How to Ask the Right Questions
Whether you use surveys, polls, or simply ask your customers to email you their feedback, there are plenty of things that you probably want to know. The key is focusing in on what you need to know. Asking your customers to answer too many questions might drive them away, so cut out the clutter and ask only when the information is critical.
The following sections provide guidance on which questions to ask and how to ask them.
START AT THE END
The best starting point for asking the right questions is the end point. At the end of the day, you are collecting information so that you can make an informed decision and take action. So what is it that you want to make more informed decisions about? By defining the problem you are trying to solve, you will then know what information you need to collect in order to make an informed decision.
You may feel the urge to now jump right into generating your questions, but there is one more step. The final step is to determine what needs to be measured in order to give you the information you need in actionable format. Now that you know what you are going to measure, you are in a great place to start creating questions that will give you great feedback.
Here’s an example of how this might play out in a real-life situation. A wine store has seen the attendance at its wine-tasting events decline over the past several months. The owner is perplexed about the reason for the decline and has made the decision to get some feedback from her customers. Here are the steps she goes through in creating an online survey:
Step One: Decision / Action
She wants to know why the attendance has declined and what she can do to encourage more people to attend her events.
Step Two: Knowledge
What does she need to know in order to figure out what to do? A couple of potential factors are timing (time of year, day of the week, time of the events), content (types of wines being reviewed), or experience (could be a wide variety of reasons, from the person presenting to the availability of parking for the events).
Step Three: Data
What needs to be measured? How many events people have attended, what motivated them to attend in the past, whether they attending more this year than last, what factors into their decision about whether to attend, and what their experience was at the last event they attended.
Step Four: Questions
This step focuses on crafting a series of great questions that not only get at each of the data elements but also provides you with actionable feedback. From step two above, we know there are three factors that we believe may be impacting attendance at our events. Each of these factors needs to be connected to the individual’s perception of whether he or she has attended more or fewer events in the last six months than they may have attended prior to this period of time. Therefore, the questions that we want to answer are the following:
1. Event Attendance History:
Q. How many events have you attended in the last six months?
Q. Would you say that your attendance to our events has increased, decreased, or stayed relatively the same in the past six months compared to prior years?
2. Rationale for Change:
Q. If you have either increased or decreased your attendance rate, please indicate below by ranking the following topics from highest to lowest, what influenced your decision to change your attendance.
a. Timing of events (day of the week, time of events, etc.)
b. Content (the types of wines being covered)
c. Experience (presenter, setting, parking)
3. Details:
Q. Please provide us with further information on the item that you ranked highest in influencing your attendance to our events.
FORMULATE YOUR QUESTIONS
The questions outlined above take into account a number of the best practices for creating questions. Here are the five keys to successful question writing.
1. Keep it short. You are asking your participants to spend their time helping you out. You owe it to them to keep your survey short and to the point. If possible, keep the number of questions to ten or less.
2. Start smart. Start with the most important questions first and make them easy to answer so that your participant gets engaged in the process. If the first questions ask too much of the person taking the survey, he or she will just stop taking it, and you won’t get any feedback.
3. Know when to use closed- versus open-ended questions. Closed-ended questions are sometimes also called quantitative questions. The benefits of these questions are that they are typically easier to respond to. Since you specify the potential answer set, they are also very easy to analyze. The challenges involved with these type of questions are that the provided answer set needs to be comprehensive and you need to know exactly what you want. An example of a closed-ended question is the following:
Q. In comparing the past six months to the prior six months, would you say that your attendance at our events has increased, decreased, or stayed roughly the same?
An open-ended question is often called a qualitative question. The benefits of these questions are that the participant is not limited to your choices, and you are able to get results in the actual words of the participant. The challenges of these questions are that they cause fatigue on the participant (since they are harder to complete), you tend to get more feedback from the people on the extremes (really like or dislike), and the data is more difficult to analyze. An example of an open-ended question is the following:
Q. Please provide us with further information on the item that you ranked highest in influencing your attendance at our events.
4. Right order gets results. The order of your questions matters.
Put the most important questions you want answered at the front of the survey. That way if the participant tires and does not finish the survey, you still have the answers to the most important questions. To make it easier on your readers, try to start your survey with closed-ended questions and place the open-ended questions and any demographic questions toward the end.
5. Do something. The first thing to do when someone has taken your survey is to thank him or her for taking the time. The next thing is to take action on the feedback he or she has provided and let the respondent know that the feedback factored into your actions. In our example above, the wine store owner, once learning that the biggest reason people stopped coming to her wine tasting events was a lack of available parking, should announce to her customers that she appreciated their feedback and that she has arranged free parking with the bank across the street from her store.
BE A DRIP
I suggest using a “drip” strategy, where you constantly collect small amounts of information rather than trying to do it all at once through one giant survey. You are more likely to benefit by getting real-time actionable content if you collect information on an ongoing basis. By using just one closed-ended question in conjunction with one open-ended question, you can get specific feedback on what you need to know and provide your customers with an opportunity to share with you what’s on their mind.
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