Finding out what your customers think is important to implementing change. Let’s look at the three questions to drastically improve your restaurant quickly.
common survey questions
5 Survey Questions Customers Will Skip Every Time
Survey Tips
As you’re crafting your survey, it pays to know what works, and what doesn’t. Here are five survey questions customers will skip every time.
5 Unique Survey Questions
Survey Tips
Surveys are a terrific way to gather vital information for your business. You may have already started surveying your customers with this popular data-collection method.
You may have found that surveys can help you survey large groups of people in a cost-effective manner. Perhaps you’re getting ready to send another survey, and you’d like to send one that isn’t predictable or boring.
Asking unexpected, fun questions is a great way to encourage more survey responses. You might find that shaking things up a bit increases your response rates.
We put together this list of five unique survey questions so you an reduce your survey abandonment rates and encourage more respondents to not only start your survey but finish it.
#1: Picture Question – Choose One
The image choice question is fun for respondents, and it’s especially useful for your more visual customers.
This type of question is a simple, closed-ended question where your survey respondents can choose from one or more image answers.
You provide the images, and they are free to pick their favorite(s).
We like the image-based question because it’s highly interactive for your survey respondents and encourages engagement. This is especially helpful if your customers are suffering from survey fatigue.
Because your customers are hit every day with surveys, the interactive image-based question can energize your customers and make them want to complete your survey. This can reduce your survey abandonment rate and increase your response rate.
The picture question can help you break through the survey clutter and show your customers their opinions matter.
#2: The Constant Sum Question
With this distinctive survey question, you allow your respondents to express how valuable or important something is to them.
A constant sum survey question helps you collect a ratio of data showing it in comparison to other data.
For example, you might offer respondents a sliding scale that they can move themselves. You could ask them to show how likely they are to do a series of things.
Let’s say you own a clothing store, and you want to know how likely your customers are to spend money on individual items. They can move the slider showing how they spend their money. You might ask them to slide the scale on the following:
- Pants
- Shirts
- Undergarments
- Pajamas
- Jewelry
- Hats and Belts
- Shoes
You can use this question when you are relatively sure your customers will make a purchase from you, but you want to know on what.
#3: Upload a File
There are times when you may really want to engage your survey respondents and asking them to upload a file on their cellphone is one way to do this.
Perhaps you’re looking for photos, documents or other information. If so, you can add an upload question to your survey.
Using this question allows your respondents to not only provide you a survey response but upload a file as well. It allows you to collect data that might not be available to you through standard survey questions.
While your customers will find this question fairly easy to deal with, you want to make sure to restrict the type of file your respondents can upload. For example, if you’re looking for an image, you don’t want them to upload a spreadsheet.
Be sure to provide hints and tips for users who may not be well-versed in mobile uploads.
#4: Reword the Question
Another way to make your surveys more unique is to get your creative juices working. Find fun ways to rewrite your standards survey questions so they inspire your respondents and elicit higher response rates.
Consider this survey question example:
How likely are you to purchase this product again?
- Heck yeah!
- Stuck in the middle.
- Wishy washy.
- No way.
By using clever choices, you give your customers a smile and create a survey they might actually want to complete.
Note, though, that this doesn’t work for all survey questions, and you should remain serious where it’s called for and if your industry wouldn’t work well with a bit of creativity.
Know your audience and use your best judgement.
#5: Throw in Some Humor
Yes, surveys are important for your data collection, and you don’t want to venture too far away from getting your results, but in the right circumstances you can consider using a little humor.
For example, if you have a long survey of 10 questions, and you want to add a bit of levity to the seriousness of it, you might through in a humorous question in the middle.
Do make sure the question still gathers data but ask it in a unique way. Perhaps halfway through your long survey, you might ask customers, “Are you tired yet?”
For the answers, make it apply to your business:
- Choice #1: Yes! I’m as tired as I was walking from one end of your store to the other to find what I needed.
- Choice #2: Of course not, you would never tire me.
From this question/answer, you add some humor, but you’re still able to take away vital data. If they chose choice #1, you might rethink your store layout for ease of use.
Bottom line have fun with your wording but do make sure you’re still getting valuable data about your customers’ experience with you. (tweet this)
Final Thoughts
Hilary Swank, a well-known actress, said, “If I’m going to do something different, and if I want it to meet someone’s needs, I really need to go the distance.”
If you take this quote to heart, you can see how important it is to first, survey your customers so you ensure you’re meeting their needs. Second, you want to create a survey that is engaging enough your customers will want to take it.
One way to do this is to throw in some unique survey questions to increase your response rate and engage your best customers.
Now that you have some survey questions to help you step out of your response, you’re well on your way to getting responses while making your customers feel that you went the extra mile to make sure their survey experience was one of a kind.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
Image: Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
Why Embedding Questions Gets More Survey Results
Survey Tips
One of the best ways to increase your survey response rates is to embed the questions right in your email marketing software.
