Questionnaire Example

Completing a study is just the first step in the market research process. A good researcher knows there is plenty of work left to be done analyzing survey data and taking action on survey results.

Stay in touch with the client and schedule presentations of the research. If you have a client contact assigned to the project, go over the preliminary survey data to see what key findings they feel are the most important to share. Create presentations around these key findings. You can also create separate market survey reports for different groups within the same company.

For example, if you have just completed a large product survey that includes feedback on customer satisfaction, the client may want a presentation simply on customer feedback for their customer service team.

A good researcher also has an eye for finding problems. If you notice an area for improvement in the course of your market research analysis, propose a solution to that problem for the client. Take this market research survey example, customers complain about being on hold too long when calling customer service. You could propose several ideas from hiring more staff to setting time goals for staff to talk to customers.

Even though the client may not agree with your solution ideas, ignoring problems you identify through the research is a bad idea. The client is paying you to compile and analyze research data, and they will likely appreciate all your efforts even if the information does not fit in with their current business plan.

At minimum, two specific characteristics define a good list of response options for survey questions.  First, the categories (response options) must be mutually exclusive, which means they do not overlap with one another.  Second, survey response options must be collectively exhaustive, meaning they provide all possible options that could comprise a response list.  Let’s take a look at examples of common mistakes for each of these characteristics:


You can see while this response list is exhaustive, it does not provide mutually exclusive categories.  For example, if a survey respondent eats out three times per week, he or she could select either (b) or (c) as an accurate response.


In this survey question example, the response categories do not overlap, but they are not collectively exhaustive.  If a survey respondent make less than $10,000 annually, he or she does not have an option that can accurately capture his or her response.  This could be corrected for option (a) by applying the same response type as shown in (e), such as “$29,999 or less."

When working with a client who has already built a strong customer base, market researchers are often called upon to create surveys to aid with customer retention programs.

Customer retention surveys are a bit different than a new product or service launch survey because the survey respondent sample must consist of product users. There are several things you need to ask this group so your client can formulate the best customer retention strategies, including:


The recommendation sample customer questionnaire question is important. Often, this can be a company’s bread-and-butter when it comes to retaining customers and gaining new ones. If a good amount of current customers would recommend the product to a friend, that speaks volumes about the quality.

It is also wise to include some open-ended questions. Find out why people use the product, and would continue to do so. If they wouldn’t recommend the product, or use it again, it is important to know why. Your client can use the information to persuade customers on the fence, and keep current customers coming back.

Before creating a poll online for your client survey, sit down and gauge initial opinions and move forward from there. If there were original product launch studies done, it may be helpful to revisit those results as well, just for comparison purposes. Approach the questionnaire research with care and the resulting data analysis will provide information to create customer retention techniques and marketing strategies.

Here at Cvent, we get asked for survey templates all the time. That's why we've created a bank of survey questions and pre-created questionnaires for all clients to utilize within their account. But it never seems to be enough. Sample employee motivation surveys, employee evaluation survey examples, sample employee questionnaire, employee satisfaction survey templates, the list goes on, and on, and on...

While this post may not give you all the answers or the complete employee survey template you're looking for, it definitely is a start. Below are some sample survey questions for employee questionnaires.


While not all of these questions are necessary (or appropriate) in any given employee engagement survey or job satisfaction questionnaire, you should see how some of them will fit into your next employee satisfaction survey template.

I got an email today from Smarter Travel announcing the winners of their 2009 Readers' Choice Awards. Notice anything interesting?

At the beginning of the week, I shared the first 10 tips from the Meetings & Convention article, Survey Science: How to craft more effective attendee evaluations, in Part I and Part II of this post. The first ten event survey tips include several of your typical online survey best practices: set clear survey objectives at the beginning, create clear survey questions, think about question flow, vary your question types, etc. While the last five tips shared in the article are still good online survey tips, they do focus a little more on event and conference surveys.

