9 Types of Survey Questions to Collect Insightful Feedback [+Examples]

9 Types of Survey Questions to Collect Insightful Feedback [+Examples] cover

What types of survey questions should you use to collect valuable feedback?

It is essential to identify the types of survey questions that work best and utilize them to gain insights into user sentiment. Insightful questions can help you create compelling surveys that yield actionable feedback.

In this article, we’ll go through 9 types of survey questions and their examples that can help you get insightful feedback about your products and user experiences.

Let’s start!

TL; DR

  • You should use both closed and open-ended survey questions to collect quantitative and qualitative data and get more accurate responses from survey respondents.
  • Open-ended survey questions bring in qualitative feedback in users’ own words with valuable insights into the customer experience.
  • Yes/no questions can help you identify and screen individuals for target surveys without overwhelming participants.
  • Multiple Choice Questions present predetermined answer options to respondents and gather data that you can use for behavioral segmentation.
  • Checkbox questions allow multiple answer choices, making them useful for determining respondent characteristics and performing user segmentation.
  • Rating scale survey questions use a numeric scale to measure customer satisfaction, commonly through CSAT and NPS surveys.
  • Likert scale survey questions use a 5 or 7-point scale ranging from agree to disagree or satisfied to dissatisfied to measure customer satisfaction.
  • Rank-order questions ask respondents to prioritize answer choices based on preferences, making them useful for ranking product features with long lists.
  • Matrix survey questions ask multiple questions with the same options, increasing efficiency by not repeating answers.
  • Demographic questions gather background characteristics of survey respondents for insights into customer context, enabling better segmentation and personalized experiences.
  • To create a responsive survey, you should use simple language and avoid unnecessary jargon and common bad survey pitfalls.
  • Userpilot can be the perfect tool to help you create and trigger in-app survey questions with its survey builder and templates, NPS dashboard, feedback analysis tools, etc.

9 Types of survey questions

The 9 types of survey questions are:

  1. Open-ended questions: Questions that allow for a wide range of responses and encourage the respondent to provide more detailed and elaborate answers.
  2. Yes/no questions: Respondents can answer questions with a simple “yes” or “no” response.
  3. Multiple choice questions: Respondents must choose from a given set of options to answer the question.
  4. Checkbox questions: They let respondents select multiple answers from a list of options.
  5. Rating questions: They ask respondents to rate or assess a particular product, service, or experience, usually on a numerical scale.
  6. Likert scale questions: Likert scale questions measure the degree of agreement or disagreement with a particular statement using a 5 or 7-point scale.
  7. Rank order questions: These questions ask respondents to rank a list of items in order of importance, preference, or relevance.
  8. Matrix survey questions: They present respondents with a grid or matrix of options, where each row has the same options for survey responses.
  9. Demographic questions: These questions ask respondents to provide personal information about themselves, such as age, gender, income, education level, or ethnicity.

1. Open-ended survey questions

You can use open-ended survey questions to collect qualitative feedback from users. These questions allow users to describe something in their own words without any limitations from the survey. As a result, you can gain valuable insights into your product and user experience.

You can often see open-ended questions featured as follow-up questions. NPS follow-up question is a common example where you can include an open-ended question to collect more qualitative feedback. It helps you understand the reasons behind certain responses from survey takers.

nps-follow-up-survey-questions-userpilot.png
NPS follow-up question with Userpilot. Get a demo and see how you can use it.

Open-ended question examples

1. Is there anything you feel our product could do better?

This question invites users to provide suggestions for improvement and gather feedback on your product.

2. How can we improve our product to meet your needs better?

This question asks users to consider their needs and the improvements they want in your product.

3. What is the one thing you wish this product could do that it doesn’t already do?

This question brings out specific feedback from users by asking them to identify what customers need the most. As a result, you learn more about users’ priorities.

Create product improvement survey in Userpilot.

Create product improvement surveys in Userpilot.

2. Yes/No questions

The simple yes/no questions are an excellent tool for screening out or filtering individuals for your target online surveys.