Why does this increase your response rate? You see higher response rates because your respondents don’t have to leave their email to take your survey. They can answer it right in the virtual comfort of their inbox.
This is different than putting a link in your email, and it eliminates an extra step for survey takers.
In this article we look at why embedding questions gets more survey results.
Why are Response Rates Higher?
Response rates for emails with embedded survey questions are often higher for several reasons:
- As your respondent clicks to answer your question, they have already invested their time and are compelled to complete your survey. There is less chance of large dropout rates.
- Your respondents are more likely to answer a single question in your email than invest the time to click through to a long survey.
What is the Best Question?
Surveys embedded in emails generally see a much higher response rate than when you send a link to your survey. (tweet this)
Because of this, you want to ask the question that is the most important to your company. In many instances, this would be your Net Promoter question, “How likely are you to recommend our business to others.”
You’re sure to come up with other one-question surveys that fit your needs, but it’s a good idea to keep embedded surveys to no more than three questions.
Final Thoughts
Email is a powerful vehicle for your surveys. Nearly everyone checks their email, and by embedding your survey questions right in your email, you increase your chances of a response.
Embedding the survey reduces a perceived barrier to completing the survey. Your respondents can complete it immediately upon opening their email. They don’t have to click a link away from their email and take extra steps to complete your survey.
This is a bonus for your business and can help you learn more from your surveys while making it easier for your customers.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
Image: Ashes Sitoula on Unsplash
10 Questions for Your Guest Evaluation
Survey Tips
Sending a survey after someone stays at your hotel or bed and breakfast is a fairly commonplace marketing tool.
If you aren’t currently sending a guest evaluation, or if you’d like to give your survey a refresh, this article includes 10 questions for your guest evaluation.
These are questions you can use to see where you are excelling, or perhaps where you can improve your business.
Your reputation depends on what people are saying about you, and if you don’t know how they really feel, you have nothing on which to base your improvements. (tweet this) This is why a guest evaluation survey is so important for the hospitality field.
With many of the questions below, you can choose to offer open-ended questions as well as rating questions or closed-ended questions where users can choose more than one answer.
Consider what you really want to know before deciding on the question type.
#1: Why Did You Choose to Stay at This Hotel?
By asking this question, you get a good idea of whether it was an online search, price, word of mouth, reviews, repeat customer or something else.
Provide choices for your customers and let them check as many as they’d like because it could be multiple reasons.
#2: Tell Us About the Front Desk Staff?
These employees provide the first impression for your guests, and they set the tone for the entire stay.
Let respondents rate the front desk staff. If the response was negative, provide another question so they can say why.
#3: How was the Check-In Process?
This question lends itself to an initial closed-ended question.
You might ask respondents how satisfied they were with the check-in process with choices like: very satisfied, satisfied, neutral, dissatisfied and very dissatisfied.
Yet, you could employ conditional logic to gather more information in the form of an open-ended question.
For example, if they answered satisfied or very satisfied, you would send them to a question asking them why.
If they answered on the opposite end, you certainly want to know what happened, so you’d ask for details.
#4: Was Your Room Clean Upon Arrival?
This is a simple question and usually, a yes or no answer is just fine.
But, again, you want to employ conditional logic if survey respondents answer with a no response.
Push further to find out what wasn’t up to par. This helps you better train your housekeeping staff to meet the needs of your guests.
With regard to clean rooms, it’s worth noting that this is one of the most important items to your hotel guests when it comes to choosing accommodations.
#5: How Did the Housekeeping Staff Do During Your Stay?
With this question, you would use a rating scale.
For example, your question might look like this:
The housekeeping staff did an excellent job cleaning my room.
o Strongly agree
o Agree
o Neutral/Not sure
o Disagree
o Strongly disagree
If they answer that they disagree, move them on to another question so you can learn about the problems they encountered.
#6: Did You Use Any of the Amenities? If so, which ones?
This is an important question because you really want to know if they used your business center, swimming pool, hot tub, exercise room, restaurant, etc.
So, the best way to do this question is to provide a list of all of your amenities so they can check the boxes of all that apply.
You could follow this question up with a “Why didn’t you use X amenity,” if you want to learn how important individual ones are to your hotel guests.
#7: Was Your Bed Comfortable?
This is another important item for your hotel guests. While it might not be what makes them make the initial reservation, you can bet that it is a determining factor when they decide the following:
- Whether or not to return to your property.
- What kind of online review they’ll write.
- If they recommend you to others.
So, ask this question. Then, take a look at your results over a few months. If the answer is most often a no, then you want to work new beds into your next budget.
#8: Did You Enjoy Breakfast?
