April 12, 2022
Emma is the AVP of Marketing at Remesh. She hopes to one day play the ukulele successfully.
Taking customer feedback surveys - and crafting them - can be a drag for you and your customers. By avoiding this list of common mistakes, it’s easy to avoid skewing data with poorly written questions and to ensure you’re taking the time to craft well-thought-out, unbiased questions
Just as Eminem says, “You only get one shot, do not miss your chance,” it’s vital that you not miss your chance for insightful, clean data from your customers. Making business decisions off of biased customer data can lead to costly mistakes.
When designing your customer feedback survey, you want nothing but the cold, hard truth. So when a question is leading, it is often unintentional - it can be hard to write unbiased questions when you already have a preferred outcome in mind.
Be careful of the words you include in the questions - you might have words that have a more positive or negative connotation, thus already biasing your customer’s mindset when answering. Leading questions have a way of putting your answer right in your customer’s mouth.
This one happens so often that there’s actually a name for it: a double-barreled question. This is when you are actually asking two questions in a way that sounds like you’re only asking one. Your audience may have different thoughts about the two things you’re asking about but instead, you’re forcing them to give a single answer that covers both.
Sometimes, when you’re at work, writing an email or in a meeting, you start saying things like “synergy” and “paradigm shifts” despite your best judgment (it happens to us all). While corporate-speak can allow you to fit in with your colleagues, it will only distance you from your respondents.
When you ask questions on your online customer surveys that include this type of jargon, expect to get responses that are equally vague and formalized. Your customers are people too so do them a favor and speak to them like it. They’ll appreciate it.
This ties into the previous point about corporate-speak - simplest is best. You need to be clear, concise, and to the point. Unnecessary complexity distorts your questions’ meaning and can lead to non-responses or responses that don’t truly represent your customer because they misunderstood you in the first place. Making sure there are a few mental hurdles as possible will lead to faster, clearer answers.
The human attention span is shorter than a Goldfish's (no lie). You are lucky to have captured your customer’s attention long enough for them to open the email about your survey, let alone invest their time to respond to it.
When surveys are drawn out and are too long or too complicated, respondents tend to skip questions or abandon the whole survey in the first place.
While it may seem like common sense to avoid these customer feedback survey mistakes, they are incredibly easy to make when you don’t think carefully and critically about each question. Make sure you have several different eyes on each customer feedback survey you craft- it will also help you catch and remove bias before it’s too late.
