If you want to understand your audience better, then open-ended questions are the way to go. Open-ended questions allow individuals to express their thoughts, feelings, and experiences in their own words. In this blog post, we’ll explore what open-ended questions are and how they can unleash the power of qualitative data. We will discuss the best practices, advantages of qualitative data and how to analyze it. .
What is An Open Ended Question?
Open-ended question is a form of collecting candid responses from survey takers. It allows people to express and talk about their purchase experience in their own words. This is known as qualitative data. This encourages detailed responses, as opposed to closed-ended questions with limited or numeric options. They play a crucial role in qualitative research. It can collect rich data on people’s experiences, attitudes, and beliefs. Researchers use them to gain deeper insights and make informed decisions.
What is qualitative data?
Qualitative data in market research uses open-ended questions to encourage longer responses that provide marketers with additional information. Examples of open-ended questions include “Tell me about your experience with our product” or “What do you think could be improved about our customer service?”.
These types of questions are a good way to get valuable information from your customers without receiving a single-word answer or closed question.
Best Advantages of Open-Ended Questions
Here are the two best benefits of including qualitative data in your customer experience feedback survey.
1. The audience can share candid experiences
It is crucial for any business to understand their target market. The main aim is to obtain information about the user’s preferences, behaviours and why they prefer a certain benchmark. Giving the chance to share opinions also allows people to share their testimonials and grievances. This means people can elaborate on why they rated a certain scale with a particular number. Seeking response goes beyond the numbers.
2. Encourage people to give detailed responses
Sometimes, a numerical metric may not denote much beyond a rating or a satisfaction scale. To collect detailed responses ,you have to offer an open section where customers can share the rating and explain the reason for the rating. Using this approach, you’ll gain additional insight and uncover unexpected perspectives. Open-ended questions are an excellent tool for exploring new topics. People can share certain keywords that can help you curate better strategies as an upgrade.
3. Get details on negative feedback
CX marketers need to close the feedback loop the moment they come across negative feedback. This can allow people to describe their negative experiences in detail. This can help solve problems of the customers and improve experience for future customers. Open-ended responses can help people vent about their negative experience. However, people are also tempted to share their negative or positive experiences on social media platforms (Instagram stories, Twitter feed) .
How to Create Best Open-Ended Questions?
Here are some valuable guidelines that you can use when you build a customer survey. The end goal of the survey is also to collect candid feedback or constructive criticism along the touchpoints.
Use clear and concise language
When seeking open feedback, focus on clearly asking for a candid response. Avoid using closed questions or leading phrases. This may encourage one-word answers or restrict critical thinking. Keep the answer space directly pertaining to the question you ask.
For example “Share your reason for the rating below:”.
The power of qualitative data lies with the opinions of the respondents.
Avoiding leading questions
A leading question is the one that prompts respondents to answer in a desired manner. It is important to avoid this error since that may cause bias and produce skewed results. Use neutral and non-judgmental wording when asking participants to “describe” or “tell me about” their experiences.
For example “Did you like our detailed services?” would prompt the respondent into a ‘yes or no’ type of an answer. A better way to frame it would be- “How would you rate our services?”- provided with a scale and a space for them to explain their stance on the rating.
Allow for a range of expression
Design the qualitative question in a way that encourages people to respond freely without bias or fear of judgement. If it helps, allow for a multimedia input such as a photo input. This can help CX professionals get more insights into the customer sentiments.
For example, “Please share the reason for the rating (share photos here)”.
Best Practices For Creating Open-Ended Questions
While building a survey, create every question with equal clarity, keep it goal oriented and achieve survey completion. Even when we seek opinion based answers from our respondents, it is still very important to adhere to the guidelines. The responses need to be free of bias. Here are some best practices to adopt while soliciting open-ended questions:
Keep direct questions
Direct questions are clear, to the point and mostly jargon free. This means that the question is seeking an answer that will satisfy the purpose of the question. At this point, avoid leading questions and double-baralled questions. Simple language will solicit a greater number of responses for authentic qualitative data.
Provide context to gain information
Open-ended is mostly used when you seek opinions. This can be a follow-up question after a certain rating metric such as Net Promoter Score (NPS survey), customer satisfaction score (CSAT score) or even in-app feedback review. The metric based questions provide a context for the respondent to share details on their rating. This is also a call to seek a review, criticism or a testimonial. This format is mostly used within applications, websites and email survey forms.
Use open-ended prompts
Open-ended prompts can be used to encourage respondents to share more information. For example, instead of asking “Did you have a good experience with our customer service?” you could ask “Can you tell us about your experience with our customer service?”. This allows the respondent to share details and provide a genuine response.
Offer space for elaborate answers
Short answer boxes may discourage them from providing thorough answers. Gauge the type of question asked and provide ample space for opinion based response. This will give you more data on the customer’s perspective, their pain points or their satisfaction metric at a customer journey touchpoint. Qualitative data is a powerful tool to comprehend your user base and what they feel about your product and service offerings.
How to Analyze Responses to Open-Ended Questions?
Choose a software that can segregate responses based on ratings and opinions. Merren can segregate responses based on certain key terms or keywords. The words are collectively put into a word cloud. In this manner, you can view certain repetitive words, emotions, mostly used terms by respondents to help you gauge patterns.
1. Coding and categorization
Begin by categorizing and coding the responses into significant groupings. Identify prevalent themes, concepts, or subjects that arise from the information. Allocate corresponding labels or codes to every response based on their respective categories. This aids in organizing the data and simplifies comparison and explanation.
2. Create actionable insights
Categorizing the data involves identifying common patterns in the analysis process. With these findings, you can comprehend common patterns . Communicating this information is critical via multiple-choice questions or visual aids like charts or graphs. Extremes of emotions can help you understand if consumers are unhappy at a certain touchpoints. For example, the rating for a product could be marked as ‘good’ but respondents might also want to add a critical point to note.
3. Manual reading and reflection
It is imperative to go through each response with careful attention and manually assess the qualitative data. While doing so, be mindful of any subtle nuances, underlying emotions, or implicit messages that may not be immediately visible. Take note of the tone, language employed, and the overall context of the response. By conducting a thorough reading, you can gain valuable insights that go beyond surface-level observations.
Conclusion
Open-ended questions are a powerful tool for collecting qualitative data. They allow you to tap into the thoughts, experiences of your audience in a way that closed-ended questions cannot . By understanding your audience and encouraging detailed responses, you can gain valuable insights that can help shape your business strategy and decision-making.
Using Merren, you can opt for customized templates to help you build your own survey. Use our vivid charting facilities to segment your qualitative data into actionable insights. Bring insights at a superfast speed today. Try our features and sign up for a 14 day free trial and 10X your response rate.