11. Avoid the spam folder. Once upon a time, spam folders weren't something paper survey designers worried about. It's a different story now with email survey invitations. Nat Estes, an account executive here at Cvent, shared his tips in this article: Avoid using all caps in the subject line, avoid the word "free" and the use of lots of dollar signs or exclamation points. These tips apply to both sending reminder survey invitations as well as the initial invite.

12. Offer incentives. We've talked about how incentives tend to boost survey response rates in the past. Offers can include free products/samples, cash, gift cards and drawings, or it can even go the route of sharing the survey report after the survey is over.

13. Use pre-meeting surveys. Post-attendee surveys are no brainers at this point, but they don't always tell the whole story. Think of this survey questionnaire example, the post-seminar survey shows that the majority of the attendees have a positive impression of a product. The planner doesn't know if their impression was changed because of the seminar, or everyone already had a positive impression before the event. The reverse could be true as well. The majority of registrants may have had a positive impression before, and after the event had a negative impression. Something went really wrong! But if you don't ask pre-event survey questions, you're not going to be able to track the change. Not to mention the benefits of asking other pre-event survey questions about what they want to get out of event, etc.

14. Use regret event surveys. As a leader in the event management space, this tip is near and dear to our hearts here at Cvent. Most people make the mistake of just forgetting about those people who say they can't come, "They don't matter." This is definitely the wrong approach. Every planner should want to know why people aren't coming to their event. Regret event surveys should be kept short, only a few questions. The questions should try to find out if the invitee is still interested in the topic or product, why they can't come (schedule conflict, not in the budget, etc.).

15. Conclusions? Don't Jump! Lots of us look at survey results and draw conclusions about the entire target population based on a small survey sample. If your event survey has low response rates, don't make drastic change's just because that's what the survey data pointed to. Think about how representative the sample was, and if the changes make sense.

Hopefully everyone will consider asking attendees to give feedback through survey questionnaires or comment cards after the event. If you get really adventurous, you can set up survey kiosks at the event using a kiosk survey system (My suggestion? Cvent.) to catch attendees while your event is still top of mind.

Many people ask the question How do I create a customer survey? The basic steps are the same no matter what type of client survey you're writing: customer satisfaction, global market research, product development surveys, etc.

Step 1: Sit down and figure out what the goal of the survey is. Are you trying to identify upsell opportunities? Want to discover features missing from your current product? Figuring out if it's a good idea to take your marketing overseas and attack a global market? In the very beginning of the survey planning process, you should know what it is you want to get out of the consumer survey. If you don't have a firm customer satisfaction survey objectives in the beginning, while you go through the other steps such as writing survey questions or selecting the best survey software, you're going to stray from the path. If you stray from the path, you may find the final survey results are not as helpful as you had hoped.

Step 2: Decide on a research methodology. Your goals should help you on this step as well. You need to first decide if you're planning to do qualitative or quantitative research. From there narrow the scope further, if you want to do qualitative research are you interested in focus groups, advisory boards, one-on-one interviews? With quantitative research you may decide on comment cards, feedback forms and surveys. Is your survey method going to be online, telephone-based or paper questionnaires?

Step 3: Survey Design. I'm making the assumption since you're reading a survey blog about how to create customer surveys, you're not interested in the other market research methods right now so I'm going to focus on the process of building customer surveys. Once you've gotten through the first two steps, you're ready to start writing survey questions (Finally! I bet you thought this would be the first step!). Customer satisfaction survey design can be the biggest challenge. Luckily, there is survey designing software to help you step through this. Survey software tools often have templates and question libraries to help you write good survey questions.

Step 4: Data collection. Okay, you've picked your customer survey methodology, created a client survey and you're ready to field your survey (or use the data collection tool in your survey application to collect responses). Exactly what you do in this step will depend on what type of survey you decided to collected: telephone, paper, online. One way to get survey responses is to use email marketing tools to send personalized email surveys. You can also share the link on your website, social media sites, invoices, etc.

