MarketTools Blog

This post was adapted from the MarketTools Zoomerang blog.

When designing a survey questionnaire, it is almost always useful to include a few open-ended questions. An open-ended question is designed to encourage a response that is spontaneous and unstructured. (Of course, this is the opposite of a closed-ended question which encourages a brief or single-word response usually answered with a simple yes or no.)

Don’t overdo it, though: having too many open-ended questions in your online survey can confuse and sometimes annoy your respondents. Start off with closed-ended questions and interlace open-ended queries throughout the form to keep your survey takers on point. 

With that being said, here are six open-ended questions to consider when building your online survey questionnaire:

• What would it take to get you to use or buy a product or service?
  This question can help aggregate your learnings from previous findings, while also highlighting problems and issues that may have gone unnoticed.
• What is the best thing about the product, service, or campaign?
  Asking what the BEST thing about the experience is instead of a more general “what did you like?” question can drill down and find positive feedback even if the respondent was dissatisfied overall.
• What is the worst thing about the product, service, or campaign?
  This question can yield some very surprising answers and give new insight into deeper customer perceptions.
• What would your business associates and/or friends think of this product, service, or campaign?
  Moving the question into the third person can open up the respondents’ feelings about their willingness to share with others.
• Would you recommend this product, service or campaign to your friends or family members, and why?
  This is similar to the previous question, but  more personal. It gets straight to the point as to  whether the respondent likes your offerings enough to suggest it to friends and family.
• What task or action did you perform immediately prior to using the product or service?
  This question can provide useful insight into the respondent’s experience with your offering, or how they came to have a need that your product or service fulfilled. For example, it can be useful to know if the respondent is running out the door for their daily commute, or sitting down to relax before they use a particular product or service.

These open-ended questions can lead to a deeper understanding of your survey respondents as they use their own words to respond and better describe their experience.  Just make sure to use these types of questions thoughtfully, and to only include the ones that are most important to capturing the kind of survey feedback that will help you achieve your desired business results.

What kind of success have you had using open-ended questions? Which questions have offered up the most interesting responses? We would love to hear your feedback.