Every Question You Ask Is Expensive

The good news is I have been receiving questions from more proprietors interested in finding out how to get more information about their customers. I frequently refer them to http://www.surveymonkey.com which is an on line research company that helps you to send, manage and analyze the results of a questionnaire to your data base.

The bad news is that "questionnaire writing and market research analysis" didn't usually come with the job description for a bowling proprietor.

So in this short post, here are 4 Tips for Writing a Questionnaire

1.       Every question you ask is expensive. (Expensive in terms of loyalty and goodwill). Don't ask a question unless you truly care about the answer. This means that a vague question with vague answers (extremely satisfied...acceptable...extremely dissatisfied and no scale to compare them to) is a total waste of time. What action will you take based on that? It's smarter to ask, "how much would you say lunch was worth?"

2.       Every question you ask changes the way your users think. If you ask, "which did you hate more..." then you've planted a seed.

3.      Make it easy for the user to bail. If you have 20 questions (that's a lot!) make it easy to quit after five and have those answers still count. If you waste my time and then don't count my answers, see #2

4.      Make the questions entertaining and not so serious, at least some of them. Boring surveys deserve the boring results they generate.    Don't be afraid to shake up the format. Instead of saying, "Here are ten things, rank them all on a scale of one to five..." why not let people compare things?  "We had two speakers, Bob and Ray. Who was better?

For more information on this, give me a jingle at 516 359 4874