Customer surveys come in many shapes and sizes but they tend to repeat the same mistakes time and time again. Review your survey and ensure that you don’t make these 10 Customer Feedback question mistakes!

1. The 10 Worst Customer Feedback Question
Mistakes You Can Make
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2. Introduction
Customer surveys come in many shapes and sizes but they tend to
repeat the same mistakes time and time again.
Review your survey and ensure that you don’t make these 10
Customer Feedback question mistakes!
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3. 1. Making Questions Mandatory
You should never make your customer feedback questions
mandatory.
While it may seem like a good idea in the moment it almost never
is because:
- It is disrespectful to your customers
- It generates bad data
- It reduces response rates
When written properly, your questions will get answered anyway.
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4. 2. Asking What You Already Know
An email invite for a survey from a large organisation was sent
out. Unbelievably the very first question in the survey was:
When you ask what you already know, you:
- Disrespect the customer’s time
- Introduce the chance for error in the response
Ask questions for answers you don’t know. It will make for a
shorter survey and better responses
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“What is your email address?”

5. 3. Asking Too Much/Private/Sensitive Too Soon
Consider this question from a real survey received:
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6. 3. Asking Too Much/Private/Sensitive Too Soon
Make sure you:
- Do not ask anything too sensitive in the first few questions
- Include the “I’d rather not say” option
Ask some easy questions to get things moving. Let the respondent
get to know the process and the survey a little bit before asking
anything too personal
Not including the “I’d rather not say” option means that if they
don’t want to answer the question they will either give erroneous
information or bail out of the survey at this point
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7. 4. Too Many Text Responses
You must ensure that the you include free text fields in your
survey to gather further valuable data.
However, asking too many text responses will:
- Place increased mental load on the respondent
- Lead to erroneous data from the respondent
- Force respondent to opt out of the survey
- Lower the response rate
Typically you should have only one or two free text fields in your
customer feedback survey.
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8. 5. Yes/No Questions
Take the below as an example:
This type of question is difficult for the customer to answer and
provides little information to the business: just a simple yes or no
A much more effective way to design the questions is:
Now the customer can provide an answer that meets their opinion
and you will get a much more nuanced view of what they think
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“Are you satisfied with our customer service? Yes/No”
“On a scale of 0, very unsatisfied to 7, very satisfied, how
satisfied are you with our customer service?”

9. 6. The 30th Question
The 30th Question. By this we simply mean a long survey.
When you make surveys long, you:
- Reduce the response rate
- Increase the load on customers
- Reduce the accuracy
If your survey has 20, 30 or even (and I’ve seen them) 50 pages
of questions you should radically redesign it.
Give yourself a 10 questions limit.
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10. 7. Answers Don’t Match Questions
Check out this survey question received from a major airline:
The responses, mostly, don’t match the questions:
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“What specifically did you dislike about the boarding experience?
– The efficient boarding process.”
“What specifically did you dislike about the boarding experience?
– I get priority boarding based on my status or special needs.”

11. 7. Answers Don’t Match Questions
In fact the first two responses are simple tautologies and add no
information. Reworded more clearly they simply say:
Responses that would have been more useful could have been:
- The cleanliness of the lounge
- The clarity of the public address announcements
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“What specifically did you dislike about the boarding experience?
– the boarding process.”
“What specifically did you dislike about the boarding experience?
– the priority boarding process.”

12. 8. Questions Your Customer Can’t Answer Accurately
Take the below as an example:
The trouble is that while everyone might have an opinion of what
makes an advertisement stand out it is probably not what really
makes it stand out for them.
A much better way to answer this question would be for the
newspaper to run tests of different layouts to see which works
best.
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13. 9. Prioritizing
Take the below as an example:
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“Please prioritize the following features from most important to
least important:
Feature 1
Feature 2
Feature 3
…
Feature 10
Feature 11
Feature 12”

14. 9. Prioritizing
There are two mistakes in this question:
- Prioritizing 12 items is a very difficult thing to do: basically the task is
just too hard
- Respondents don’t know the answer: this is the same as newspaper
mistake earlier
Ensure that you have no more than five elements in the list.
Any more than that and it makes it complex for the brain to order
them in any meaningful way.
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15. 10. Two Ideas in the Same Question
Take the below as an example:
The question has two separate ideas in the one question and the
respondent cannot answer the question accurately
If the customer is happy with accuracy but unhappy with the
clarity of the document, or visa versa, they are stuck.
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“How accurate and clear was our loan documentation?”

16. 10. Two Ideas in the Same Question
So, if you see two ideas in a question it’s best to simply put it into
two questions:
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“How accurate was our loan documentation?”
“How clear was our loan documentation?”

17. Review Your Survey
These mistakes are very common and I’d be surprised if your
feedback survey doesn’t have at least one or two of them
Take five minutes now and review your survey. Make sure that you
are not making any of these mistakes and lowering the
effectiveness of your customer feedback process.
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18. About RunOurSurvey
RunOurSurvey is dedicated to helping small businesses collect,
understand, and act on customer feedback
Check out our free resources:
• The Free Small Business Customer Feedback Megapack
Download your Customer Feedback Tools:
• The Complete Small Business Customer Feedback Kit
• The Customer Survey Question Sourcebook
We’ve also got a stack of content you might like:
• RunOurSurvey Customer Feedback Blog
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19. Contact RunOurSurvey
Below are our contact details. Please feel free to contact us at any time.
Phone: 02 9191 4700
+ 61 2 9191 4700
Website: www.RunOurSurvey.com
Email: info@runoursurvey.com
Twitter: @RunOurSurvey
Facebook: www.facebook.com/RunOurSurvey
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/RunOurSurvey
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