If you serve breakfast, this is an important question to ask because it’s vital to the overall impression your guests have of your property.
While this can be a yes or no question, you certainly want to follow it up with conditional logic.
The end goal is to find what they enjoyed about the breakfast. You might find no one likes oatmeal, so you can remove it from your offerings.
You also want to know what they like to ensure it stays on your menu.
#9: How was the Check-Out Process?
Just like the question you asked about the check-in process, you want to know about the check-out process.
This includes things like:
- Was your bill accurate?
- Did you check out online?
- Did you go to the front desk to check out?
- How was the front desk staff?
- Were there enough luggage racks for you?
- Did you find the parking adequate for ease of getting your bags to the car?
#10: How Likely Are You to Recommend Our Hotel to Others?
Finally, this is the ultimate question on your list. This is the meat of your guest evaluation.
Why? Because when all is said and done, you want to know if you succeeded in making your guest’s stay so wonderful that they will recommend you to others.
This question is what makes up your Net Promotor Score. It’s what lets you gauge the loyalty of your customer.
Did you go far enough to build a great relationship?
If the answer to this question is less than satisfactory, you have a problem on your hands and one that must be solved quickly.
Final Thoughts
The hospitality business is based on reputation, digital reviews and even word of mouth.
To make sure that your hotel or bed and breakfast is getting a five-star rating and reputation online, you want to know what your guests think. The best way to do this is through a guest evaluation survey.
The 10 questions included here will help you determine whether or not your property is making the grade. You will get insight on where you excel and where you can improve.
In the hospitality business, anything under a four-star rating will give your guests pause, so it pays to conduct a guest evaluation so you can make quick, positive corrections to ensure five stars show up for you each time.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free SurveyTown trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
Image: Paul Bence and rawpixel.com on Unsplash
How to Achieve Balance in A Survey
Survey Tips
The purpose of a good survey is to dig deep to learn what your customers really think about your products or services and your customer service.
You want to provide a survey to your customers that not only meets their usability needs, but one that meets yours.
The results you are looking for are in-depth and reliable. To do this, you must create a balanced survey that asks the right questions.
In this article, we look at how to achieve balance in a survey.
Watch for Bias
Your first step in achieving balance in a survey is writing open-ended survey questions that avoid bias.
This means staying away from questions that bias respondents towards one answer.
Biased questions ruin your survey’s reliability because the answers you receive aren’t accurate.
What does a biased question look like? Here’s an example:
We love our new cleaning solution. How wonderful do you think it is?
While this may be an extreme example of bias, you can see how this pressures respondents to come up with a positive answer.
This is not only off-putting to respondents, but it skews your data.
One way to fix this question is to write one like this: How does our new cleaning solution work for you?
This puts the focus on the cleaning solution, and leaves respondents able to answer positively or negatively.
By eliminating any biased wording, you take out your own opinions and leave the answer wide open for respondents.
Your other option would be to re-frame the question, while adding another option so your survey remains balanced. Consider these two questions:
How helpful is our new cleaning solution?
What about our new cleaning solution hasn’t met your needs?
On their own, these questions are biased. When set side-by-side, they provide balance.
Provide a Balanced Scale
Your next step is using a balanced scale when creating your closed-ended survey questions.
When posing questions on a balanced scale, you ask respondents to answer a question based on a balanced ratings system. For example, your question might be:
Rate your experience with our new cleaning solution:
The choices you provide are very dissatisfied, dissatisfied, neither satisfied or dissatisfied, satisfied, very satisfied.
This is a balanced scale because there are two options on each side of neutral – one moving in the positive direction and one moving in the negative direction.
In a balanced scale, both the negative and positive categories must be equal. If they aren’t, you might end up with survey bias because you are leading respondents to a particular answer.
The mid-point must be between to equal sides to avoid “forcing” respondents to answer in a way they don’t really feel. This can create a sub-conscious bias.
Keep your scale balanced so you don’t get inaccurate results or misleading data that ruins the accuracy of your survey. (tweet this)
How do you know what kind of scale to use? First, more categories aren’t always the best scenario. Give respondents too many choices, and you again run the risk of unreliable data because the choices are so overwhelming, the respondent just picks an answer.
When it comes to balanced scales, less is often better as long as there is enough difference between the choices, and the positives and negatives are balanced.
Your categories need to be distinctive to avoid data problems, but not so far apart that respondents wished there was another choice.
Final Thoughts
For the most reliable and usable data, keep your survey balanced.
Whether you take all bias out of your questions, or you offer two alternatives, one positive and one negative, you allow your respondents the freedom to answer truthfully about how they really feel.
To achieve balance in a survey, keep all of your own thoughts and opinions out of your questions so you can get true and accurate responses.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
Image: Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash
9 Of The Most Common Survey Questions
Survey Tips
Wondering what your customers think of your business, your staff, and your product and services? The best way to find out is through a survey.
