Top 5 Survey Design Mistakes

Customer service is one of the biggest contributors to business, organization, and event success. In fact, 96% of customers¹ will base their brand loyalty off the level of customer service provided to them. Surveys are a useful tool to help ensure you’re providing a helpful or necessary service and experience. Before jumping into determining the questions to use for your survey, consider these top five survey design mistakes.

1. Neglecting to Define a Clear Goal

Defining a clear goal is one of the most essential steps in creating an effective survey. Survey goals should be determined by what exactly is going to be most important when analyzing results. Focusing on a clear objective can help eliminate unnecessary questions, allowing you to gain useful, applicable feedback.

2. Asking Too Many Vague Questions

Vague questions are often counterproductive, as the responses received are too broad to effectively analyze. For example, only asking a respondent how their overall experience was doesn’t allow them to explain why they chose a given rating. Asking additional detailed questions with descriptive type answer choices will allow you to obtain information on areas of strength or where enhancements could be made.

3. Asking Too Many Questions

When creating feedback surveys, it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole of asking too many questions. Although asking users many questions may seem like the most efficient way to gather information, respondents are actually less likely to complete the survey. To ensure your desired results are received, we recommend keeping the number of survey questions at a practical level by utilizing branching type questions, which will allow the respondent to skip sections of your survey that do not apply to them.

4. Questions are Confusing or Too Technical

Each survey should be written to compliment your business or organization’s branding. Write each question as if you are asking someone face-to-face. Language within each survey should be conversational and easily digestible. Ultimately, customers are more likely to provide honest feedback when they understand what’s being asked.

5. Failing to Analyze Survey Results and doing Something with the Results

Your customer feedback survey has been posted or sent, now what? It is “Time to Analyze!”. One commonly overlooked step in surveying is aggregating and understanding the survey results. This can be done on an individual basis or by looking for trends. The next step is actually doing something with the results! This can include reaching back out to the respondent if there are issues to be addressed; conducting staff evaluations with feedback received; making changes to internal workflows; following up with additional information that has been requested; and most importantly, to celebrate successes!

We here at eAutoFeedback provide personalized service, which sets us apart from other survey vendors by helping you create the applicable survey questions to ask, we add them to your profile on our cloud-based system, and then train you on how to easily send out the survey requests via email or using a kiosk/iPad model. Contact our team of professionals to schedule a no obligation demo in order to learn more about how eAutoFeedback can become an essential strategic partner for your business.

References:
¹ Microsoft, "Expectations for Customer Service Continue to Rise Around the Globe", 2017 State of Global Customer Service Report, Page 2 Introduction.