Questionnaires are more than just a string of questions—especially when you fine-tune them to provide insights into the needs and desires of your target audience.
As more businesses integrate customer research strategies into their core values and practices, knowing how to properly collect this valuable feedback has never been more important.
If your company wants to learn more about your customer’s experience with your brand or wants feedback on a recent service or product launch, the questionnaire method of data collection is a great place to start.
Offering both flexibility and reliability, thoughtfully crafted questionnaires can provide your business with an endless list of customer insights to work from—something that will have a significant impact on your bottom line and ROI.
Providing a clear-cut way to collect feedback and opinions from your customers, this article will show you the many benefits of the questionnaire method of data collection (and we will even show you how to build your own successful questionnaire, too!)
With this in mind, here’s what you need to know about collecting data using the questionnaire method.
Analyze your survey results in a way that's easy to digest for your clients, colleagues or users.
Chances are, you have filled out at least one questionnaire during your lifetime. Used across almost every industry, the questionnaire method of data collection is tried and true—and its overwhelming popularity is partly due to how effective of a tool it can be when used correctly.
To get a better understanding of its benefits, we first must specifically define what a questionnaire is:
Depending on who you’re talking to, most people will use the terms survey and questionnaire interchangeably—but as it turns out, they are actually two different things.
As a versatile tool that you can use for a wide variety of projects, your team can implement the questionnaire method of data collection for any of the following purposes:
Depending on the type of data your team is looking to collect, it is important to note that you can use different styles of questionnaires:
Questionnaires are often given to participants as a set of questions that they will fill out on their own. Capable of being sent through email, asked on social media, or provided on paper to in-person customers, the self-administered method of questionnaires is incredibly common.
Offering the benefit of flexibility and autonomy, many companies opt for this style of questionnaire because it’s cost and resource efficient—though it does often offer less in-depth and detailed results than those conducted as an interview.
If your team wants to gain a more nuanced understanding of a smaller group of customers, conducting a researcher-led questionnaire is the way to go. Hosted like a structured interview, the benefit of a researcher-led questionnaire is that your team has someone to directly drive conversation and ask questions—which in turn digs up more detailed information and feedback.
While this questionnaire style can be incredibly valuable, hosting individual or group researcher-led questionnaires is more costly and doesn’t translate well to large-scale research projects on a tight timeline.
As your team get ready to build its own customer research questionnaire, there are a few key aspects to consider before you jump right in:
With all of this considered, it is now time to take these important lessons and convert them into beautiful, effective, and compelling questionnaires.
If you and your team are looking to build a new questionnaire for your next customer research project, here is our step-by-step guide to ensuring you get the most out of your efforts:
The success or failure of your questionnaire truly starts at the very beginning. If you don’t clearly decide on a research question that you want answers to, your participants will fill in the questionnaire with vague and non-specific questions that won’t give you the results you want.
Do you want to collect stats, numbers, and demographics? If so, you want to plan your project around a quantitative research question.
What if you want to learn about customer experience, their preferences, and their most common pain points with your products and services? In this case, you need to select a qualitative research question to ensure you collect the correct type of data.
Before moving on to the next step of this process, we recommend hosting a brainstorming session with your team to answer the following questions:
Once you have a clear understanding of the research question you want to answer, your team needs to identify your target audience.
Whenever possible, being specific in your selection can help ensure you ask the right people the right questions. Whether you go for a larger population size or opt to niche down to a few key stakeholders, your entire team should be on board with who you’re planning to send your questionnaire to before you spend any time writing questions.
If you’re in a situation where you don’t have direct access to your target audience, you may need to take an additional step to set up a screener. By doing this, you’ll be able to collect some rudimentary data (like which people use which particular products or which customers exhibit particular behaviors) so you can better approach your research with a set group of people in mind.
In order to connect with your target audience (or to recruit potential participants with a screener), your team may use any of the following methods of data collection:
Next, ideally during one or a few group sessions with your team, you should write out as many potential questions as possible. Do your best not to edit yourself during this process—instead, write lots of options for each question and try different wording and phrasing based on past customer research.
During this process, whenever possible, include a wide spread of question types (open-ended, close-ended, multiple choice, rating scales, etc.) to provide variety.
The goal of this phase of the process is to create a bulk database of possible questions that you will later edit and reduce to get the best possible options to send.
After you’ve written your list of potential questions, you now get to go through and select the best of the best.
During this stage, it’s very helpful to have your team members provide input, as they can add their expertise to select the winning questions from the list. Ideally, at the end of this process, you should end up with 5–10 high-quality questions that cover the key pieces of information you want to collect from your customers.
If done correctly, the final questions you land on should cover the key research points you are looking to collect data for, and they should be clear, understandable, and easy to read.
Often, the order of your questions in your questionnaire is equally as important as the actual question content.
As we mentioned above, questionnaire fatigue is a real phenomenon that impacts the quality of answers you’ll receive for questions that appear later in your questionnaire. To ensure you get data points for your most important questions, be sure to place them at the top of your questionnaire (and wherever possible, cut out any unneeded questions to reduce confusion and burnout).
It is finally time—after all of your hard work, your team is ready to share your questionnaire with your target audience to begin to collect data. Hooray!
Once your questionnaire is out in the world, you finally get to rest (but only for a short while, of course.) As the data begins to pour in, your team can get ready for the next essential phase of a successful questionnaire—actually using the insights to improve your brand.
Detailed and well-executed customer research has become the not-so-secret key to building a successful brand. Offering a wealth of data and acting as a guiding light for future product and service updates and launches, you need to be listening to your customers to grow—and one of the best ways to collect customer insights is by creating targeted questionnaires.
Interested in getting the most out of your next customer questionnaire? By using an insights hub like Dovetail, you can easily bring your customers into every conversation with software that translates your data into insights you can use for your next big project.
Do you want to discover previous survey findings faster?
