Top 5 Tips to Improve Survey Quality

Are your survey Programming not effective enough to drive accurate and reliable information? Beat complex survey challenges with our best survey designing tips to improve survey quality and get better customer insights.

Discovering your audience’s preferences throughout their customer journey can be effectively accomplished through surveys. These valuable tools enable you to swiftly gather feedback from a large number of individuals within a short span. The logistics involved are comparatively straightforward- you design and deploy the survey, respondents participate at their convenience, and you subsequently analyze the collected data.

Surveys provide a wealth of information concerning your audience, encompassing various aspects such as.

• Purchasing process- What information do customers require to fulfil their needs? Where do they seek such information? What kind of details aid them in making purchasing decisions?
• Website satisfaction- Why do customers visit your company’s website? Can they easily access the desired information? Are there additional resources or tools you can offer them?
• Post-event feedback- What is your customers’ perception of your company’s trade show booth? What aspects did they find most valuable? Is there specific information they were seeking but did not find?

Surveys are crucial for gathering information, hence it’s worth investing our time and effort to make them more engaging and innovative to support their purpose. So businesses must not overlook poor-quality surveys and seek the help of experts to improve survey quality.

Why Business Must Improve Survey Quality?

Improving survey quality can bring numerous benefits across various domains. Here are some key advantages.

• Reliable insights

Improving survey quality ensures that the insights obtained are representative and unbiased. It helps minimize errors, sampling biases, and methodological flaws that can distort the results. Reliable insights enable organizations to make informed decisions, formulate effective strategies, and address specific challenges with greater precision.

• Enhanced credibility

High-quality surveys enhance the credibility and reputation of the organizations conducting them. When surveys are designed and implemented with rigor and transparency, stakeholders perceive the organization as trustworthy and competent. This credibility can foster stronger relationships with customers, clients, employees, and other key stakeholders.

• Improved customer satisfaction

By conducting surveys with better quality, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of customer needs, preferences, and satisfaction levels. This information helps identify areas for improvement, develop more targeted marketing strategies, and deliver better products and services. Ultimately, improved customer satisfaction leads to increased loyalty, repeat business, and positive word-of-mouth.

These advantages can positively impact decision-making, organizational performance, and the overall quality of products, services, and interventions.

Below are the best and proven tips to improve survey quality within no time.

5 Proven Tips to Improve Survey Quality

Tip 1- Goal-specific Survey Improves Survey Quality

When creating surveys, it is crucial to have a clear purpose in mind. Whether you are seeking feedback on your customers’ experience or aiming to identify the main challenges faced by your target audience, every survey should serve a specific goal. Unfortunately, many companies make the mistake of sending out lengthy and vague surveys that cover a wide range of topics, from website experience to shipping prices. This approach is likely to annoy your customers.

To obtain meaningful answers to your questions, it is advisable to divide your surveys into shorter questionnaires, each focusing on a single objective. By doing so, you can gather the necessary data more efficiently and simplify the process of developing questions.

Maintaining a clear focus on your goals can also improve other aspects of survey design, such as avoiding ambiguous and overly complex questions. By ensuring your survey content is engaging and relevant to your customers, you increase their willingness to participate. For further insights and statistical references, you can refer to the related resources.

Clear survey purpose enables-

• Appropriate question selection
• Elimination of ambiguity
• Focus on goal-oriented questions
• Inclusion of highly relevant questions

Tip 2- Say No to Jargon

Different respondents and customers attempt surveys from novice to experienced persons. If you do not make sure that your language suits every person out there, you might lose your valuable customers and their thoughts. It is better that you speak everyone’s language. Connect with your audience by using their preferred language.

When crafting your questions, it’s important to tailor them to your specific target audience. Choose wording and terminology that your respondents will easily comprehend. Steer clear of using internal jargon that may confuse them. If you do use abbreviations, make sure to provide a clear explanation of their meaning. By ensuring your questions are easily understood, you enable your respondents to provide more accurate and meaningful responses.

For example-

In the below example, using “AR” might confuse many people as they might have different understandings. They will make assumptions that will impact their answers, resulting in vague results.