Step 5: Analyze customer feedback. Analyzing survey data is one of people's least favorite parts of the surveying process. We have some tips for how to analyze survey data here. Don't be afraid of this step. You need to conduct the survey customer analysis to achieve your goal. It's what you set out to do, so keep your chin up. You're only a step away from the final product (and once you choose survey analysis methods you should be almost finished).

Step 6: Share the survey findings. This is what you set out to do. Get answers to your customer questions. Take the customer feedback analysis you completed in the last step and format it. You're creating a survey report you can share within your organization (and maybe with others outside of your organization). If you need tips for creating survey reports or an example survey report, you can read more about them here.

Step 6.1: Take action. This is still part of step 6, but it's important enough it should be broken out. In your customer analysis survey report, you should have shared your recommendations for moving forward. Make sure you make recommendations and there is an agreement about moving forward based on the customer survey findings. If you don't plan to take action in Step 1, then you should save yourself the time of conducting the customer research in the first place.

Any other survey research design tips? How have you used these steps to create a customer survey that improved processes in your organization?

Survey reports in the Cvent Web Surveys software tool offer a wide variety of ways to view your data and begin conducting your market research survey analysis. The answer summary by question report, for example, pulls up a table, a graph and basic statistical analysis for each survey question. Another example survey report, answer details by respondent, offers you the option of seeing each respondent’s answers on a separate page or answer details for all respondents gives you the opportunity to see all the answers for all respondents on a single page!

But sometimes these are not enough when you want to make a professional report for your boss to present to the board members. This is exactly why Cvent has the presentations feature within the survey application. The presentations section allows you to create reports with unique combinations of filters and display options. You can use our presentations creator to access data views that are unavailable with other out-of-the-box survey reports. Creating distributable reports in the Cvent Web Surveys software tool makes it easy to communicate the survey results in either Word or PDF format.

To determine what you see on each page of your sample report, choose from the options below:

I was getting caught up on some reading over the weekend and came across a poorly designed matrix question posted on the Bad Research; No Biscuit. blog. The blogger explains during the market research survey, he was asked about different brands of cat food (14 brands of cat food). According to the post, he said he'd never heard of 5 of them, but then saw the survey question asking how he'd heard about all 14 brands.

Here's a thumbnail of the never-ending matrix, you can see the full matrix in his post, but I think this gives you the gist. Keep in mind it goes down for another 15 categories:


For the moment, I'm going to ignore how the survey writer is not following best practices for designing matrix survey questions and an appropriate length and focus on the fact that all the brands were shown after the survey respondent said they hadn't heard of all of them. This is exactly why we have online survey technology for complex survey questionnaires hosted online. If you're making it easy on the survey respondent to complete your survey - and the respondent experience should be a critical focus of your survey design - using survey logic is a no brainer.

If you're a Cvent client, you have the ability to prevent this survey design faux pas from happening in the first place. You can apply what we call Link Logic. Link logic allows the survey designer to customize the answer choices respondents see based on answers to previous survey questions. In this market research survey example, the survey writer would only have the 9 brands the survey respondent had heard of show up.

Likert scales are the most widely used survey scale in questionnaires and survey research. A likert type question asks survey respondents to state their level of agreement with a statement. A likert survey example question might be:


If you choose a likert question, you're choosing to use a bipolar survey scaling method. All this means is you're survey questions are measuring either positive or negative responses to a statement. Typically, you'll use a likert scale item on a 5- or 7-point scale. However, some people choose to use 4-point scales which forces survey respondents to pick a side. That's why removing the neutral point in a scale is refereed to as the forced choice survey question method.

One thing you should watch out for when using likert scale questions is central tendency bias. This type of survey bias is where survey respondents avoid selecting answers on the extreme ends of the survey scales. Like all survey biases, if you have good questionnaire design, you should be in good shape.

Most students these days have seen an education survey or completed a course evaluation or teacher evaluation form after a class, but are universities paying attention to what the results of the survey data collection means?

