The 10 Worst Customer Feedback Question Mistakes You Can Make

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Introduction

Customer surveys come in many shapes and sizes but they tend to repeat the same mistakes time and time again.

Review your survey and ensure that you don’t make these 10 Customer Feedback question mistakes!

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1. Making Questions Mandatory

You should never make your customer feedback questions mandatory.

While it may seem like a good idea in the moment it almost never is because:

- It is disrespectful to your customers- It generates bad data- It reduces response rates

When written properly, your questions will get answered anyway.

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2. Asking What You Already Know

An email invite for a survey from a large organisation was sent out. Unbelievably the very first question in the survey was:

When you ask what you already know, you:

- Disrespect the customer’s time- Introduce the chance for error in the response

Ask questions for answers you don’t know. It will make for a shorter survey and better responses

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“What is your email address?”

3. Asking Too Much/Private/Sensitive Too Soon

Consider this question from a real survey received:

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3. Asking Too Much/Private/Sensitive Too Soon

Make sure you:

- Do not ask anything too sensitive in the first few questions- Include the “I’d rather not say” option

Ask some easy questions to get things moving. Let the respondent get to know the process and the survey a little bit before asking anything too personal

Not including the “I’d rather not say” option means that if they don’t want to answer the question they will either give erroneous information or bail out of the survey at this point

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4. Too Many Text Responses

You must ensure that the you include free text fields in your survey to gather further valuable data.

However, asking too many text responses will:

- Place increased mental load on the respondent- Lead to erroneous data from the respondent - Force respondent to opt out of the survey- Lower the response rate

Typically you should have only one or two free text fields in your customer feedback survey.

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5. Yes/No Questions

Take the below as an example:

This type of question is difficult for the customer to answer and provides little information to the business: just a simple yes or no

A much more effective way to design the questions is:

Now the customer can provide an answer that meets their opinion and you will get a much more nuanced view of what they think

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“Are you satisfied with our customer service? Yes/No”

“On a scale of 0, very unsatisfied to 7, very satisfied, how satisfied are you with our customer service?”

6. The 30th Question

The 30th Question. By this we simply mean a long survey.

When you make surveys long, you:

- Reduce the response rate - Increase the load on customers- Reduce the accuracy

If your survey has 20, 30 or even (and I’ve seen them) 50 pages of questions you should radically redesign it.

Give yourself a 10 questions limit.

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7. Answers Don’t Match Questions

Check out this survey question received from a major airline:

The responses, mostly, don’t match the questions:

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“What specifically did you dislike about the boarding experience? – The efficient boarding process.”

“What specifically did you dislike about the boarding experience? – I get priority boarding based on my status or special needs.”

7. Answers Don’t Match Questions

In fact the first two responses are simple tautologies and add no information. Reworded more clearly they simply say:

Responses that would have been more useful could have been:

- The cleanliness of the lounge- The clarity of the public address announcements

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“What specifically did you dislike about the boarding experience? – the boarding process.”

“What specifically did you dislike about the boarding experience? – the priority boarding process.”

8. Questions Your Customer Can’t Answer Accurately

Take the below as an example:

The trouble is that while everyone might have an opinion of what makes an advertisement stand out it is probably not what really makes it stand out for them.

A much better way to answer this question would be for the newspaper to run tests of different layouts to see which works best.

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9. Prioritizing

Take the below as an example:

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“Please prioritize the following features from most important to least important:

Feature 1Feature 2Feature 3…Feature 10Feature 11Feature 12”

9. Prioritizing

There are two mistakes in this question:

- Prioritizing 12 items is a very difficult thing to do: basically the task is just too hard

- Respondents don’t know the answer: this is the same as newspaper mistake earlier

Ensure that you have no more than five elements in the list.

Any more than that and it makes it complex for the brain to order them in any meaningful way.

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10. Two Ideas in the Same Question

Take the below as an example:

The question has two separate ideas in the one question and the respondent cannot answer the question accurately

If the customer is happy with accuracy but unhappy with the clarity of the document, or visa versa, they are stuck.

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“How accurate and clear was our loan documentation?”

10. Two Ideas in the Same Question

So, if you see two ideas in a question it’s best to simply put it into two questions:

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“How accurate was our loan documentation?”

“How clear was our loan documentation?”

Review Your Survey

These mistakes are very common and I’d be surprised if your feedback survey doesn’t have at least one or two of them

Take five minutes now and review your survey. Make sure that you are not making any of these mistakes and lowering the effectiveness of your customer feedback process.

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About RunOurSurvey

RunOurSurvey is dedicated to helping small businesses collect, understand, and act on customer feedback

Check out our free resources:

• The Free Small Business Customer Feedback Megapack

Download your Customer Feedback Tools:

• The Complete Small Business Customer Feedback Kit• The Customer Survey Question Sourcebook

We’ve also got a stack of content you might like:

• RunOurSurvey Customer Feedback Blog

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