25+ Good Survey Questions to Ask Your Customers to Collect Valuable Insights

25+ Good Survey Questions to Ask Your Customers to Collect Valuable Insights

We can all recognize good survey questions when we see them. They’re well crafted to help you gather valuable user feedback. But crafting one can be a real head-scratcher.

Where do you begin? What should you (or shouldn’t you) ask? Which question(s) will draw better responses?

In this article, we discuss different types of questions, and how to write good surveys.

 

TL;DR

  • A good survey question is clear, concise, and appropriate. It doesn’t confuse survey takers and provides you with helpful business information.
  • There are different types of survey questions, including questions with multiple choice answers, Likert scale, closed and open-ended questions, etc.
  • To write a good survey question, you must first have a clear objective for the survey.
  • Then, you’ll need to determine your desired feedback type – quantitative or qualitative and identify the audience group best placed to provide high-quality responses.
  • When crafting your question, remember to keep it simple and short. Avoid any loaded, sensitive, or leading question that may lead to response bias.
  • Finally, keep your response options (especially your scales) consistent to avoid any confusion.
  • With your survey questions decided, Userpilot provides you with tools to create and launch your survey in-app. Book a demo today to learn more!

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What is a good survey question?

A good survey question is concise, clear, and appropriate.

It doesn’t confuse the respondent and provides clear business-critical information that helps you improve/tailor your product or service, website, landing page, etc.

Different types of survey questions

The first thing to understand before preparing a survey question is that there are different types of questions, each suitable for different scenarios. These include:

  • Rating scale questions: These questions provide answer options on a numeric scale. An example of a rating scale question is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, where users are asked how likely they are to recommend a product (from 0 – 10).

A rating scale question

  • Multiple choice questions: Also known as closed-ended questions, these questions limit the respondent’s answer options to a set of pre-defined choices. Here, respondents have to pick only one answer from the available options.

Example of multiple choice questions

  • Likert scale questions: A Likert scale is a 5, 7, or 9-point scale that measures a respondent’s intensity of agreement towards something. On a 5-point scale, ‘1’ often indicates an extreme view (say, “strongly disagree”); ‘5,’ another extreme view (“strongly agree”); and ‘3,’ neutral.

Example of Likert scale questions

  • Open-ended questions: An open-ended question allows respondents to provide written answers, without any limitations to a set of predefined choices (like the others above).Example of an open-ended question
  • Multiple-answer questions: These are multiple-choice questions where more than one answer is correct. These question types often provide checkboxes to allow respondents to select multiple answer choices.

Example of a multiple-answer question.

  • Smiley face survey questions: This is a specific type of rating scale survey question where smiley faces are used instead of a numeric scale. Those type of questions are usually used to measure customer satisfaction.

Example of a smiley question.

How to write good survey questions

Crafting good survey questions is critical to the success of your in-app surveys. There are five (5) steps to writing good questions. Let’s go over them.

1. Decide on your objective

Why are you running this survey? What insight do you seek from the survey data you’ll acquire?

Understanding why you need to run a survey is the foremost step in survey design.

Decide on your goals, objectives, and expected results for the survey. You should also ensure you keep the goals small (1 or 2 is enough) and make them SMART.

2. Choose between qualitative data and quantitative data

Next, you want to determine what type of insights you’d love to unveil with your survey questionnaire – qualitative or quantitative. Not only does this decision affect the variation of responses you’ll receive, but it may also impact response rate and bias.

For qualitative data, you’ll need open-ended questions that enable users to answer in their own words. Meanwhile, you obtain quantitative data from closed-ended questions with predefined answer options.

Research suggests you get the best feedback when you combine both. For instance, some surveys begin with a closed-ended question to get a tidbit of information before drilling down for a more detailed response using an open-ended question.

Combine open-ended and close-ended survey questions to get the best results

3. Ask the right questions to the right audience

Identifying your ideal target audience for your survey is critical to receiving more accurate answers. To do this, you must properly segment your users.

For example, when seeking feedback on a specific product feature, you’ll want respondents to be those who have used the feature in the past. You can track in-app user data and build a segment of users who fit your survey criteria.

Segment your audience

Likewise, when you segment users according to their use case, you can ask journey-specific questions that drive personalization.

4. Phrase your survey responses and questions to avoid biases

How you ask a question is everything. Your choice of words and phrases in a question can affect the interpretation of the question and/or limit the scope of respondents’ answers.

Providing too much information in your question can be confusing. If a question is getting too long, break it down into smaller, separate questions. Likewise, you must avoid asking sensitive questions or leading questions.

For example, consider the question: “How was your amazing customer experience?”

The question assumes the customer experience was “amazing” and doesn’t leave room for the respondent to state otherwise. The result is a slew of biased responses rating the “amazing” experience.

