Don’t Ask Questions in a Survey You Already Know

Surveys are a great way to collect your customers' insights and know how they perceive the experience you provide them through your products and services. Surveys are all about asking questions from the customers to gauge their experience and collect feedback. Questions are the core of any survey. The success of any survey depends on the response rate of the survey, and the response rate is based on the questions you ask. So, to make your surveys effective and successful, it is crucial to choose your survey questions wisely.

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If you don’t choose your questions wisely and ask irrelevant or unnecessary questions, your surveys will turn out to be uninteresting. There would be more chances of them being left unanswered or partially filled but not submitted in such cases.

This article will discuss one of the biggest survey mistakes, i.e., asking questions in a survey about things that you already know. We will discuss about the information you are most likely to know by yourself, and there is no need to ask it from the customers. We will also discuss how it affects the survey responses and how to avoid this blunder in your surveys.

Biggest Mistake that Surveyors make While Creating a Survey

One of the biggest mistakes while creating a survey is to include such questions, which you already know. When you ask repetitive questions or basic information about your customers in your feedback surveys, it doesn't seem good to the customers.

When you have reached a stage where you are collecting feedback from your customers about your products and services, this means that they have already made purchases from your business. In such cases, you are most likely to have their basic information. Then asking again for the same information while taking feedback is not a good idea.

Asking again the same thing can frustrate the customers because they assume that you already have this information, and they expect you to recognize them. Let’s explore the information your business is likely to have already and should not ask for it through your survey questions.

Information that you may Already Have

1. Customers' Basic Information

Almost all businesses take some basic information from the customers when placing their first orders. This information is very basic, like name, address, business phone number, email address, etc., and is good to take only once. The next time customers place the orders, they just share one identifier information like phone number, and the sellers can access all the other details through it.

When you send a survey to the customers through an email, it means you have their email addresses, and it's not good to ask them again. Similarly, if you are sending an SMS survey, you have the customers’ phone numbers, and there is no point in asking the phone number again in the survey.

2. Purchases that Customers Made

When you seek your customers for feedback, you should not ask questions like “What did you purchase? Or “Which membership do you have?” It’s the customers’ purchase history that is present in your records.

Instead, your surveys should include questions like “How satisfied are you with our products and services?”. These are the questions that fetch you Customer Feedback, and the former will only create a wrong impression and feedback.

3. Customer Interaction

When you send surveys to your customers to gather feedback after a ticket closure or an issue resolution, you should not include questions like “Did you have an interaction with your customer service team?”. If you follow a streamlined process, you should have all the details of all customer interactions and what happened in those interactions. 

The correct process is that your service agents pass on this information with the help of the right tools and mechanisms. Your question should be like, “How would you rate the interaction you had with our service team?” which will fetch you feedback about how satisfied your customers are with the interaction and issue resolution.

4. Transaction Details

Transactions Details are details like Invoice number, Order number, Bill number, Reference ID, or Ticket number. These are the details that every business maintains, but it becomes hard to remember at times for the customers. So why bother them asking these details? Maintain these details on your own and link them to your surveys rather than adding more questions for the customers to answer in the survey.

If you ask questions from your customers that you already know, it will negatively affect your survey responses. Let’s explore such consequences.

Consequences of Asking the Questions You Already Know

1. Surveys Become Lengthy

Asking things in a survey that you already know will add to more questions in your surveys, which will make it unnecessarily lengthy. Most people are busy and do not spend much time filling out surveys. So surveys are always best when short and simple. If surveys become too long and time-consuming for the customers, they are more likely not to attempt them or even leave them in between.

2. Survey Fatigue

Survey Fatigue is a situation in which your audience gets bored or becomes uninterested in filling out surveys. Again and again, filling in basic details or purchase history or data like bill number, order number, etc., can create such situations which will make them decide not to take the survey.

3. Wastage of Precious Time

Filling in more and more details and answering long surveys consumes the customers' precious time, and nobody wants to do so. It becomes a task of time wastage for both you and your customers. The better idea is to create short and straightforward surveys with relevant questions, which will take less of your time to create the survey, and less of customers’ time to fill it.

4. Survey Abandonment

Researches suggest that 70% of people have abandoned a survey in between. The reason is the survey is too long and time-consuming. So you should ensure that your surveys are short and less time-consuming. For this, you need to eliminate the unnecessary questions, for which you already have the answers somewhere.

Let’s learn how to avoid asking such questions and making this mistake in your surveys.

How to Avoid this Mistake?

The best way to avoid this mistake of asking questions you already know is to build an effective survey mechanism. And to do this, you can use good Survey Software to create and send surveys to your customers and collect feedback. An effective feature-loaded Survey tool can help you to do so. You should use these features to avoid asking questions you already know:

1. Custom Variables

Custom Variables are tokens to pass additional information in a survey. It is a feature that automatically adds the information in the survey form when a survey is started, or one question is answered. Custom Variables allow you to [ass the information through the survey web link. You can also display this web link in the survey or survey report.

The types of Customer Variables you can use are:

• Survey Variable - Survey Variable automatically adds information like survey language, survey questions, and survey location. For example - if you are conducting a survey at multiple locations of your business, you can use variables to pass on information as per the option selected by your audience. Selecting a particular location or location ID will display all other attributes of that location.
  Similarly, you can allow your respondents to select one language among the multiple languages available. By doing this, the whole survey would be available in that particular language which the respondent had suggested. 
• Contact Variable - Contact Variable adds the basic and contact details of the customers. All your customers or potential respondents are your contacts, and all the information related to them are contact attributes. When you enter one information that is unique like a phone number or registration ID, all other information would be passed on automatically in the survey. For instance, details like customers’ names, addresses, email addresses, etc., would be filed automatically on entering customers' phone numbers.
• Hidden Variable - Hidden Variable automatically adds information like bill number, invoice number, order number, etc. Many times, customers don't remember this information, so why bother them looking for this information? Hidden variables solve this purpose, and this information is passed on automatically in the customer survey.

Some Examples of Variables

• If you are taking feedback in a retail store, you have the details of the customers' purchase history. When your customers enter one of their information like their phone numbers, the information about what was the last purchase made by the customers will be passed on automatically through variables.
• When you are taking delivery feedback, you don't need to take the location details where you have sent the orders. As the customers have given their full addresses for the delivery, you obviously have the information of the location in which the delivery has been done.
• In the case of capturing Airline Feedback, you have all the information like the travelers' destination and starting locations, the class of tickets they bought, their seat number, and more. Using variables will pass this information in the survey as the customer put in their details like phone number, or registration number.

2. Integrations

Integrations are a great way to make your processes seamless and less time-consuming. Integrate your survey software with your CRM tools to bring in the customer data present in your CRM tool to your surveys. This will help you avoid asking questions about the information from your customers that you already know and thus save your customers’ time.

Zonka Feedback offers powerful Integrations with tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and more to let you integrate your customer data to your surveys and manage your feedback surveys.