8 Best Practice Tips for Designing Feedback Surveys

Customer feedback is critical to both sustain and grow any business. A well-designed survey has the ability to engage and provide knowledge about your services, increase customer satisfaction, retention and, ultimately, referrals. Here are some top tips to help you design a killer survey.

Explain why. 

Why are you sending your customers this survey? Be transparent about what you are trying to achieve. For example, if you are considering adding a new product to your line, tell them that you value their feedback and genuinely want to know what they think about it. 

Be specific.

Keep the focus of the survey narrow and limited for the best and most in-depth responses. Be strategic and spend time determining what you want to accomplish before crafting survey questions. 

Keep it short. 

Next, limit question count, and keep it focused. The longer the survey, the less likely people are to complete it. Aim to keep the survey under five minutes long. If you are struggling with how to set up a survey, Typeform can help you design a form for free. 

Begin with “yes.” 

Ask the “easy stuff” up front. Save open-ended questions for the end of the survey, where you’re more likely to actually receive open-ended responses. 

Speak simply. 

Make sure you are using terms that your audience can easily understand. Avoid any niche industry or internal company jargon. For things that are difficult to describe, consider including images or video to help clarify while keeping the overall survey content to a minimum.

Keep it consistent. 

Keep scaled responses consistently formatted. If you’ve always used “strongly agree” on the right and “strongly disagree” on the left, check to make sure that this is consistent throughout. 

Target. 

Now, narrow the focus for the target audience receiving your survey and align it with your overall survey goals. If you are polling all customers, make sure you are choosing a representative chunk of your database to survey so that the results are not skewed toward one demographic. 

Reward. 

Incentivize respondents to complete your survey with a small token of appreciation like a Starbucks or Amazon card or a coupon toward their next purchase.