You need a solid foundation: good survey questions to collect meaningful and actionable survey insights. This may seem obvious, but it’s pretty important to your overall survey success.
Well-written survey questions solicit accurate and actionable insights that can guide product development, direct marketing campaigns, and improve customer journeys.
Learn how to write good survey questions for your next research project.
What makes a good survey question?
There are 3 key elements that make a survey question great:
- Questions must be clear, neutral and unbiased. Learn how to avoid making survey bias mistakes.
- The right question depends on your objective. Measure one thing at a time and keep your questions focused on your goal.
- A good survey uses a variety of question types, including qualitative and quantitative questions.
5 tips for writing good survey questions
You already know that good survey questions, but how do you write good survey questions? Here are five tips you can employ right now to write good survey questions for accurate data collection.
1. Avoid leading questions
Avoid leading questions that encourage respondents to give a specific answer.
You know the type. “Since you love our product so much, how likely are you to recommend it to a friend?” Or “Tell us about how the conference changed your professional life.”
These survey questions assume the respondent’s experience, inserting bias into the question.
2. Use simple language
Speak a language your respondents understand, and save the jargon for colleagues.
Simplify your survey question language. And if you must use industry-specific language, define it for the respondents.
3. Pretest your questions
Test your survey with a small group of respondents to ensure they are clear and effective. Pretesting helps identify any issues or biases in your questions before the survey is distributed to a larger audience.
Based on the feedback you receive, refine your survey questions to ensure they are clear, specific, and neutral.
4. Ask one thing at a time
Double-barreled questions, or a question that asks a respondent’s opinion on two things at one time, are a recipe for confusion and flawed data.
“How would you rate our customer service and product reliability?” is an example of a double-barreled question, because it combines customer satisfaction and product usability questions. It is not clear which question the respondent should answer.
This may lead the respondent to skip the question, provide an answer that doesn’t reflect their true opinion, or abandon the survey altogether.
To avoid double-barreled questions, refer to your research objective and share the questions with a trusted colleague for verification.
5. Ensure clarity, specificity, and neutrality
- Specificity: Make sure your survey questions focus on a particular aspect of customer satisfaction. Vague questions can lead to ambiguous answers that are difficult to analyze. For instance, instead of asking, “How do you feel about our service?” you could ask, “How satisfied are you with the response time of our customer service team?” Specific questions provide more precise insights into customer satisfaction.
- Neutrality: Ensure that your survey questions are neutral and do not influence respondents’ answers. Avoid using leading questions or assumptions that may bias respondents’ responses. For example, instead of asking, “How much do you love our product?” you could ask, “How satisfied are you with our product?” Neutral questions help gather unbiased and honest feedback.
- Clarity: Ensure that your survey questions are clear and easy to understand. Avoid using jargon or technical terms that may confuse respondents. For example, instead of asking, “How would you rate the UX of our product?” you could ask, “How easy is it to use our product?” Clear questions help respondents provide accurate answers, leading to more reliable data.
60 good survey question examples and ideas
Your research objective is the difference between a “good” and a “bad” survey question. Here are 60 good survey question examples based on the situation, including customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and post-event.
Customer service survey questions
The use of good customer service survey questions, which should be clear and straightforward, can accomplish two things: solicit honest customer feedback and reinforce your company brand. Here are 12 customer service questions to jumpstart your customer support survey.
- How satisfied are you with the overall customer service experience?
- How did you contact our customer support team?
- How easy was it to reach our customer service?
- How satisfied are you with the response time of our customer support team?
- How would you rate the professionalism of our customer support team?
- How knowledgeable did you find our customer service representatives?
- How well did our customer support team resolve your issue?
- What could our customer support team have done better?
- How likely are you to recommend our customer support to others?
- How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
- Do you have any other comments or suggestions for our customer support team?
- Please provide any additional comments or suggestions you may have.
Employee survey questions
Employee-centric survey questions deserve the same care customer-facing questions dictate. Employees are just as likely to abandon and straightline as customers.
These responses can dramatically impact the accuracy of your employee engagement and satisfaction data and mislead employee initiatives. Avoid this outcome with these Likert scale and dichotomous employee survey questions to gauge employee engagement and satisfaction.
- I am satisfied that I have opportunities to apply my expertise.
- My organization is dedicated to my professional development.
- I am satisfied with my overall job security.
- How easy is it to get help from your supervisor when you want it?
- How understanding are your coworkers?
- How reliable is your supervisor?
- When I speak up at work, my opinion is valued.
- How well does your supervisor facilitate your professional growth?
- How realistic were the expectations that were set for you?
- Overall, how fairly were you treated?
- How involved are employees in setting the company’s objectives?
- How well do the members of your department work together to reach a common goal?
UX survey questions
Good UX surveys use various question types to understand the customer experience with your product. Likert scale questions gather quantitative data, while open-ended questions allow you to understand customer sentiment.
Use these UX survey questions to evaluate user experience and product usability. Keep in mind that you may want to accompany the survey question with high-resolution images.
- How would you rate the overall user experience of our product?
- How would you describe our product in one word or sentence?
- How easy was it to navigate through our product?
- How visually appealing do you find our product?
- What features do you find most useful? Select all that apply.
- What do you like most about our product?
- How responsive is our product?
- What improvements would you suggest for our product?
- How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?
- How satisfied are you with the user interface of our product?
- How satisfied are you with the ability to collaborate with other users on the website?
- How often do you use our product?
Post-event survey questions
Post-event feedback questions are deployed immediately after an event. For this reason, questions are often close-ended and concise as the survey will likely be completed on mobile devices, which encourages high response rates.
Consider these survey questions after an event to collect feedback from participants.
- Overall, how would you rate the event?
- Overall, were you satisfied or dissatisfied with the event?
- How could future events be improved? Select all that apply.
- Was the event length too long, too short, or about right?
- How well did the event meet your expectations?
- How likely are you to recommend this event to a friend/colleague?
- Prior to the event, how much of the information that you needed did you get?
- How useful was the information presented at the event?
- How helpful was the staff at the event?
- How likely are you to attend the event again in the future?
- How would you rate the vendors at the event?
- How clearly was the information presented at the event?
Quantitative survey questions
Close-ended questions are among the most accurate ways to gather quantitative information. These questions limit a user's response options to pre-selected multiple-choice answers, making them easier to analyze. You aren’t restricted to close-ended questions, though. In many cases, like the NPS survey question, it is best practice to follow up with an open-ended question to understand the respondent's answer.
Here are examples of quantitative survey questions for a variety of research objectives.
- How likely is it that you would recommend this company as a place to work to a friend?
- How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?
- How easy was it for you to complete this action?
- Overall, how satisfied are you with the speed of our customer service?
- How would you rate this employee’s performance?
- When was the last time you used this product category?
- Will you be attending the event?
- Overall, how well does our website meet your needs?
- Overall, how would you rate your purchase experience today?
- How would you rate each aspect of your experience?
- How likely are you to purchase any of our products again?
- In a typical week, how often do you feel stressed at work?
400+ survey, questionnaire, and form templates
Get real results with our expert-written survey templates.
Create effective surveys with SurveyMonkey
Good survey questions are critical to market research. The right questions will solicit actionable data that directs product development, marketing campaigns, and CX initiatives to success.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a survey expert to write survey questions. SurveyMonkey has 400+ expert-written survey templates and prebuilt forms that you can customize to your specifications.
NPS, Net Promoter & Net Promoter Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.
