Open-ended questions and satisfaction surveys: the rules of thumb

As we've seen in previous articles, the open question is essential to any customer satisfaction questionnaire. It allows customers to express themselves freely about their experience, and to go beyond the closed questions asked elsewhere.

It is also used for semantic analysis.

But many of our customers ask us how best to write it. How can they make the most of the comments left by their customers?

Group your open-ended questions

It can be tempting to formulate several open-ended questions in your questionnaire. For example, it's not uncommon to have one open-ended question per section (Reservation, Welcome, Stay, Departure...). The advantage of this method is that you can easily give the right feedback to the department concerned. The semantic analysis is then almost dispensable. The customer does the categorization himself.

But I see several problems. First of all, answering an open-ended question takes up an enormous amount of the customer's time. And the multiplication of open-ended questions risks significantly affecting your return rate.

Secondly, the operative who reads the piece of commentary intended for him or her risks losing all contextual information. The customer's irritation, for example, may have been built up gradually, over the course of the customer's journey.

Prefer a single neutral question

The way the question is worded will also have an impact on the results obtained.

You can play the company that owns up to its shortcomings with a question like "To help us improve, do you have any comments on your experience in our store?". According to our previous experience, you'll get 80% negative feedback: logical, since that's what you're asking for. The disadvantage of this approach is twofold:

• Reading comments becomes difficult for operational staff. An exercise in self-flagellation is not necessarily good for team morale.
• Customers don't talk about what went right. But this information is just as important.

You can then try a 2-question approach: "Tell us what you liked" and then "Tell us what we need to improve". The big advantage of this option is that you balance positive and negative comments. What's more, you have an initial categorization of the comments (positive tone and negative tone). The problem, however, is that responses are often in bullet-point format. Customers respond with a list of keywords. And that's a big problem. It's the grammar used, the tone, the construction of sentences that give all their richness to comments.

This is the simplest, yet most effective solution. A question like "Following your stay, do you have any comments? The customer will express himself in a constructed sentence, naturally balancing positive and negative comments. However, this is France: expect more negative than positive comments.

Place your open-ended question at the end of the questionnaire

This seems logical enough, but it's important all the same. The open-ended question also allows the customer to cover areas that were not covered in the closed-ended questions. It therefore seems logical to position the open question at the end of the questionnaire.

Conclusion

I can't stress this enough. The open-ended question is essential for any satisfaction survey, and you need to read all the comments received. To maximize this contribution, we've seen that it's best to use a simple open-ended question, positioned at the end of the questionnaire.