish.
Now get someone who hasn’t seen the survey before and ask them to do the same.
As a general rule (and assuming you’re doing an online survey) anything over 2 or 3 minutes is too long. 5 minutes is definitely too long. 20 minutes…. Nope.
If it’s too long people will give up part way through.
Don’t lie and say “It’s only 2 minutes” when you know it’s longer. Seriously.
8 - The order you ask questions matters
(aka Avoiding accidentally priming people)
The order of your questions is just as important as the wording.
If you start off asking people about their nutrition habits and then ask them “What’s the most important factor in keeping healthy?” they will be more likely to mention nutrition because they’ve just spent a few minutes thinking about and focussing on it.
The best way to approach this is to write out all your questions and then look at putting them in the order that most makes sense.
Question order is especially important if you’re asking your clients something like “Overall, how satisfied are you with our services?”
EXAMPLE:
Say you ask 4 questions in your survey:
- How easy was it to contact us when you needed to?
- How satisfied are you with the quality of work we did for you?
- Did we stick to agreed deadlines?
- Overall, how satisfied are you with our services?
Each time you make a change to the first three questions this will potentially impact the score for the final “Overall satisfaction” question. If you’re tracking this score over time, this can make things tricky – did our score change because we got better / worse or because we changed the questions that came before it in the survey?
Your best bet is to ask the “Overall satisfaction” question first.
EXAMPLE:
- Overall, how satisfied are you with our services?
- How easy was it to contact us when you needed to?
- How satisfied were you with the quality of work we did for you?
- Did we stick to agreed deadlines?
This way you can add in / remove / change any of the other questions without them impacting your “Overall satisfaction” question.
9 - Anonymous V’s not
Clients might not want to hurt your feeling by telling you that you suck. Especially if that client is also a friend.
Let people be anonymous if they want to be.
If you want to be able to follow up with people on individual responses, consider adding a “Hey, can we contact you to discuss your feedback in more detail” question at the end of your survey.
EXAMPLE:
10 - Don’t over survey people
I know, you’re keen to get feedback after every session. Don’t do it.
Asking after the first session and again at the last session is probably the max. If you’re only doing three sessions, ask for feedback after the last session.
If you have a regular client for recurring project work, ask after the first project and then again in a year.
BONUS #11 - Sampling
(aka Who to include in your survey)
Getting feedback from existing clients
If you want to get feedback from your clients ask all of them, not just the ones where things went well.
Depending on what you want to know, you might also like to consider getting feedback from people who approached you but didn’t commission you for work.
Getting feedback from potential customers
If you’re trying to gauge interest for a new idea make sure you ask the relevant people and be aware of skewing your sample.
- If you’re using social media to ask your questions or share your survey be aware that different types of people use different social media platforms. Where people do use multiple platforms, they will likely be in a very different mindset when using one over the other. For example, asking your connections on LinkedIn about their health and wellness will give you very different responses to if you ask the same questions on TikTok.
- The same principle applies to physical geography – if you stand on the corner by a busy train station in the city and talk to people about your idea for a product or service, you will get different people compared to if you went to a local coffee shop in a more rural area.
- Don’t just ask your friends. The chances are that your friends will have similar opinions, habits and ways of seeing the world to you. If you’re exploring a new idea for a product or service you need to talk to a wider variety of people.
Think about who you want to hear from or who you want to learn out about and ask them. Ask them in a variety of places. If you want to talk to new parents, try a Facebook group for new parents and a local community parents group. If you want to talk to solopreneurs, try a local co-working space or LinkedIn group (or Facebook). If you want to talk to long distance runners try looking for a local running group or asking if you can talk to customers waiting to buy new running shoes at the local running shop.
And there you have it, 10 tips on how to write better surveys.
Like I said, survey writing can be super simple and annoying complex at the same time.
I’ve been in the business of asking people what they think about various things for over 20 years now and while that doesn’t make me an expert it does mean that I’ve seen (& made!) enough mistakes to know better.
If you found this helpful and want to tell me about it, feel free to email me (hello@lizmoffatt.com) and we can high-five to your success over email.
May The Fore be with you.
I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and waterways in which I work.
I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.