Surveys help you gather data and analyze it so you can take action if necessary. They have the ability to help you increase your business while strengthening your relationship with your customers.
To help you make the most out of your next survey, we look at nine of the most common survey questions and review their effectiveness.
#1: The Open-Ended Survey Question
The open-ended survey question is perhaps the most effective survey question because it provides you with the most information. (tweet this)
With this question, the sky’s the limit when it comes to answers.
You use the open-ended survey question when you really want to dig deep into how your respondents feel about your company, your brand, your products and services, and your customer service and staff.
This question allows respondents to answer the question in as much detail as they want.
#2: The Dichotomous Question
Generally speaking, this is the common yes or no question.
For example, you might ask, “Have you used our products in the last year?”
Respondents are then given the option to simply answer yes or no.
As for the effectiveness of this type of question, it’s beneficial if the only answer you want is yes or no. If you want to screen respondents out and send them on or dump them out of your survey, this question works.
Many people use this type of question to make sure only “qualified” people are taking their survey.
In the above example, you’d respond to survey takers who answered no, they haven’t used your products, with a thank you message and the end of the survey.
Those who answered yes, they have used your products, would continue on.
#3: The Multiple-Choice Question
Another common survey question is the multiple-choice question that consists of three or more answer choices.
With this question, you might ask respondents which products or services they’ve used. For example, the question might be “What is your favorite product of ours that you’ve used in the last year?”
You would then give them three-ten choices and they choose one.
We recommend adding in an “other” category for certain questions to make sure you cover all your bases.
Like the dichotomous question, this is also a good question for which you can use conditional logic. Depending on their answer, you can send them off into various directions to answer different survey trains.
#4: The Rating Scale Question
A very common type of survey question, the rating scale asks survey respondents to rate their experiences.
It might be a product, a service or how the customer felt about something. The key to this question is a scale, usually from something that was very bad to very good.
This question is effective if you just want to know how your customer perceives your product or service.
The most common form of ratings question uses the Likert Scale. When responding to this question, your survey participants specify their level of agreement or disagreement.
#5: The Rank Order Question
You’ve probably answered this type of question many times.
With the rank order question, you might list five of the services you offer and ask respondents to rank them in order of their usefulness.
This question is effective in that it allows you to prioritize your marketing dollars into the services that people find the most valuable.
#6: The Demographic Question
Common and important, most surveys include the demographic questions.
Why do you want to ask these questions? They’re vital to the data you collect.
With the demographic survey questions, you learn the age, gender, income, race, geographical location, number of children, education level and much more of your respondents.
This helps you filter your results by demographic items.
For example, you might find that most of your respondents with children feel differently about your products than those without. Or, you might learn that people at a certain income level had a different experience with your service than others.
You have a more accurate view of your respondents once you have demographic data. This helps you understand your customer and in turn market to them more effectively.
#7: The Single Select Question
This type of question allows you to ask your respondents to choose from preconfigured options. In this instance, they only choose one.
For example, you ask, “What is your favorite food?” They can choose from pizza, burgers, steak and chicken fingers, but they are only allowed to select one.
Based on this answer, if you own a restaurant, you might add more of this type of food to your menu.
This is a closed or forced-choice question. It’s effective when you want very specific data.
#8: The Multi Select Question
This is just like the single select question, except your respondents can choose as many options as they’d like.
In the previous example, if you made it multi select, respondents could choose each one of your food items.
This question can be effective if a broad amount of data is acceptable.
#9: The Semantic Differential Scale Question
Another type of ratings question, this common survey question asks respondents to rate your company, service or product using a seven-point scale. At each opposing end is a completely opposite description.
For example, one choice would be very likely, while the other choice would be very unlikely. Respondents would choose on the scale of seven, from 1 being very unlikely to seven being very likely.
This question is perhaps not the most effective because the middle ground is very vague.
To Conclude
Now that you know nine of the most common survey questions and their level of effectiveness, you’re ready to start building your survey.
Before you do, though, here are a few more tips to building the perfect and most successful survey.
- Know your objective. Narrow down what you want to know from your customers and what you’re willing and able to take action on. Then, tailor your survey around this topic only.
- Keep your survey short. For the best data, keep your survey to no more than five minutes. This generally means asking fewer than 10 questions.
- Include a balance of closed-ended and open-ended questions and make sure the question style fits your query.
- Ask only one thing per question. If you ask two things in one question, you end up with skewed data, and you confuse your respondents.
- Be careful of question bias. Have others proof your survey before sending it out to avoid leading and biased questions.
Finally, do take action on your survey results and let your respondents know what you learned from the survey and what you intend to do about it.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
Image: Ken Treloar on Unsplash