You’ve probably been on the receiving end of a bad survey.
Maybe it asked you to rate a delivery you never received. Or it forced you to choose between three irrelevant response options, none of which applied to you.
Or perhaps you actually took the time to explain a problem in your own words, and no one followed up.
These moments damage brands as much as they annoy respondents.
They’re a testament to the fact that online surveys are everywhere, but most are careless, biased, or just plain useless.
Even worse, a poorly executed survey will fail to represent your population at large. It will nag rather than invite, and worst of all, won’t gather actionable insights and KPIs.
At Interaction Metrics, we believe the survey process should be treated like any other mission-critical business function: with discipline, accountability, and respect for survey participants.
This article shares the exact best practices we use to guide our own survey designs. They’re the same methods we use every day to help clients collect reliable data and make confident business decisions.
If you’re looking for a partner who handles every step, from identifying your target population to interpreting your survey data, get in touch. We’d love to hear about your survey goals.
Best Practices for Writing Good Survey Questions
Most surveys fail because the questions were flawed from the start.
They’re too long. They introduce bias. They sound like they were written without any real thought about the target audience. They chase too many topics, and the data collected ends up shallow, scattered, and hard to act on.
In this section, we’ll look at how to write a good survey questionnaire that avoids common flaws so you can ask clear, neutral questions that provide accurate answers and meaningful data.
1. Start With a Clear Goal
Every survey project should begin with a crystal clear goal.
“Get feedback” isn’t a goal.
“Figure out whether our new onboarding flow is frustrating customers” is.
If you’re trying to cover multiple unrelated topics (like onboarding, pricing, and customer support), split them into separate questions.
Or better yet, create a survey for each topic. This way, you’ll know the details to improve in specific areas.
Takeaway: Before you write your first question, determine exactly which business decisions the survey needs to support.
A good goal does two things:
- It ties directly to a decision you’re trying to make.
- It defines what should—and shouldn’t—be part of your survey design.
Before you move forward, write down your survey’s goal in one complete sentence. If you can’t do that, you’re not ready to write the survey.
2. Ask Compelling (but Non-Leading) Questions
A well-written survey question should walk a fine line: It needs to be interesting enough for the survey respondent to want to answer, but neutral enough not to shape how the respondents answer.
One common mistake is question wording that pushes people toward a specific opinion.
For example, “How satisfied were you with our helpful and knowledgeable staff?”
Questions like this assume the staff was both helpful and knowledgeable.
Instead, try something like “On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your interaction with our staff?”
This uses a clear response scale, gives room for a range of answers, and doesn’t suggest a preferred outcome.
When drafting your questions:
- Avoid emotionally loaded terms like “amazing” or “excellent.”
- Stick to clear response categories (e.g., “Very satisfied” to “Very dissatisfied”)
- Use multiple-choice questions with mutually exclusive options
Once you’ve written a draft, test it with someone not involved in your survey research.
Ask them:
- Were there any questions where you felt nudged to respond a certain way?
- Did you think any of the wording assumed how you felt?
- Did any questions feel hard to answer honestly?
What feels neutral to you might sound pushy to someone else, especially if they’re not thrilled with your service.
If your goal is to understand the truth, your job is to make every question feel safe, simple, and judgment-free.
3. Keep Your Survey Focused On One Topic at a Time
Every question in your survey should point toward the same research goal.
This is critical when you’re dealing with self-administered surveys, where there’s no interviewer to guide the flow.
If you veer off-topic, you risk losing your survey participants’ attention.
Say your survey mode is email, and you’re trying to evaluate your new onboarding flow.
Halfway through the survey, you suddenly ask: “How satisfied are you with our pricing?”
Now the survey respondent is shifting gears, thinking, “What does pricing have to do with onboarding?”
Their answer might be valid, but it doesn’t serve your objective. It introduces noise instead of clarity.
This is different from double-barreled questions (which we’ll cover shortly).
Here, we’re talking about maintaining focus across the full survey, so every question fits together in a coherent, logical order.
If you’re tempted to squeeze in unrelated feedback, ask yourself: “Do I need another question—or an entirely different survey?”
4. Use Natural, Conversational Language
Customers don’t say things like “I somewhat disagree.”
They say, “Not really” or “It was okay.”
The language you use in your questions—and especially your response categories—should reflect how people really talk.
The more natural the phrasing, the more likely survey respondents are to give honest, thoughtful answers.
Instead of:
- “Please indicate your level of satisfaction with our service representative.”
Try:
- “How would you describe your experience with our team member?”
Even your closed-ended questions should use plain, everyday language. Options like “Bad,” “Okay,” and “Great” are easier to interpret than formal phrases like “Strongly Disagree” or “Very Dissatisfied.”
If your question wording feels stiff or confusing, you’ll either lose people entirely or collect data that doesn’t reflect reality.
