Reasons why you should avoid mandatory questions in your survey

As your company is crafting the perfect survey to gather customer opinions, there are some essential tips you should think about when making mandatory questions. While yes, you want as much information about the client's experience as possible, there is significant evidence to prove that it works in a negative way. Mandatory questions work only a handful of times and are not recommended in any survey. We have the top three reasons outlined in this handy guide.

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Reduction in Responses

Customers are usually busy and do not want to spend more than a few minutes completing a survey about their experience. It is important to note that if you have mandatory questions, you are significantly impacting the amount of responses you will get. Instead of making your open-ended questions mandatory, leave them optional. If people want to give an answer, they will, and it will be accurate not fluff given to fulfill the requirements.

Mandatory is Disrespectful

Your customer has already given you their patronage, why shackle them to a ten-minute survey full of necessary questions? People who agree to these surveys are doing it because they have an opinion on the matter as it is, they will answer the questions anyways. For those who are not looking to answer each question, sometimes it may not even be relevant.

You Get Fluff Data

One of the main drawbacks of mandatory questions, the reason most companies have abandoned them altogether, is because of fluffy data. Fluffy data is inconclusive, it wastes your time and most of all, and it makes responding to customer feedback extremely difficult. Most customers willingly respond to questions and they do so because they're strongly, or at least in mediocrity, opinionated about it. Forcing them to answer a question that they may not otherwise be interested in answering is likely to give you junk data since you don’t know if it was forced or if it is true. Why skew your own numbers?

Now that you know the top contenders that are impacting your survey performance, how are you able to fix it? Simple, leave your questions opened ended and use multiple choice as much as possible. Remember, the more simple your survey is, the more concrete your data can be!