In the second part, where we mentioned “AR” as “ Augmented Reality” will clarify the scenario and people will be able to answer correctly, resulting in accurate results. 

In most scenarios, it is better that you describe it clearly so that even the novice can answer in a better way.

Image Credits: Pollfish

Tip 3- Is your Survey too Lengthy? Trim it now!

Customers do not want to spend much time completing surveys. They get bored easily if they have to attend lengthy surveys. Result? Quitting the survey in the middle.

This might severely damage your results. To maximize respondent engagement, it is crucial to ensure that your survey is concise. It is important to have a clear understanding of the specific information you wish to gather.

According to Cameron Johnson, business segment leader at Nextiva, research suggests that surveys that can be completed within five minutes or less tend to yield the highest response rates. Conversely, surveys that exceed 11 minutes in length are deemed too long and are likely to result in higher rates of abandonment or, even worse, random responses.

In essence, if your survey is excessively long, individuals are likely to expedite their responses in order to complete it quickly. They may not thoroughly contemplate their answers and could potentially misinterpret the questions, thus negatively impacting the quality of your data. By keeping your survey concise, you can achieve improved outcomes and foster greater engagement from your audience.

Tip 4- Curate Survey Questions Smartly

Are your survey questions making sense? Making sense at all? Or making dual sense that might confuse customers?

Then you must work on your words and curate questions that present a clear picture of what exactly you are looking for. The choice of words can greatly impact the quality of responses and prevent biased or confusing answers. Below are some valuable tips for creating effective survey questions.

• Use unbiased questions that avoid leading respondents to a particular answer. For instance, instead of asking, “When do you enjoy using this product?” which introduces bias, ask, “When was the last time you used this product?”

Image Credits: Forms.app

• Pose one question at a time to avoid confusion and obtain clearer results. Often, surveys bundle multiple questions together, leading to muddled responses. For example, rather than combining “Do you prefer this product? If so, why?” into a single question, separate them. First, inquire about product usage and then ask for the reasons behind the preference.

Image Credits: Pollfish

• Offer balanced response options to ensure unbiased results. Use answer scales that include an equal number of positive and negative choices, with a neutral option in between. A well-balanced scale could include options like Excellent, Good, Average, Below Average, and Poor.

Image Credits: dataforceresearch

• If you’re uncertain about the clarity of your questions, enlist a test group to take the survey. Seek feedback from colleagues or friends to identify any potential confusion and make necessary adjustments.

Tip 5- Adding Question Variety to Improve Survey Quality

When it comes to gathering information, active engagement is the key. By incorporating a variety of question types, such as ranking, matrix, open-ended, or multiple-choice questions, you can captivate your audience and maintain their interest, even in a lengthier survey.

This requires a clear understanding of different types of survey questions and how can you use them to support your results, ensuring survey quality.

• Open-ended or Close-ended questions

Image Credits: embedsocial

• Multiple-choice questions

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• Dichotomous questions

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• Rating-scale questions

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Such questions will keep the boredom away and help customers to engage throughout surveys irrespective of the length but do not exaggerate the survey length. Leverage the right survey creation tool that will turn your creative ideas into reality and improve survey quality.

Improve Survey Quality with OnGraph’s Customized Survey Creation Tool

Unleash the power of surveys to understand your audience! Customize questions to match research objectives and gather vital information. Write in a language that resonates with your audience. Simplify survey participation with diverse question types, logical flow, and skip logic. Seek a fresh perspective from a colleague to spot any confusion. 

Elevate your insights and connect with your audience like never before with the right customized Survey Creation Tool at your fingertips. We have experts who can custom-build tools to turn your survey expectations into reality for better and more accurate results. That’s why businesses must not overlook survey quality for any reason.

Apart from curating amazing surveys, protect them against fraud. Read our blog- Safeguard Market Research: The Ultimate Guide to Fraud Detection.

Drop us a query today, we will be happy to help and improve your survey quality.

If you have implemented other tips and tricks or something better in mind to improve survey quality, let us know via comments. We will be glad to hear.