Tuitions have skyrocketed, suggesting student satisfaction levels should have increased as well. Are universities aware of how poor classrooms, faculty, staff and administration ratings can truly effect the return on the student, and more likely, the parents' investment? Perhaps universities should consider this part of their own investment.

Universities should use academic surveys and course evaluations as indicators to estimate the likelihood students will talk about their school in a good light, suggest their school to a friend and even... the likelihood of future donations as alumnus. Schools can literally calculate the possible ROI of education surveys. Here's an education survey example:

A private institution of 2,000 students with an average tuition is $20,000 roughly equates to a $40,000,000 business. Why risk the losing the potential for even more down the line with a poor university student experience survey that student believe will never be acted on? How much would you pay to protect that size business and make it part of your organizational culture?

Developing the right survey questions when writing a satisfaction survey for clients can be a challenge. There are many client survey templates available that include essential customer and client satisfaction survey questions.

When you begin writing survey questions for your online survey questionnaire, be sure not to forget this important client satisfaction survey example question:


This example client satisfaction survey question also works well for other customer and consumer surveys. That may seem obvious, but it's often a forgotten question. You should also consider asking employees if they would recommend your product/service/company. It's a good employee satisfaction survey example question because no matter what else they say in the survey, if they wouldn't recommend you, then they're not as satisfied as they should be. As we've mentioned before, unsatisfied employees are not going to provide customers with great experiences either.

We know Cvent Web Surveys software allows you to automate survey invitations, reminder invitations to non-respondents and reminders to partial survey respondents, but what about other types of emails you can automate with our email survey software tool? Most survey companies' feedback management software have a lot of features, but not all of them have robust email marketing capabilities. It makes me wonder what pain customers feel when they need to send survey emails.

Thankfully, our clients don't need to feel any of that pain, and they don't have to waste extra time trying to create workarounds or moving data between systems. Cvent has the rules for sending emails already set up for you - all you need to do is turn them on and make any necessary edits.

One email type I think often gets ignored is the automated completion survey emails. Depending on how you're conducting a survey, how you want to use this email will be different.

Take these survey examples:

1. You're offering a free eBook after completing the survey. Consider utilizing the completion email instead of providing the link on the Thank You page or redirecting survey respondents.

2. You're gathering product feedback and want to give respondents a promotion code to use on their next purchase. It seems unreasonable to ask respondents to write down a promotion code you post on the Thank You page. It's often more convenience to have the code in your inbox to reference when you're ready to purchase. Besides, isn't the point of offering a promotion code as an incentive to drive more revenue?

3. You've created a customer feedback survey and want to share results with respondents. You can create a parked report and automatically send them the link to check the survey results when they want.

You know your survey methods and practices better than I do, but hopefully you see how you can utilize automated Thank You emails to survey respondents besides just a simple Thank You - not that simple thank you's are a bad idea.

I was out to dinner with a friend the other day and had an odd thing happen when the check came. Our waitress asked us if we would complete an online survey about our experience. Now so far being asked to complete a restaurant survey on customer satisfaction and overall experience with the dining establishment, pretty normal. But the link to the survey wasn't on our receipt. It was on the receipt the restaurant keeps. Huh? Did they expect me to memorize the website survey link and the validation code? Obviously that was not going to happen.

But I was hooked. Because of my desire to pass on survey best practices and tips, I'm always curious about organizations' surveys. I always want to take them - who knows what great idea or technique they'll have that should be shared. Or on the reverse, what faux pas was committed that should be used as a survey example of what not to do.

Before I let you in on what I did to be able to take the survey, lets pause for a moment so you can allow this concept to sink in: it's a bad idea to not give the customer something they will take way that contains the survey link. It's your job to make it easy for patrons to give customer feedback. I'm not a fan of paper surveys or comment cards, because I think online surveys are a better solution. But if you cannot handle passing along the website link generated by your online survey software tool, use comment cards and feedback forms instead. The key: Make it easy for respondents to complete your customer survey.

