A consumer survey is the most powerful tool to get feedback from your customer. In order to perform a survey, you have to create a questionnaire, conduct the survey, and produce a survey report based on the gathered data.

A questionnaire is a list of questions that aims at obtaining specific information about customers’ preferences, tastes, or satisfaction with existing products. Questions, included in a questionnaire, have to possess certain qualities, in order to maximize the positive results of the survey. Below you find the question types that you can include in your questionnaire.

Relevant Consumer Survey Questions to Ask

Dichotomous questions are highly welcomed in most questionnaires. They use binary oppositions, as possible answers to a question. For example, you may ask if a customer uses the company’s products, and the proposed answers should include only Yes/No options.

Open-ended questions are very helpful as they produce highly personalized responses. These are qualitative questions and the interviewer should ask them if he/she wants to know “what is inside the customer’s head”. 

Multiple choice questions allow you to research a diverse range of issues. This can be related to demographic information, competitors, substitute products, and services. Customers may choose single or multiple answers.

Ordinal scale questions are usually included to collect customers’ attitudes to your research topic. Use this type of question to find out how your customers feel, think, and perform.

Likert scale questions can range customers’ opinions and place them between two opposite options. This type of question was invented in 1932 by Rensis Liker. For example, points can range from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”, from “never” to “very often”, from “very uncomfortable” to “very comfortable”.

Ratio scale questions are also a good option and are used when some quantitative issues are involved. For example, you may want to know the level of income, age, number of family members, how much customers usually spend, or how often they go on vacation. 

Evaluating Consumer Survey Results

When you know what types of questions should be on the list, you have to define the number of each question type in the questionnaire. For example, you shouldn’t include too many open-ended questions as answers may consume your time. Besides, normal customers would like to go through the questionnaire quickly as they have a lot of things to do. Open-ended questions should be used in the focus group survey type when you have the opportunity to ask experts or key players.

Once you created a questionnaire and conducted the survey, you have the needed data in your possession. Now you have to make the data work for you and other involved parties. In the initial stage of data analysis, you have to group data, create tables and diagrams on its basis. Then, you are supposed to write brief explanations about the information in the tables and diagrams. Explanations should be concise and simple, so everyone who reads them can understand what it means. The final stage of the survey data analysis is the report preparation. To make this you should create a separate document, structure it, and feel it with tables, diagrams, and text you wrote. The only thing that’s left is to write a conclusion.