Best Practices to be followed while framing survey

A good survey has the right blend of close-ended and open-ended questions that are framed to capture the right sentiments to achieve your goals. Studies show that close-ended questions in a survey tend to capture more responses than open-ended questions.
A well-structured survey can actually be the stepping stone to building a great CX story. Surveys are only a means of capturing your customers’ sentiments; hence, they should be designed keeping in mind the analytics that could be derived from the responses.
Through this blog, Zykrr will try to chart out a few best practices that are absolutely necessary while curating a survey.

Choose a neutral tone

Survey questions should be set in a neutral tone. It should not probe or nudge your customers into specific responses. It is easier to answer questions more honestly when the questions are not directed toward a specific sentiment. The intention is not to derive the desired responses but to understand the correct sentiments from your respondents.

Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive

This is an important framework that needs to be considered while framing these survey questions. In a multiple-choice question, the answer choices should be mutually exclusive, which means that the choices should not be similar to each other. The answer choices to a question should also be collectively exhaustive, meaning that your survey responses cover the realm of all possible answers a respondent can select. Precisely, it means the collection of responses is exhaustive of all answer responses.

Avoid double-barrelled questions

A double-barrelled question is one where two things are asked in the same question. For example, you will often find questions in surveys that ask "How satisfied are you with our product features and service?" Now, it tends to create confusion in the minds of your customers and influence their answers. This results in skewed opinions that aren’t completely true. A customer might be satisfied with the product features but not with the service. In this case, he/she does not have the option to provide his/her correct opinion.

Hence, it is always better to have a single subject of concern for a question.

The sequential arrangement of questions

A good survey is curated in the form of a story. It is organized such that respondents are engrossed in the survey. This basically means that the questions are arranged in a certain sequence that automatically gives a flow to your survey. Every Moment of Truth is captured and placed in the questionnaire in the right order. It is of utmost importance to ensure that the questions differ from each other yet are directed towards the same goal. A very vital point to be taken into consideration is that at no point should respondents feel obligated to answer. Questions should be made optional so that respondents have the freedom to choose and answer only the ones they wish to respond to.

A Balanced and Sequential Set of Answers

Just as it is important to arrange the questions in a logical order, it is also important to arrange the answer choices to these questions in a sequential manner. The choice should be balanced in the sense that it should have all possible answers. For example, say you want to know how your customers feel about your organization’s customer service. The answer choices should have been Very Helpful, Helpful, Neither Helpful Nor Unhelpful, Unhelpful, and Very Unhelpful. Hence, these choices have covered all possible emotions a customer can express in the question. Note that the answers should also be sequentially arranged so that respondents have a clear understanding and also find a link between the choices.

It goes without saying that it's mandatory to test run the survey at least twice once it’s ready for your client. Test it amongst your peers to see how it looks and note all the parameters that come to your mind when taking the survey. Sometimes the minutest details that have the maximum impact escape our attention. At Zykrr, we aim at building innovative techniques either through our survey administration module or with our AI/ML-enabled insights platform to ensure that, together with our clients, we can build a great CX story.