Obviously, I took the survey, so I must have somehow taken something home that had the information on it. I suppose in hind sight I could have just written the information down on my receipt, but I did not. I ripped off the middle section of their receipt and took it with me.

Finally, while I'm talking about making it easy for customers to complete your feedback survey questionnaire, try to use an easy link. You can do this one of two ways:

1. If you're a Cvent Web Surveys software customer, you can brand your URL to include your organizations name and the name for the survey.
    
2. You can set up a redirect on your website, or another domain, that will redirect to the longer online survey link. For example, instead of having to type in http://guest.cvent.com/v.aspx?3B,Q3,2c85db16-4ab4-45a2-ae17-... they would only have to type in www.example-survey.com.

It's a good idea to always review the online survey respondent experience. It may not seem worth the time because no one else does, but if it's too difficult to take your survey, no one's going to take it.

I recently finished reading Company by Max Barry. The short version of the story is someone had the idea to create a "fake" company to test out management theories. However, due to a variety of factors, worker satisfaction is practically non-existent and employee morale is in the toilet (although the group of "researchers," called Alpha, claim it makes them more productive). Barry gives a great employee satisfaction survey example of what not to do as an organization. At one point in the story, the main character initiates an employee satisfaction survey. Unfortunately, employees don't believe the survey is anonymous or Senior Management plans to make any changes based on survey results. Instead, employees believe if they answer "in correctly" they may be terminated.

If you're beginning to think about putting an HR survey program in place to conduct job satisfaction questionnaires or employee morale surveys, here's a hint: make sure employees believe the survey is anonymous and they will not be investigated as a result of their feedback. In my opinion when it comes to staff surveys, nothing is more important than preserving the survey respondent's anonymity. Barry took it to an extreme having employees look for tiny, hidden watermarks on the paper survey with markings of employee numbers.

Another important lesson for survey writers and survey project managers is if your employees do not believe the organization plans to make improvements based on feedback, your survey is probably worthless. Employees wont spend time thinking about their answers and providing constructive feedback. More likely than not, they will breeze through the questionnaire giving "correct" answers. Why bother?

While the last lesson is something that must be addressed with organizational culture and building trust between management and employees, the anonymity issue is easily solved with a web survey tool. Most online survey software has the option to build surveys that are anonymous. Take advantage of that feature when creating surveys to collect employee feedback.

When you sit down to because the survey writing and question creating, take a minute to review these tips for what types of questions to avoid.

One type of online survey questionnaire we don't talk about a lot is website marketing research and web usability surveys for your web pages. Often times we narrow in on market surveys, customer surveys and employee surveys leaving out a wide range of other types of surveys. Web site survey tools can help you quickly build surveys and polls to gather visitors feedback to help you improve your website. According to an article published in the current issue of BtoB Magazine, websites rank at the top for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers when it comes to online marketing tactics. If websites are so important, how can you not take the time to gather feedback about your web pages?

You can use the website feedback survey questions below as a site survey template for gathering user feedback. For many of these questions, you will need to change the options so it makes sense for your particular website.

I just created a survey to gauge Cvent employee interest in playing in a local softball league this fall. It got me thinking after yesterday's post where I suggested using online surveys to collect employee feedback for product enhancements. Perhaps it's not obvious how human resource departments or any other department can use online questionnaires to survey employees.

One of our sales team members has been trying to organize a company sponsored softball team for years. This year, it looks like it might finally happen - if there's enough people who want to play. But how do you easily find out in a company with over 475 employees who wants to play, when they're available and what positions they can play? It could be a lot of emails to manage and spreadsheets to keep track of responses. Or you could build an online survey in ten minutes and email the survey to employees. Much less work to manage data collection via an electronic survey than responses via email. If you want to know every time an employee completes your survey or online poll, you can set up triggered email alerts within the survey software to receive all the survey responses or just the ones that meet certain criteria. In this case, I might want to set up a triggered alert when an employee says they want to play.