At Interaction Metrics, we’ve seen this play out time and again: When questions sound human, customers give more thoughtful answers.
When they sound robotic, customers either drop off or speed through.
5. Avoid Double-Barreled Questions
Double-barreled questions ask about two different things in the same question—but only allow one answer.
Example: “Was your waiter prompt and polite?”
That might sound harmless, but what if the waiter was fast and rude?
The same question is trying to measure two behaviors. And now your data collection is flawed.
These questions cause confusion, harm data quality, and make it impossible to accurately measure what your customer really experienced.
But it’s not the same as asking a leading question. Leading questions steer people toward a specific answer. Double-barreled questions cram multiple concepts into one sentence and force a single response.
To fix it, just separate the topics:
- “How would you rate the promptness of the service?”
- “How would you rate the politeness of the staff?”
6. Ask Only Relevant Questions
If a question doesn’t apply to someone, don’t make them answer it.
Say you’re asking about gym habits.
If a respondent doesn’t go to the gym, asking them how often they attend or what equipment they use just feels sloppy.
That’s where question logic comes in.
Also called branching or skip logic, it means you only show questions based on how someone answered earlier ones. If they didn’t use your mobile app, don’t ask five questions about it.
If your survey software doesn’t support logic, at least include a “Not applicable” option.
If you don’t, you introduce bias that can tank your data quality.
This matters even more when you’re asking about sensitive subjects like medical history, gender identity, or demographic information. If a question just doesn’t apply, your survey needs to respect that.
This is one of the core principles behind best practices survey design: relevance improves honesty, and honesty improves outcomes.
7. Let Customers Answer Anonymously
About half of all survey participants prefer to remain anonymous. When you give them that choice, you’re far more likely to get detailed, honest answers, especially when you’re covering sensitive questions or potentially sensitive topics.
But doesn’t anonymity conflict with segmentation?
Not if you design your survey correctly.
You don’t need someone’s name to group them meaningfully.
Here’s how:
- Use early questions to capture demographic information, behaviors, or product usage
- Allow people to skip identity-related questions if they choose
This lets you segment results without sacrificing anonymity or trust.
In fact, anonymous surveys help minimize bias, especially when dealing with qualitative research methods like open-ended questions or focus groups.
When you pair anonymity with smart research methods, like conducting cognitive interviews during testing, you dramatically improve the honesty and reliability of your survey results.
8. Consider Not Sending a Survey at All
Surveys are powerful, and there are many different kinds. But depending on your goal, they’re not always the right tool.
If you’re trying to understand why customers feel a certain way or explore how they interpret a sensitive subject, sometimes other research methods work better than a digital or paper survey.
Use interviews when you need depth.
Live conversations allow for follow-up questions and nuance. They’re ideal when you’re dealing with emotion, complexity, or context that’s hard to capture in a closed-ended question.
Use usability studies when you’re testing processes.
You can ask people what they think of your website, or you can watch them use it. Watching gives you real-time insight that most surveys can’t provide.
Use personal outreach when you need quick feedback.
If you’re looking for input from a specific segment, like recently churned customers, skip the survey.
A short, focused email or call often leads to richer insights.
Use Service Evaluations when you need to have better interactions with customers. They’re useful when you want an in-depth examination of your call, chat, and email conversations—and want to know how to get more value from them.
If you notice the following signs, it’s worth considering if you’d be better off skipping the survey altogether.
- No matter what you’ve tried, no one responds to your surveys, or your customer/employee database is tiny to begin with.
- You’re not learning anything new from your surveys.
- You’re tackling topics that are personal, emotional, or complex.
Choosing the right method upfront saves you time, protects customer goodwill, and leads to stronger, more actionable insights.
Best Practices for Good Survey Sampling
Even the best-written survey won’t help if you’re asking the wrong customers —or the right customers in the wrong proportions.
Sampling doesn’t get much attention. It’s not shiny. But it’s the foundation of trustworthy data.
Get your sample wrong, and everything else collapses.
Sample too small? Your data won’t represent your customer base. You’ll make decisions based on outliers, not trends.
Sample too big? You might waste time and money collecting more survey responses than you need without gaining any detailed information that leads to clarity.
Worse, many companies fall into the habit of surveying only the easiest-to-reach customers—recent buyers, email openers, loyal fans. That creates a false sense of confidence while overlooking the quiet churn risks or casual users who see your business differently.
If you want reliable insights and segmented results you can act on, you need a sample that reflects the full spectrum of your customer base.
9. Survey the Right Customers (Or Employees)
You can’t improve the customer experience if you only hear from your happiest customers or employees.
For example, a good customer sample includes:
- Your newest customers
- Multi-year repeat buyers
- Those who’ve stopped engaging
- Customers who’ve never contacted support
- Customers who always contact support
Each of these groups experiences your business differently.
