Are you ready to build your survey? Here are 5 survey mistakes to watch out for to help you craft a better survey:

1) Create a Long Questionnaire
We have this tendency to ask all the questions possible when designing a survey. Why shouldn’t we? We have this opportunity to tap into our clients’ feedback, why not ask away everything we need to know. Bad idea!

Long surveys tend to scare people at the onset and drive down the response rate. What good is the survey questionnaire if we can’t get participants to respond? Ask relevant questions, ask questions that will help you understand an aspect of your business that perplexes you. Use survey tools that will allow you to link your customer database with their survey responses, this can dramatically reduce the number of questions on your survey.

2) Forget to provide clear instructions
How many times have you clicked on a survey link to be taken straight away to the first question of the survey without much detail about the purpose of the survey? Survey design fail. Our Training Ninja, Melissa Krut, explains the importance of an introductory text in a short video here.

 3) Ask too many open-ended questions
Open-ended questions are great as it allows the participants to freely express their opinions without any limits imposed by our answer options. However, be wary of asking too many open-ended questions, as they can drive participants away from completing the survey for lack of time or their uneasiness in answering questions in detail. Also, open-ended questions are difficult to tabulate and collecting intelligence from them can be a challenge, time consuming or an expensive affair.

4) Deploy multi-lingual surveys without letting an expert review it
While it is great to deploy surveys in multiple languages, make sure that it is thoroughly reviewed and edited by a professional proficient in that language. Deploying surveys without reviewing the text and the language can sometimes lead to an embarrassing error. We all want to avoid that!

5) Ignore the look and feel
I can’t tell you, personally, how many surveys I have seen that totally ignored the branding and the look and feel of the survey. Remember, an attractive survey gets more responses. Before deploying a survey, make sure that they are responsive, that is, they can be seen on handheld devices with ease. Survey design should not only be smart but attractive, too.