Customer Insights

The order in which one authors survey questions has long been a topic of debate. Today’s best practice was yesterday’s heresy. In this brief we will examine the use of an inverted pyramid approach.

Screeners have long been used to keep certain groups out of a survey. The alternative to this approach is to use screeners to re-route respondents to another survey. If they have gone as far as to click on your invitation why not capture that interest! This practice minimizes the potential for respondents to feel as if their input is not valued.

Open-end questions allow researchers of all stripes to capture the raw feelings of their audience. This slot is best reserved for essay-style questions such as “What, if anything, do you dislike about Acme?” or “If there were one area we should focus on, what would that be?” This allows respondents to speak their peace before potentially biasing them with subsequent questions. Not long ago, conventional wisdom suggested it was best to leave open-ended questions for the end of the survey, in order not to overtax respondents.

General questions form the meat of the survey. These should be used as a stepping stone to branch respondents to specific questions. Online survey tools, such as Cvent, allow survey authors to use advanced logic to direct respondents to questions that are relevant to them. An example would be “Have you purchased from Acme during the last six months?” If a respondent answered ‘no’ then they would be sent down one branch, while if they answered ‘yes’ they would follow another branch. This allows the author to probe deeper with questions tailored for specific responses. These specific questions can be fixed, open, or a combination of styles.

Profile questions, either demographics or firmagraphics, are useful for identifying sub-groups and for facilitating comparisons across these groups. They are often considered to be intrusive and raise respondent questions such as, “Why do they need to know my age or income?” If possible append this data from an existing CRM system.

Closing the gap is a crucial, but often overlooked, step in market research. This is the place where researchers can ask for feedback on the survey itself, and obtain permission to follow-up with the respondent to discuss their responses, if they desire.