When collecting feedback, open-ended questions offer the most valuable insights. Unlike multiple-choice and rated scale questions that provide quantitative data, open-ended questions encourage respondents to provide elaborative responses.
Adding these questions to your survey will help you collect more insightful data and improve customer satisfaction. However, before you start asking your customers open-ended questions, run a test on a small sample of your client base to catch any errors.
Increase Participation Rates
We all know that surveys are a necessary evil, but getting people to take the time to fill out and submit them can be challenging. Whether you’re trying to collect feedback on products, customer service, your website, or any other facet of your business, high survey participation rates are essential for ensuring that the results you get are accurate and representative.
To improve your response rates, consider incorporating open-ended questions. While closed question types are quick and simple for respondents to answer by selecting one of a few options, open-ended questions allow them to share their opinions in their own words, which can provide more detailed insights.
It’s also important to encourage participation by letting your respondents know that their feedback is valued and that you will take action on their responses. Additionally, if you notice that someone has provided an exciting or unexpected answer, don’t be afraid to follow up with additional questions to dig deeper into their thoughts.
In survey design, open-ended questions are crucial in eliciting detailed and diverse participant responses. Examples of open-ended questions are, instead of asking, “Did you find the product helpful?” an open-ended question like “How did the product impact your specific needs?” encourages respondents to share specific experiences and insights. Likewise, inquiries such as “What suggestions do you have for improving our services?” allow participants to provide nuanced feedback, offering valuable qualitative data beyond simple yes or no responses.
Boost Engagement
Boosting engagement with open-ended questions can help you improve your survey results. Open-ended questions allow respondents to express their thoughts and feelings freely, providing valuable insights that may not be easily gleaned through multiple-choice or scale questions alone.
However, the nature of open-ended responses makes them more challenging to analyze than scale questions and other closed-question types. Coding, filtering, and interpreting textual data can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially for large-scale surveys with many open-ended questions.
For this reason, it’s crucial to balance open-ended questions with other question types in your surveys. Too many open-ended questions can overwhelm respondents and cause them to lose interest in your survey, which may hurt your completion rate. To ensure your survey is engaging, try using automated survey nudges to remind participants of the importance of their feedback. This way, they’ll be more likely to take the time to respond to your questions thoughtfully. You can also brand your survey to ensure customers recognize it as coming from a company they trust.
Increase Productivity
When using open-ended questions, you can capture information and opinions that may not have been considered in the closed question’s answer options. As a result, you’ll receive more in-depth and rich data.
This additional data can provide valuable insights into why customers choose specific answers on your NPS score or give a particular star rating to a product or service. This can help you to create more targeted improvements for future customer interactions.
That said, it is essential to balance closed and open questions when designing your survey. Respondents can only answer so many closed questions in the same amount of time, and they may begin to lose interest if too many open questions are included. To avoid this, we recommend including one open question for every 10 to 15 closed questions in your survey.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
Using open-ended questions allows you to gather qualitative customer data. This data lets you get inside your respondents’ heads, letting them tell you what makes them happy or unhappy with your product and why. This data can help you create targeted decisions about improving your products, services, and marketing campaigns.
Closed-ended questions offer quantitative data, allowing you to rate your customer satisfaction on a scale of 1-10 or from extremely satisfied to very dissatisfied. However, these types of responses leave out important information, such as the reason behind their satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Open-ended questions allow you to ask questions such as “What can we do to increase your satisfaction with our product?” which provides a more in-depth and meaningful response.
When you incorporate open-ended questions in your survey, it’s essential to know that they can take more effort from your respondents. Bombarding them with multiple open-ended questions can cause them to give half-hearted answers or abandon the survey altogether. Keeping your open-ended questions short and simple can avoid this.
Increase Productivity
When paired with multiple choice and Likert scale questions, open-ended questions provide valuable insight that can improve your survey results. They are a great way to get deeper into your respondents’ minds and learn more about their authentic reactions. These qualitative responses are a powerful tool for changing your marketing, products, and services. Keep in mind that open-ended questions are most effective when used sparingly. Surveys that contain too many open-ended questions can be overwhelming for your respondents, and it can lead to low completion rates.
It is also important to remember that open-ended responses can be challenging to analyze. Unlike quantitative data derived from rated scales or multiple-choice questions, open-ended answers are not numerically consistent. They can contain a lot of “noise” (i.e., emojis, URLs, spelling mistakes, and non-word characters). However, with the right coding tools, you can still extract meaningful insights from your verbatim responses. For example, you can discover that your customers are using a specific product feature in ways you hadn’t anticipated.