Are You Asking the Right Questions?

How do you know what your employees, customers, or potential clients think about your company? Do they enjoy your products? Are they upset about the company culture?

The more you know about the people who interact with your business, your industry, and your competitors, the more you’ll have the necessary edge to produce the most successful products or services.

How can you discover this information? Survey your audience. A simple questionnaire can help you gather the insights you need to put together a strong, well-rounded business. To get data from your survey that is useful and accurate, you need to know how to put together your survey. The right questions can make all the difference between getting useful insights or receiving unusable data.

Read on to learn how your business can create surveys that ask the right questions to the right audience to get accurate responses and actionable data.

Define Your Needs

You can’t create and send a survey if you’re not sure what data you need to collect. Before you can start asking questions, you need to understand what you’re looking for.

Take a moment to brainstorm and define the needs of your business. You can use your list of business needs to further refine your survey questions.

For example, your Human Resources department may want to know a number of things on the perception of the company’s culture. Needs for the HR department might include:

· Overall employee satisfaction

· Perception of company culture by employees

· Satisfaction of wages, benefits, and workplace perks

· Employee understanding of company rules, guidelines, or policies

The needs of your Marketing department are likely much different. For example, a Marketer may want to know:

· Brand awareness and reach

· Customer satisfaction with products

· Customer satisfaction with service

· Customer response to advertising campaigns

Even smaller companies without large, defined departments can create a segmented list of needs. Separate your lists based on a central topic. For example, your list may include several needs related to product development. You can then use this topic to create a survey aimed at understanding what customers need and want from your products.

Consider Your Target Audience

Much like how your business needs vary between departments, the targeted participants of your surveys should be defined before you create your survey. This will affect everything, even down to how your survey questions should be phrased.

For example, an HR survey should go out to employees. Customers of your business probably can’t give you accurate insights into the company culture or employee satisfaction of benefits. Product development surveys, on the other hand, should go to existing customers who have made purchases in the past to see what they did or didn’t like about your product. You can send a second survey to people who know of your product but didn’t purchase to see why they may have chosen a competitor.

Question Formats that Get the Most Reliable Data

Certain types of questions increase survey response rates. The goal of your survey is to collect accurate data, but you also want to collect enough responses to measure trends or patterns. To get a large batch of reliable data, you need to make the survey experience stress-free and easy.

Think about the last time you were sent a survey for a product or service. Did you fill it out? If not, what made you decide to leave it unanswered? If you did complete it, what features made you continue the process?

You’ll probably notice that the surveys you completed were simple, straightforward, and didn’t take a long time to complete. Multiple choice questions (https://www.questionpro.com/article/multiple-choice-questions.html) with limited options were the best choice. In fact, a Pew Research study found that responses are more accurate when a question forces the respondent to make a choice.

As you create your survey, answer the questions yourself to see if they encourage you to continue. You can also run the survey by a third party, like a family member or colleague to see how they respond. If you find that your survey takes a long time or has too many technical questions, it could be a sign you need to create multiple surveys.

What Kinds of Questions Should You Ask?

You know what your goals are for your survey, who you’re talking to, and how to format your survey questions. Now you just need to figure out what questions will get the most accurate and insightful responses.

This can be the most difficult part of creating a survey. You want to ask questions that encourage thoughtful responses without forcing your participants to overthink. Try to keep your questions as simple as possible. Questions that require multiple levels of responses should be split into individual questions.

For example, here are some questions you may want to ask employees if you’re looking to evaluate company culture and employee perception:

· What makes you proud to work at the organization?

· Do you feel that you received enough training?

· What training programs have helped you the most?

· Do you feel the organization celebrates employee success?

· Which method would you prefer to showcase employee accomplishments?

A marketing survey to determine customer buying preferences, on the other hand, may include:

· Of three ad choices, which resonates with you the most?

· Have you purchased products from Brand X in the last 6 months?

· Of these features, which best describes Product X?

Set Yourself Up for Success

Don’t let a lack of time stop you from using surveys in your organization. While the process to create and distribute surveys can take time, there are tools to give you a head start. Survey software makes it easier to create and send surveys on behalf of your organization.

Most survey software tools allow you to customize your survey to meet your brand guidelines, and also send online surveys through email or other channels. You can even find survey tools that include example questions, survey templates, and sample audiences.

You can also find survey tools that crunch the data for you. This means that you won’t need to spend hours poring over responses to find patterns. Instead, the survey software delivers a detailed report on the data collected by your survey.

Set yourself up for a successful survey with professional survey software and get the answers you need.

Submitted by QuestionPro.