Sample survey questionnaires for businesses

Are your customers happy or unhappy? How happy? If you don’t have in-depth, well-documented data to back up answers to those questions, the solution is to use a survey questionnaire to gather important feedback. The below sample survey questionnaire content can help you track their satisfaction and, in the process, make sure your business remains competitive.

Best practices for creating survey questionnaires

Before you start drafting your questionnaire using the right survey tool, consult a few survey examples and keep in mind some high-level recommendations to ensure you’re able to gather the most effective results possible. These include best practices like:

Clearly defining the purpose

Unclear goals lead to unclear results, so before launching, spend a bit of time upfront to spell out things like the goal of the questionnaire, why you’re creating it, and how you’ll use the data once you collect it.

Keeping things short and focused

Customers are busy, so the goal should be for them to finish in less than five minutes. Not only will this increase the number of responses you get from customers, it will force you to focus on a single objective—which will ultimately be more useful, and actionable, for your business.

Limiting open-ended questions

Closed-ended questions require either a yes or no answer, choosing from a list of multiple choices, or selecting a rating-scale option. This makes the results much easier to quantify, collate, and analyse. Open-ended questions do give customers the opportunity to share their thoughts in their own words, but limit these as follow-up questions or in select areas where custom feedback is needed.

Considering the inclusion of an incentive

While not always appropriate, when it fits with your product or service and the audience, offering an incentive has been shown to improve response rates. People like the idea of getting something in exchange for giving you their time, just remember to keep the incentive appropriate to the scope of what you’re asking them to do.

Questionnaire samples by category

The question of how to create a survey can seem overwhelming, but in reality it’s not that difficult. Just remember to include the kinds of questions that will be most effective at providing the kind of feedback you want to discover once your survey questionnaire is complete. Common categories for questions include:

Product usage

This is where you assess customer needs so you can provide effective solutions while also generating valuable feedback for your marketing and product teams. Below are a few examples:

1. How often do you use the product or service?
2. Does the product help you achieve your goals?
3. What’s your favourite part of the product or service?
4. What’s your least-favourite part/what could be improved?

Demographics

By determining the makeup of your customer base, it will be easier for marketing and sales teams to pursue leads for future growth. To do that, helpful questions to include are:

1. What’s your age?
2. Where are you located?
3. What industry do you work in?
4. What’s your income level?
5. What is your marital status and do you have children?

Because these questions can be personal in nature, make sure to provide multiple choice answers with a range of responses and to always provide the option to omit an answer. The goal should be to gather honest information, and that won’t happen if customers are made to feel uncomfortable.

Satisfaction scale

Determining how happy customers are is one of the most fundamental reasons for conducting a survey questionnaire in the first place, but happiness can be a hard thing to quantify. That’s where a satisfaction scale can be useful. Helpful tips here include:

1. Have the scale range from 1 to 10 where 1 means the customer is “extremely unlikely to recommend to a friend” and 10 mean’s they’re “very likely to recommend to a friend.”
2. Descriptive scales are also useful when given a short list of responses to choose from where responses range from “very unsatisfied” to “very satisfied.”
3. Picture scales can also be used with sad, neutral, and happy emojis that represent the range of satisfaction the customer is feeling.

Open text

Open-text questions allow customers to provide answers using their own words rather than choosing from a multiple-choice list of pre-written answers. While they take more time to analyse and aren’t always completed by customers, because they also take more time to answer, they do often provide helpful feedback. Examples are:

1. Please describe how you feel about your experience with (insert product name here).
2. How could your experience have been improved?
3. What did you find valuable in your experience?
4. What can our customer service team improve on?
5. Do you have any additional comments or feedback?

Longevity

Towards the end of your survey, it’s useful to include some questions that set the stage for maintaining lines of communication with your customer in the future by following up again when additional insights are needed. This is particularly useful when new features are added to a product or service. It also makes your customer feel valued and shows you appreciate their opinions and perspective. Suggested ways to phrase these questions include:

1. Is it alright if we contact you to follow up on the answers provided?
2. Would you be willing to complete another survey in the future?
3. If we were to update our product to include a number of new features, would you be open to providing feedback on those features?