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Asking easily understood questions will increase your chances of gathering meaningful survey results.
Developing client surveys that are reliable and unbiased can be an intimidating task for financial advisors. Last month’s article, Survey Best Practices, Part 1, discussed best practices for survey format and design. This month, the focus shifts to best practices for crafting survey questions.
The goal is to develop easily understood, simply written questions that will increase your chances of collecting accurate and valid responses from survey participants.
Asking the right questions
In order to increase the relevancy and accuracy of your survey questions, it is important to ask questions that are clear and easily understood. In order to accomplish this, the first step is to determine your goal or objective for the survey (i.e., the data you are trying to collect by posing each question in your survey). While going through this process, be prepared to assess your questions to determine whether participants will be able to understand and answer them. To accomplish this goal, focus on developing questions that address the three factors below to gather useful responses from those taking your survey.
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Suitable: Your questions should be applicable to the survey purpose and all participants. For example, if you are looking to collect clients’ feedback on the frequency of your firm’s marketing communication, such as a weekly or monthly blog or newsletter, you would not also include questions asking for feedback on a specific client event you hosted. Chances are that not all people taking the survey would have attended the event.
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Understandable: Survey questions should be easy to read, understand and answer. This will increase the chances that someone will read the question all the way through before selecting their answer. When possible, keep your questions and answers concise and direct.
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Effortless: Nearly everyone feels crunched for time, including your clients. Your questions should require very little effort to answer. Most people prefer to answer and complete surveys rather quickly, without spending time agonizing over their response. The more difficult you make it for them, the more likely they are to adopt strategies to get through the survey as quickly as possible. That will decrease the accuracy of responses you receive. As always, avoid questions that are double-barreled or leading or that include a double negative. Examples of these types of questions can be found here.
Survey question types
Generating unbiased and relevant survey responses depends on the types of questions you include in your client survey. Question types range from open-ended to close-ended and come in a variety of formats. Below is a list of recommended question types to incorporate in your next survey.
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Closed-ended: The most popular survey questions are closed-ended questions. These questions allow respondents to choose from two answer choices (e.g., Yes or No) or select one of many answer choices (e.g., A, B, C or D).
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Open-ended: These types of questions can be valuable, as they allow your respondents to answer the question using their own words. The purpose of these questions is to solicit free responses. Incorporate these questions when you are asking for likes, dislikes or feelings as well as memory recall or opinions. Popular open-ended questions include those that solicit feedback on event topics or address client service and satisfaction.
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Matrix and ranking: Matrix and rating questions are most useful when surveying the frequency of something like attitude or behavior. The important thing to note here is that the scale should be logical and consistent throughout the survey. If you set up your survey in the format of “1 – unlikely” to “5 – very likely” make sure the rest of the survey follows the same pattern and all the scales go from low to high.
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Ranked or ordinal questions: Incorporate ranked questions when you need survey respondents to indicate what items are the “most important” or “least important” to them. If you are interested in including this type of question in your next survey, select survey software that allows forced ranking, thereby allowing respondents to apply each rating to only one row (or answer choice).
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Likert scales: Also known as an “agree – disagree scale,” this type of question presents the respondents with a series of attitude dimensions. The dimensions generally range from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
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Balanced versus unbalanced rating scales: The majority of these types of scales involve five-point rating systems, making them easy for survey participants to understand. The system provides a balanced scale with an equal number of positive and negative labels. For instance, a balanced scale would include the following categories: very poor, poor, average, good and excellent. An unbalanced scale, on the other hand, would appear as: poor, average, good, very good and excellent.
The overall goal of your survey will have a large impact on the types of questions you elect to include. By following these guidelines and question formats, you’ll increase your chances of producing unbiased and relevant survey responses.
Elizabeth Snyder is the marketing manager for clients of Wealth Management Marketing, Inc., a firm specializing in outsourced marketing department services to Registered Investment Advisors and fee-only financial planning firms. For more information, visit www.wealthmanagementmarketing.net.
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