If you don’t hear from all of them, your survey data becomes lopsided, and your decisions follow suit.
And here’s the bigger point: without a mix of perspectives, you lose the ability to segment your results.
Segmentation lets you break down feedback by:
- Customer tenure (new customers vs. longtime customers)
- Behavior (heavy users vs. occasional users)
- Demographics (age, region, income, etc.)
It’s how you find out if first-time buyers are struggling with your sign-up flow. Or if high-value customers are quietly getting frustrated over a UX issue you had no idea existed.
No segmentation means no context. And without context, your survey is just a pile of averages.
10. Calculate the Correct Sample Size
It’s tempting to just survey whoever’s easiest to reach.
Don’t.
You need enough responses to make your data statistically valid—and evenly distributed enough to represent your whole customer base.
Here’s what that means:
- Generally speaking, the bigger your customer base, the larger your sample needs to be – up to about 370 responses per population.
- Margin of error and confidence levels aren’t technical fluff; they tell you if your results reflect reality.
Not sure how many responses you need? Use Interaction Metrics’ free Sample Size Calculator. It only takes 30 seconds to learn a whole lot more about what your survey really needs.
11. Randomize Your Outreach Whenever You Can
If your survey only goes to people who clicked your last email, you’re already working with a skewed sample.
Randomizing your outreach means every customer has an equal shot at being included, not just the people who are most engaged or easiest to reach.
Even simple randomization (like choosing every 10th customer on a list) can go a long way toward protecting the integrity of your data.
12. Use Quotas to Balance Customer Types
Randomization helps, but sometimes you need to go a step further.
Quotas let you control how many responses you get from each customer segment, so you don’t over-represent one group while leaving another out.
Examples of quotas (depending on how many subjects you have):
- 25% of responses from new customers
- 25% from long-time customers
- 25% from inactive users
- 25% from churn risks
This doesn’t mean you reject responses once a group hits its quota. But it does mean you proactively seek out underrepresented voices until you’ve got a balanced view of your audience.
The result? Data that shows you not just the average, but the differences between groups.
13. Monitor and Adjust As Responses Come In
Sampling isn’t “set it and forget it.”
You might start out with a randomized list or a balanced quota plan, but if certain groups don’t respond as expected, your sample can still go off-course.
That’s why it’s important to monitor your response patterns in real time.
If you notice that:
- Responses are coming mostly from one demographic,
- A particular segment isn’t participating,
- Or you’re trending too heavily toward one behavioral group…
Pause and recalibrate.
That could mean:
- Sending a reminder to only a specific subgroup
- Extending the window for lower-response segments
- Offering an incentive just to the group that’s underrepresented
Remember: you’re aiming for coverage, not just volume.
A great sample isn’t one that fills up fast. It’s one that tells the full story.
Best Practices for Survey Invitations
How you invite customers to take your survey says everything about how much you value their time and opinions.
A bad invite feels like spam.
A great one feels like an opportunity.
Here’s how to craft survey invitations that people want to answer.
14. Craft a Human, Personalized Survey Invite
If your survey invitation comes from “noreply@company.com,” you’ve already lost.
People don’t want to be talked at. They want to be spoken to.
Good invites:
- Come from a real person’s name and email address.
- Thank the customer for spending their time completing the survey
- Are specific about why the customer’s feedback matters.
The idea is simple: show your customers you respect their time before you ask for more of it.
15. Write Warm, Creative Subject Lines
Want your survey email to get deleted immediately?
Generic subject lines scream “bulk email.” They kill your open rates before you even get a chance.
Better options:
- Focus on customer impact: “Help shape your next experience.”
- Highlight a small reward: “We’d love your opinion—coffee’s on us.”
- Make it intriguing: “Got 60 seconds? We’ll make it worth it.”
Skip the word “survey” altogether if you can. Customers should feel like they’re joining a conversation, not completing a chore.
16. Offer Thoughtful Incentives (Without Overpromising)
Incentives are a great way to increase response rates—but only if they feel genuine.
Nobody believes they’ll win a $500 Amazon gift card for taking a survey. And even if they did, dangling big prizes can cheapen your brand.
Instead, small, guaranteed gifts show real appreciation.
Try offering a modest Starbucks card. A discount code. Early access to a new feature.
Interaction Metrics has seen success with “a latte on us” style incentives. Small surprises create positive reciprocity without making you sound desperate.
17. Actively Listen and Follow Up with Respondents
The moment someone completes your survey, the relationship changes.
They’ve invested time. They’ve told you something real. Now you owe them something back.
Even a small follow-up makes a huge difference. Customers don’t expect instant changes. But they do expect to know they were heard.
Fail to follow up, and they’ll never bother answering your next survey.
Good surveys start with a good invitation. They end by showing that someone on the other side was actually listening.
Best Practices for Analyzing Survey Data
A finished survey isn’t the end of the process. It’s the start of decision-making.