5. Keep the same response options to avoid confusion

Collect customer feedback with the same survey structure to avoid confusing your users. This is especially important for Likert or rating scale questions.

For example, if a 1-5 rating scale question goes from good to bad on one question, flipping the order (bad to good) for the next question will only confuse and skew their answers.

Good survey question examples

Now, let’s consider good question examples you can adopt/adapt for your next survey. We’ll look at demographic, market research, and customer satisfaction survey questions, among others.

Market research survey questions

Market research questions help you learn more about your customer base. The goal of this survey is to help you sell more to both existing and potential customers, by better understanding their needs and decision drivers.

Example of a market research survey question

Survey questions here include:

  • What price would you be willing to pay for our product? (multiple choice)
  • How well do you understand our pricing model? (scale)
  • How would you rate the product’s value for money? (scale)
  • If the pricing were to change, would you be happy to pay more? Why or why not?

User persona and demographic survey questions

Market research doesn’t stop with potential customers alone. User persona and demographic questions help you better identify those who responded to your messaging.

You can ask these questions in your welcome survey to learn about your new user’s background, job-to-be-done (JTBD), needs, and how they plan to use your product or service.

Good survey questions here include:

  • What is your current employment status?
  • What will you be using the product mainly for?
  • What ‘job’ are you primarily ‘hiring’ our product to do for you?
  • What do you want to achieve with our app?
  • Will you be using this product alone or as a part of a team?
  • Have you used a similar product before is it the first time you’re using X (e.g. an email marketing tool)?
  • How does the app compare with competitors?
  • Are you moving from another tool? Which one?

User satisfaction and user experience survey questions

Customer satisfaction questions help you gauge how well your product helps users achieve their goals. Similarly, customer effort surveys and user experience surveys measure the ease of using your product.

As well as revealing your strong points, these surveys help you to identify reasons behind customer dissatisfaction and work on fixing them. Presenting these surveys at every stage of the customer journey informs you which part of the journey requires improvement.

Example of an NPS survey question

Sample survey questions include:

  • How would you rate our product as compared to our competitors?
  • How would you feel if you had to stop using our product?
  • Would you recommend our product to others?
  • How was your experience with [new feature]?
  • Can you report issues that ruin your experience with us?

Product or service UX survey questions

UX surveys help you gather feedback about users’ experiences and interactions within your app. Your goal here is to find out how easy and understandable the product experience is and how well your product solves the user’s problem.

Example of a good UX survey example

Sample UX survey questions include:

  • Is there anything you feel our product could do better?
  • How satisfied are you with the performance/stability of our product? (scale)
  • We are looking to solve [problem x] – how would solving this problem with our product be helpful for you?
  • How would you rate the usefulness of our product? (scale)
  • How does this design make you feel? (multiple choice + text field)
  • How easy was it to complete task x? (scale)

Customer service experience questions

Recent customer service trends indicate a general movement towards personalized customer service that drives customer success.

Customer service survey questions help you determine how satisfied customers are with your support. This survey should follow right after a customer interacts with a customer representative/support channel.

Example of acustomer experience survey question

Good survey questions to ask include:

  • Was the support representative able to resolve the issue?
  • Are you satisfied with the help our support team provided?
  • Please rate your recent customer support interaction (scale)

Good churn survey questions

Churn surveys or exit surveys are surveys sent to users trying to cancel or downgrade their subscription plan. The survey helps you understand why users churn and what you can do to fix it.

Example of a churn survey

Sample churn survey questions include:

  • What’s the main reason you are canceling your account?
  • Why did you decide to cancel your subscription?
  • What made you close your account?

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How Userpilot can help you with your online survey questions

Userpilot is a powerful no-code product growth tool that enables you to create flexible, bespoke user experiences. To achieve this goal, it arms you with tools that help you better understand your users.

One of these tools is its feedback collection feature. Userpilot lets you build and incorporate contextual feedback into your app, which you can launch anywhere on your app.

Do you want to conduct a UX survey for a specific feature? Have the survey appear only after a user uses the feature. Want to know new users better? Incorporate demographic questions into the welcome screen.

Build your in-app survey and select where it appears and to whom it’s shown from a simple Chrome extension.

Code-free surveys in Userpilot

You can build a custom survey from scratch or select hyper-specific templates like the NPS and CSAT survey templates, and customize them as extensively as you desire. You can even tag responses to make analyzing data easier.

NPS response tagging

Conclusion

In-app and on-site surveys are a gold mine of feedback data if you can get your questions right. Good surveys have a clear purpose, avoid confusing language, and keep away from leading or loaded questions.

Thanks to Userpilot’s extensive feedback functionalities, building a survey doesn’t have to be a hassle. Book a demo today to have a representative show you how you can get started with Userpilot.

Create surveys code-free with Userpilot

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