The Likert Scale Explained (With Examples)

The Likert scale is a rating scale that’s often used when surveying your customers. They can help you better measure satisfaction from customers about products, customer service, etc.

The Likert scale is a series of questions or items that ask your customers to select a rating on a scale that ranges from one extreme to another, such as “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”

Unlike binary “yes or no” questions, the Likert scale gives you deeper insight into what your customers are thinking and how they feel.

When to Use The Likert Scale

The Likert Scale is best used to measure and evaluate customer sentiment on a specific product, service or experience.

Likert items that center around the same topic should be grouped together in your survey, creating what’s called a “single-topic” Likert scale.

The scale itself, regardless of whether it uses numeric or text labels, should be consistent on each item; this prevents confusion for your customers and simplifies the analysis of their answers for you.

The most valuable Likert item sets include additional questions that capture open-ended feedback to tell you more about why each customer chose the answer they did.

How to Report on the Likert Scale

Most commonly, Likert scales are evaluated by giving each option a value and then adding these values together to create a score for every customer.

Though relatively simple, this reporting method makes it easy to evaluate the opinions revealed by each Likert option. A chart of scores can offer visual insight into sentiment on a particular Likert scale.

For a more detailed analysis, Likert scale results can also be reported on an item basis, rather than by each customer. This means the value for each Likert item or question can offer deeper insights on the reasons for the sentiment revealed in the survey.

The most important factors in reporting on the Likert scale are consistency in values and cohesiveness in questions or items that are evaluated together.

Questions that are out of place can skew the results, making it harder to take the right actions based on the answers your customers give you.

Likert Scale Examples

1. Agreement

Question: “The checkout process was straightforward”
Answers: Strongly Agree, Agree, Undecided, Disagree, Strongly Disagree.

An agreement scale is the most common use case for a Likert Scale. Using this format, your customers would be provided with a series of statements, for which they select Strongly Agree, Agree, Undecided, Disagree or Strongly Disagree.

2. Likelihood

Question: “I would recommend this product to my friends”
Answers: Very Likely, Likely, Neutral, Not Likely, Very Unlikely.

The likelihood version of a Likert scale is most often used to determine the probability that your customers will adopt a particular behavior, whether that behavior is buying a product or recommending a service to others.

3. Satisfaction

Question: “Rate your satisfaction with your recent customer service experience:”
Answers: Very Happy, Somewhat Happy, Neutral, Not Very Happy, Not at All Happy.

This common Likert scale measures how satisfied each customer is with a particular experience, product or service. As with the example above, the satisfaction-based question is most often used to get an opinion from customers about your service or support.

4. Importance

Question: “Rank each item in reference to its importance to you:”
Answers: Very Important, Important, Moderately Important, Slightly Important, Not Important.

The importance scale provides deeper insight into reasons behind more general opinions. It shows how strongly your customers rank the influence of various factors for an experience, product or service.

These are just a few examples of the Likert scales that can be used when surveying your customers.

Many online form and survey software solutions will have these kinds of scales built into their templates, making it easier to capture and analyze responses from your customers.

If you’re looking for a simple way to create beautiful customer surveys in less than 5 minutes, make sure you take a look at Fieldboom.

Fieldboom makes it easy to create beautiful surveys and online forms. Click here to learn more.

Originally published at www.fieldboom.com on January 4, 2017.