Tips: provide guidance and explain complex questions
Explanatory notes and instructions
Never assume that your customer questionnaire will be self-explanatory to every participant. Each complex question should include an explanatory note to ensure that it can be answered correctly. Ideally, first conduct an internal pre-test and evaluate the resulting feedback. During the pre-test, your customer survey is conducted under controlled conditions: you ask selected colleagues to complete the survey so that you can identify any weaknesses. If this reveals that questions are unclear, they should be adjusted, reworded or supplemented with explanatory notes and instructions.
Sometimes explanatory information is essential for answering a question correctly, for example with rating or scale questions. Explain the scale, measurement system or allocation of points. What do the answers from 1 to 5 mean? Are they grades, or do the numbers represent particular sentiments? The clearer and easier to understand the questionnaire is, the more valid the data (responses) you receive will be.
Tip: Make sure that every customer understands each question in the same, correct way. Otherwise, you will not receive reliable and comparable responses.
