Create Responsive Survey Design in CX
A survey design can dictate how well you can collect data from your target audience. This includes best practices and being mindful of the distribution channels. In this blog, we will discuss the three C’s of design and the 10 best practices. Supercharge your CX with these tips.
What is Survey Design?
Survey design is the process of creating surveys in a structured way to collect data from respondents. This involves several key steps and considerations to ensure that the survey is effective, reliable, and useful insights.
Why is survey design important?
Focusing on survey design is crucial for several reasons:
- Data Quality: Good survey design ensures that the data collected is accurate, reliable, and valid. Good data quality can help professionals draw meaningful conclusions.
- Respondent Engagement: Well-designed surveys are more engaging and user-friendly. This can lead to higher response rates. Respondents are more likely to complete surveys that are easy to understand and not overly time-consuming.
- Clarity and Precision: Clear and precise questions help in avoiding misunderstandings and misinterpretations. This is essential for collecting data that accurately reflects respondents’ true opinions and experiences.
- Objective Alignment: Proper survey design ensures that the questions align with the survey’s objectives. This helps in gathering the specific information needed to address the research questions or objectives.
- Bias Reduction: Thoughtful survey design minimizes various biases. These include leading questions, social desirability bias, and sampling bias. This helps in collecting more objective and unbiased data.
- Analysis and Interpretation: Surveys that are well-structured and systematically designed make it easier to analyze and interpret the data. This includes having a clear structure, logical flow, and appropriate question types for clear data analysis.
- Resource Efficiency: Investing time in designing a good survey can save resources in the long run. It reduces the need for follow-up surveys or clarifications.
- Respondent Respect and Ethical Considerations: Respecting respondents’ time and privacy by designing non-intrusive surveys is crucial. Ethical considerations, including informed consent and confidentiality, are integral to responsible survey design.
- Actionable Insights: The primary goal of conducting a survey is to gather actionable insights. A well-designed survey provides clear, relevant, and useful data that can inform decision-making and strategy development.
The Three C’s of Survey Design
Creating effective surveys boils down to the three C’s of survey design: clarity, conciseness, and communicative. Following these three principles can lead to a successful end result with accurate results from your responses.
Clarity
Clear and concise survey questionnaires are critical for good survey design. Direct questions use numerical scales or closed-ended formats with fixed options. Include a mix of open-ended formats to provide both qualitative and quantitative data.
Use simple language and sentence structure so that all respondents can easily understand the questions. Avoid double negatives, complicated phrasing, jargon, and complex terms that people may not grasp. Keeping questions simple helps people comprehend and complete the survey. Being direct avoids ambiguity and vague questions
Conciseness
One way to get a high response rate is to avoid respondent drop out rate and fatigue. This is when you keep feedback forms concise and brief. Keep your survey template to-the-point without using complicated phrasing or technical terms. Eliminate unnecessary questions or redundant aspects if you want to obtain authentic survey data. One way to do this is to opt for pre designed survey templates which are tried and tested. A good insight gathering tool by Merren can build a responsive questionnaire design across businesses.
Communicative
Communicative means using simple language. Avoid abbreviations and jargon when gathering customer feedback. Collecting open-ended responses encourages participants to provide feedback in their own words.
Being communicative also involves actively closing the feedback loop. This shows that the brands truly value customer input. Survey distribution channels play a part in this process. Reaching the right audience through the right channels ensures a high response rate.
Get a High Response Rate with These Survey Design Tips
To achieve good survey design, incorporate these top 10 best practices:
Set a goal for your survey
When creating an effective survey, set a clear and a pre-defined goal for your feedback campaign. This helps you design relevant and effective questions while avoiding irrelevant questions. Begin by identifying the information that you want to gather and how you plan to use it. Think about your target audience before tailoring your questions. Ensure that your questionnaire is concise, using simple, clear language so that all respondents can understand the questions with ease.
Test your questionnaire on a sample audience
Survey designers should test their surveys with a small sample group before launching them to check for clarity and compatibility across devices. It’s essential to analyze the data collected from surveys and use it to make informed business decisions on various topics. This includes market research, customer satisfaction, new product launches and customer service improvements.
Use both qualitative and quantitative questions
Incorporate different types of questions such as open-ended and closed-ended questions to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. To avoid skewed responses, avoid asking leading or biased questions. Survey designers should consider using likert scales for attitudinal measurement and ranking questions for prioritization purposes. The use of skip logic can be an effective way to personalize surveys based on respondent’s previous answers.
Avoid biased and leading questions
Use neutral language and don’t make any assumptions about the respondent’s views or experiences. A leading question is the type of a question that seeks a particular response from the audience. It could be a simple yes or no type formation. For example “Do you agree that our product is the best in the market?’.
A neutral question would be framed in this manner- share your thoughts on our new product. Keeping an objective tone can bring unbiased response.
Incorporate response scales
Respondents’ positive responses are gained by providing them with consistent answer options via the use of suitable response scales such as Likert scale, semantic differential scale and numerical rating scale. A good survey design consists of a balance between closed ended and open ended questions that aid in collecting quantitative and qualitative data respectively.
Use images and videos to clarify information
Using multimedia in your survey design can be a game changer. Offering the freedom to express via audio, video format, photos or texts can bring more open-ended responses for analysis. This will give better clarity alongside numerical data and statistics. Mediums such as Whatsapp surveys, Facebook messenger surveys offer multimedia facilities for response collection.
Conclusion
.Actionable data depends on the way you design a question form, how you formulate questions and what distribution channels you opt for. Everything collectively can bring actionable data. Using Merren, you can gather superfast insights and analyze them on a dashboard using filters of your choice. Opt for a multimedia format of feedback and watch your response rate improve by 10X.
If you want to witness this wonder for yourself, sign up for our 14 day free trial here. Supercharge your next survey data collection method and get high survey responses with Merren.