Suppose you conduct a feature audit to gather feedback on a new product feature. A yes/no question asking whether your customers are using the feature can quickly help you identify those who qualify to provide feedback.

Yes/No question examples

1. Have you used any products similar to ours?

The yes/no response will help you gain insights into user familiarity with the market and competition of your product.

2. Do you find our new feature useful?

This question can help you assess whether or not your newly launched feature is useful to customers and how users received it.

3. Based on your recent experiences, are you satisfied with our customer service?

This question can help you collect customer feedback on the customer service experience. You can then understand your customer service’s quality and identify improvement areas.

Create yes/no question survey in Userpilot

Create yes/no survey questions in Userpilot

3. Multiple-choice questions

MCQ or Multiple Choice Questions present respondents with three or more predetermined answer options. SaaS businesses commonly use them to gather information about respondents’ behaviors, attitudes, or persona types.

You can also use MCQ-type close-ended survey questions to gather behavioral data types and perform behavioral segmentation.

Segment customers based on company size

Build multiple choice questions to segment customers in Userpilot.

Multiple choice question examples

1. What kind of work do you do?

This question helps pinpoint user roles and it is often used in a welcome survey.

2. What goals are you trying to achieve with our product?

With this question’s responses, you can better understand the motivations and priorities of the target audience.

3. How will you primarily use [your product name]?

Respondents can select the option that best represents their intended use of the product. It will help you gain insights into the product’s use cases and target audience.

Here is an example of how the Miro sign-up flow uses multiple-choice survey questions to collect user persona information.

miro-multiple-choice-question-type-survey-question
Multiple choice question – Miro sign-up flow.

4. Checkbox questions

In this type of question, the respondents can choose more than one option as their answer. You can use these questions to determine certain sets of respondents’ characteristics.

The information about respondents’ characteristics can help you correlate characteristic sets with respondent segments. It can further help you in performing user and data segmentation.

You can also include an “Other; please specify” option within the checkbox questions. It will allow respondents to provide qualitative responses that offer additional insights into the reasoning behind their answers.

Checkbox question examples

1. Which feature do you find the most useful? Select all that apply.

You can figure out which features are most helpful to your customers and which aren’t relevant in getting their jobs to be done.

2. Choose your top 3 goals you want to achieve with [your product name].

You can use the gathered information about the motivations and priorities of the target audience to tailor an onboarding experience accordingly.

Airtable asks users to choose up to 4 things they want to track through a checkbox question.

airtable-checkbox-survey-questions.png
Checkbox question – Airtable.

5. Rating questions

The rating questions are a common type of survey question where the answers map onto a numeric scale. The numerical scale typically ranges from 1 to 5 or from 1 to 10. Respondents need to rate their level of agreement or satisfaction with a statement or question using the numerical scale.

Rating scale survey questions can help you rate customer satisfaction through CSAT surveys. You can also use it for Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to determine how likely your customers will recommend your product. A 1 to 10 rating scale is usually common in NPS surveys.

Rating question examples

1) On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend ABC Software to your colleagues?

This is an NPS survey question whose responses will give you insights into whether your products can satisfy customers.

2) How would you rate your recent customer service experience on a scale of 1-5?

This question helps you evaluate how your customer service team has been doing recently.

rating-types-of-survey-questions-example.png
Create rating questions in Userpilot.

6. Likert scale questions

You can use Likert scale questions to measure customer opinions and feelings about your product or service. These questions use a 5 or 7-point scale and typically present a range of responses that develop symmetrically around a median number, such as 3, 5, 7, or 9.

The responses to Likert scale survey questions can:

  • Range from strongly agree to strongly disagree – Strongly disagree, Somewhat disagree, Neither agree nor disagree, Somewhat agree, Strongly agree.
  • Range from very satisfied to very dissatisfied,
  • Be presented in smiley faces, from very sad faces to very happy faces.
Userpilot onboarding experience with Likert scale question.

Userpilot onboarding experience with Likert scale question

Likert scale questions are common in various surveys, including customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and customer effort score (CES) surveys. These surveys can measure how satisfied or dissatisfied customers are with a particular aspect of a product or service, such as customer service or product quality.