My survey example is only one use of web surveys for collecting feedback from employees. You can do a quick employee poll to get suggestions for happy hour events or even lunch orders. Not every survey project needs a lot of planning. When you need to quickly poll employees on a topic, surveys will do the job there as well.

How else have you used surveys to gather employee feedback quickly other than formal job satisfaction or employee performance appraisals?

It's been awhile since we've provided any customer survey templates or customer satisfaction survey example questions. Here are some sample survey questions from an online customer satisfaction questionnaire:
Now, you can't see behind the scene's of this survey so I want to point out what I've spent a lot of time talking about this week: using data you already have in conjunction with pipe question logic to personalize the respondent experience. Every place Gadget A appears in the survey is intended to be pipe logic from a question I already know the answer to: what product do you use? In my opinion, it makes your organization look much smarter to the respondent because each question doesn't say something to the effect of "our products and/or services."

Seems super simple to add this example survey question to any type of online survey - right? Yet, it's a frequently forgotten question. I'll admit even I forget the need for this type of question. I'm usually focused on keeping my questionnaire as short as possible by limiting my survey questions to only essential ones.

However, when I'm filling out a survey, I typically look forward to those comment boxes so I can provide additional customer feedback. Particularly when I'm filling out a feedback form measuring customer satisfaction. For example, I was watching a TV episode on abc.com and was having trouble with their media player (I always have trouble with their media player, and they are constantly changing it!) When I finished watching and closed the browser, I received an invitation to complete a customer satisfaction questionnaire. I was expecting one of the customer satisfaction survey questions to be an "Additional Comments" box, since none of the questions centered around my viewing satisfaction. No such luck. I was seriously disappointed. I wanted to give my feedback so hopefully, next time the viewing would be better.

Most people agree to fill out your survey because they believe there's something in it for them. You don't have to offer an incentive to make people think there's something in it for them. Simply asking for customer or employee feedback implies that you're ready to make changes, that you want to identify problems and fix them.

If you fail to offer a "last ditch effort" with and additional comments (optional) question, you could be making a huge mistake. Depending on your survey design, it may be the only place a survey respondent can give you truly honest, unprompted feedback. While you can craft technically perfect questions, they still limit what you can find out from questionnaire respondents. The additional comments section may bring to light something that wasn't even on your radar: new product enhancement requests, process changes that ultimately could boost employee and customer retention, customer service issues, website design flaws, etc. Some organizations have gotten great ideas to improve their retention programs from consumer feedback.

Including an additional comments section is even more important with online surveys, because with telephone or paper surveys the respondent has the chance to at least tell the interviewer or write in extra answers. It's always possible the extra comments may be discarded, but the respondent can still try to give additional feedback. There's no extra chance with a web based survey. Adding this one extra question wont destroy your response rate or cause your survey to be bad. In fact since it's such a common question type, I would guess if the respondent doesn't have additional comments, they hardly even notice the question.

When it comes to survey creation and design, creating questions with meaningful responses can be quite a challenge. After all, the validity of your data has a lot to do with the questionnaire itself. That's why it can be a big help to have a library of common responses in your survey tool!

Cvent Web Survey Software users automatically get access to our question and response libraries. Recently, Sarah, over at our Meetings & Events blog, was working on a client survey. She thought the response library was a huge time saver. It also ensured she was using the same responses (where appropriate, of course) for multiple questions. Having consistency throughout your survey makes it easier for respondents to complete your feedback form.

When creating a question, utilizing the response library is a simple, few click process. Survey admins have the ability to select the type of response they're looking for and then select the correct response under the category.


This is the perfect example of a survey question where a response library can save you a lot of time. Without the response library, I would have spent a good chunk of time entering in each state. Fortunately, Cvent's online survey application did all the work for me!

Cvent users also have the opportunity to create their own library of questions they use frequently. Chances are you have other responsibilities besides building surveys so as an online survey tool, we strive to cut down on the time you spend creating a questionnaire so you can spend more of your day on other tasks.

Want to learn more about how our web based survey software can save you time on your next survey project? Sign up for one of our online webinars.