But that only works if the way you analyze the data is just as thoughtful as the way you designed the survey. Otherwise, you’re making business decisions on bad math, shallow insights, or noise.
Here’s how to avoid that.
18. Pre-Test Before You Launch (And Read the Results Like a Customer Would)
Yes, you should test your survey with a small group before sending it out.
But don’t just look for typos or broken logic. Pay attention to the actual experience of taking the survey.
- Do the questions flow naturally?
- Are any answer options missing?
- Are there moments where people hesitate to answer or feel boxed into a specific response?
Ask testers what they thought you were trying to learn after they’ve seen your survey.
Clarity is everything—both for the person answering and the person reading the results. If their answers don’t match your actual goal, rewrite your questions.
19. Break Down Your Results by Segment
If you want to understand your customer experience, you have to see how different groups are experiencing it differently.
Start by segmenting your results:
- New vs. longtime customers
- High-value vs. low-value buyers
- Different age groups or regions
- Different product or service lines
Maybe new customers love the onboarding, but longtime users are frustrated with upgrades. You’ll never see that if you lump everyone together in a single group.
If you’re serious about improving the experience, you need to know who is thriving—and who is struggling.
20. Visualize the Data
Averages smooth out the bumps—but those bumps are where the real problems live.
Instead of just looking at the mean score, visualize the full spread of your data.
Tools like histograms, scatterplots, or simple bar charts can show you:
- Whether responses cluster around a few scores
- Whether there’s a big gap between satisfied and dissatisfied customers
- Whether there’s a silent middle that might be getting overlooked
21. Study the Extremes to Spot Hidden Patterns
Your most passionate customers—whether they’re thrilled or furious—often know something others don’t.
Once you have your distribution mapped, study the extremes:
- What do the happiest customers have in common?
- What do the angriest ones share?
Are the frustrated customers mostly new users? Is one product line dragging down satisfaction across the board?
Extreme responses often surface issues that averages smooth over. They’re not noise. They’re signals—if you know how to look for them.
22. Focus on What the Data Tells You to Do Next
Survey data should lead to action.
But that doesn’t mean implementing every customer suggestion. It means spotting the friction points your team can address and doing something about them.
After every survey, your team should be able to answer:
- What’s the biggest issue this data revealed?
- Who does it affect the most?
- What would happen if we fixed it?
Then share a summary with your respondents. Tell them what you learned. Tell them what’s changing.
That’s how you close the loop and keep them willing to answer your next survey.
Discover a Smarter Way to Run Surveys
Interaction Metrics is a leading survey company that believes surveys should do more than check a box. They should uncover the truth—clearly, accurately, and without bias.
That’s why we created the TrueData™ method.
It’s our end-to-end model for building surveys that actually lead to better decisions. With TrueData™, you get more than a metric—you get a roadmap for improvement.
Here’s how the TrueData™ method delivers actionable insights you can use to improve the customer experience.
1. True-Facts: Scientifically Valid Questions
Every survey we run is custom-built around your goals.
We use a proprietary 20-point bias checklist to eliminate flawed constructs like leading language, irrelevant questions, and skewed answer options. That means you get honest, actionable insights—not just noise.
2. True-Tech: Enterprise-Grade Tools (Handled for You)
We license and manage best-in-class tools like Qualtrics, Alchemer, and SPSS.
No training. No extra fees. No DIY dashboards.
Just clean, professional survey deployment and analytics—handled entirely by our experts.
3. True-Insight: Advanced Analysis That Drives Action
Once the data comes in, we go beyond top-line stats.
We segment results. Analyze text. Surface patterns in the extremes. And give you plain-English reporting with real recommendations you can implement right away.
If you’re ready to stop guessing and start gathering survey insights you can actually use, let’s talk. Connect with the Interaction Metrics team to learn how the TrueData™ method can help you get more out of your surveys.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best rating scale for a web survey?
The best rating scale for online surveys is a 5-point or 7-point Likert scale. These scales offer enough variation for respondents to express their opinions clearly without feeling overwhelmed by too many options.
What is the difference between closed-ended questions and open-ended questions?
Closed-ended questions provide a fixed set of answer choices, such as multiple-choice or rating scales, making data easier to quantify. Open-ended questions allow respondents to answer in their own words, giving you richer, more detailed feedback that is harder to analyze at scale.
Can I ask demographic questions if my survey is anonymous?
Yes, you can ask demographic questions on an anonymous survey. Avoid asking members of your survey population for personally identifiable information like full names or emails. Focus on general attributes like age range, gender identity, or region.
What are the different types of biased questions on surveys?
The most common types of biased questions on surveys include leading questions, double-barreled questions, loaded questions, and forced-choice questions. Learn more about the different types of bias here.
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Care to discuss your next survey? Get in touch!
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