Likert scale question examples

1. How was the experience of creating your first automation flow?

2. How satisfied are you with our product?

3. How would you rate the usefulness of our product?

These questions help you collect quantitative feedback about your products and their features.

Product survey with Likert scale question in Userpilot.

Product survey with Likert scale question in Userpilot

7. Rank order questions

The rank-order questions ask respondents to order answer choices based on their preferences. Businesses usually use these questions when they have a long list of different product features they want to make a ranking of.

However, rank-order questions can be more time-consuming for respondents and may require them to be familiar with all the answer options before providing a complete ranking.

Respondents may also not take the time to consider a long ranking list carefully and may instead provide incomplete or inconsistent rankings. Moreover, rank-order questions can also result in messy, hard-to-use data.

To mitigate these challenges, you should split a long list of features into categories or keep the list short. It’ll result in an increased response rate and a better dataset.

Rank order question examples

1. Please rank the following features in order of importance

2. Please rank the following goals based on your priority

These questions help you understand what your customers perceive to be the most important features of your product.

8. Matrix survey questions

This type of survey question asks respondents a few questions in a row with the same response options. Using it as a series of Likert scale questions or a series of rating scale questions is a common practice.

Matrix survey questions help you and the respondents by easing the survey process. These questions save time and increase efficiency by allowing multiple questions about a specific topic without repeating answer options.

Matrix survey question examples

1. Rate our customer service on each of the following criteria

2. Rate our product on each of the following items

3. Rate the following products based on how useful they are to you.

These questions can give you the responses to multiple surveys, like product surveys and feature surveys, in one response.

matrix-survey-questions-example.png
Matrix survey question example.

9. Demographic questions

The demographic questions are a mix of different forms of questions to gather demographic data about your user base. You can use demographic questions to gather information about the background characteristics of the survey respondents.

Demographic questions can help you gain insights into the context of your customers (like role, company, industry, etc.). It can help you segment customers more precisely and create personalized experiences that foster retention.

Demographic question examples

1. What role best describes you?

2. In which industry is your business?

3. How many employees does your company have?

These questions can help you better understand the demographic of your user base and make your personalized strategies accordingly.

demographic-survey-questions-examples.png
Demographic question example on Amplitude.

Best practices to create the right survey questions

You should include both closed and open-ended questions in your survey. Using them can help you gather quantitative and qualitative data to understand your customer experience better.

You should use simple language and avoid jargon while making in-app surveys or user experience survey questions. It is best to keep the questions simple and relevant to customers so they don’t feel tired while answering them.

Try to avoid common mistakes that can lead to bad survey questions, such as leading or biased questions, double-barreled questions, or too personal or sensitive questions.

How to create and trigger in-app survey questions with Userpilot?

Userpilot helps you easily create and trigger in-app survey questions to collect customer feedback and ensure customer satisfaction. You can build a user-friendly survey from scratch or use customizable survey templates.

survey question templates in Userpilot.

Survey template library in Userpilot

It is equally important to trigger in-app surveys aside from creating them properly. Userpilot’s advanced user segmentation enables you to target specific user segments based on behavior, demographics, etc. As a result, you can reach the right users at the right time with the right message.

trigger surveys based on user behavior in Userpilot

Trigger surveys based on user behavior in Userpilot

Bonus: You should also take advantage of Userpilot’s feedback analysis tools to analyze survey results and identify trends. The NPS dashboard lets you track your Net Promoter Score over time.

quantitative-analysis-nps-dashboard-userpilot.png
Quantitative analysis on Userpilot NPS dashboard.

You can also analyze NPS responses by tagging the responses to identify where you should improve.

qualitative-analysis-nps-response-tags-userpilot.png
Qualitative analysis with NPS response tags – Userpilot.

Conclusion

Selecting the appropriate types of survey questions is crucial for gaining insights into customer behaviors and experiences. You can use them to create powerful surveys that yield the feedback you need to take actionable strategies.

Want to get started with effective types of survey questions? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can create microsurveys code-free.

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