60 good survey questions: Types, examples and tips

You need a solid foundation: good survey questions to collect meaningful and actionable survey insights. This may seem obvious, but it’s rather important for ensuring the overall success of your survey.

Well-written survey questions solicit accurate and actionable insights that can guide product development, direct marketing campaigns and improve customer journeys.

Learn how to write good survey questions for your next research project.

Good survey questions are clear, neutral, unbiased and relevant to your research objective.

Survey questions are crucial to any survey, as they help gather valuable insights and data from respondents. Crafting effective survey questions is essential for obtaining accurate and actionable information.

Good survey questions are relevant to your goals and objectives. For example, some help you to understand customers’ satisfaction with your company, products or service. The Net Promoter Score^® (NPS®) question, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend?”, is an excellent survey question if you’re measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty.

However, an employee NPS (eNPS) survey question would be a better fit if your objective is to measure employee engagement. 

Combining qualitative open-ended questions with quantitative closed-ended questions can enhance survey insights by providing detailed personal feedback and measurable data. By understanding the various types of survey questions and how to use them effectively, you can create surveys that yield valuable insights and drive informed decision-making.

Your research objective is the difference between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ survey question. Here are 60 good survey question examples based on the situation, including customer satisfaction, employee engagement and post-event.

The use of good customer service survey questions, which should be clear and straightforward, can accomplish two things: solicit honest customer feedback and reinforce your company brand. Here are 12 customer service questions to jump-start your customer support survey.

Employee-centric survey questions deserve the same care and attention as customer-facing questions. Employees are just as likely as customers to abandon and ‘straightline’ surveys.

These responses can have a dramatic impact on the accuracy of your employee engagement and satisfaction data and mislead employee initiatives. You can avoid this outcome by asking these Likert scale and dichotomous employee survey questions to gauge employee engagement and satisfaction.

Good UX surveys use various question types to understand the customers’ experience with your product. Likert scale questions gather quantitative data, while open-ended questions allow you to understand customer sentiment.

Use these UX survey questions to evaluate user experience and product usability. You should bear in mind the fact that you may wish to include high-resolution images with the survey question.

Post-event feedback questions are deployed immediately after an event. For this reason, questions are often closed-ended and concise as it’s likely that the survey will be completed on mobile devices, which encourages high response rates.

Consider these survey questions after an event to collect feedback from participants.

Closed-ended questions are among the most accurate ways to gather quantitative information. These questions limit a user’s response options to pre-selected multiple choice answers, making them easier to analyse. You aren’t restricted to closed-ended questions, though. In many cases, like the NPS survey question, it is best practice to follow up with an open-ended question to understand the respondent’s answer.

Here are 12 examples of quantitative survey questions for a variety of research objectives.

Different types of survey questions, such as multiple choice, rating scale and open-ended questions, each serve unique purposes and can provide a comprehensive understanding of the respondents’ opinions and experiences. 

Consider the following question types as you scrutinise your survey questions and their ability to gather the information that you need in order to succeed. Nominal questions, for instance, present respondents with multiple answer choices that do not overlap, ensuring clarity and precision in responses.

Dichotomous questions are binary “yes” or “no” survey questions, restricting respondents to two straightforward answer options. This type of survey question is quantitative and can be followed up with open-ended questions.

For example, a human resources professional may ask a new hire whether they received a benefits package presentation.

Ranking questions ask respondents to organise answer choices in order of preference. Ranking questions can be a fun and interactive activity. They can also be used to gather insights for niche needs.

A product manager may use a ranking question to ask customers to rank product features. Survey responses can help product managers to prioritise feature updates.

A semantic differential scale question asks respondents to rate their attitude towards a topic. The two end points of the scale are opposites.

For example, if a product usability question asks “How easy was it to use this product feature?”, then the two answer end points would be “very easy” and “very difficult”.

Matrix questions have the same response options in a row. Likert scale questions or rating scale questions work well as matrix questions.

For example, a customer experience professional may ask whether, on a scale of “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied”, customers are satisfied with the product, customer support team and onboarding.

Dropdown questions are closed-ended, multiple choice questions that allow for a long list of responses. You should bear in mind the fact that a long list of dropdown answers may not display well on mobile devices.

Slider questions are interactive, quantitative survey questions. Respondents answer questions according to a numerical scale, making it easy for survey-makers to aggregate and analyse data.

Image choice questions allow respondents to select images as answers. This type of question works really well when you want respondents to evaluate visual qualities. For example, you can use this question for logo testing and user interface testing.

Constant sum questions require respondents to divide a specific number of points or percentages as part of a total sum.

For example, a survey question may ask the following: “Using 100 points, please apply a number of points to each factor based on how important each is to you when using our product.”

Side-by-side questions enable you to ask multiple questions in a condensed format. Like matrix questions, this type of question will enable you to evaluate several aspects of a subject in a straightforward format.

Star rating questions are another way to enable respondents to evaluate a statement according to a visual scale. The scale comprises stars, hearts, thumbs, smiles or other niche visuals that help survey-makers to measure respondent sentiment. Whichever visual you use, each is assigned a weight so that a quantitative score can subsequently be aggregated.

Do you want to hear from survey respondents in their own words? If so, you’ll need an open-ended question requiring respondents to type their answers into a text box instead of choosing from preset answer options.

Since open-ended questions are exploratory, they invite insights into respondents’ opinions, feelings and experiences. Good open-ended questions will often explore all three and serve as follow-ups to previous closed-ended questions. 

Multiple choice questions are the most popular survey question type. They allow your respondents to select one or more options from a list of answers that you define. They’re intuitive, help produce easy-to-analyse data and provide mutually exclusive choices. Because the answer options are fixed, your respondents will have a more effortless survey-taking experience.

Likert scales are a specific type of rating scale. They’re the “agree or disagree’’ and “likely or unlikely” questions that you often see in online surveys. They’re used to measure attitudes and opinions. They go beyond the simpler “yes”/“no” question, using a five- or seven-point rating scale that goes from one extreme attitude to another.

For example:

Related: Which common survey questions are asked most often?

You already know that good survey questions are clear, neutral, unbiased and relevant. But the question remains: how do you write good survey questions? Here are five tips that you can use right now to write good survey questions for accurate data collection.

Related: Best practices for writing good survey and poll questions

Avoid leading questions that encourage respondents to give a specific answer.

You know the type: “Since you love our product so much, how likely is it that you would recommend it to a friend?”; or “Tell us about how the conference changed your professional life.”

These survey questions assume the respondent’s experience, inserting bias into the question.

Use language that your respondents understand, and save the jargon for your colleagues.

Think of it this way: how do you expect respondents to respond to the best of their ability when they don’t understand the question? Of course, respondents have the option to follow up or do their own research. However, it’s more likely that they’ll fill in a random answer or abandon the survey, which will impair the accuracy of your data.

Simplify your survey question language. And if you must use industry-specific language, define it for the respondents.

Double-barrelled questions, or questions that ask for a respondent’s opinion about two things at the same time, are a recipe for confusion and flawed data.

An example of this is the question “How would you rate our customer service and product reliability?”. This combines customer satisfaction and product usability questions. It is not clear which question the respondent should answer.

This may result in the respondent skipping the question, providing an answer that doesn’t reflect their true opinion or abandoning the survey altogether. 

To avoid double-barrelled questions, you should refer to your research objective and ensure that the question aligns with your research question. You should also distribute your survey to colleagues before you send it to your target audience because they can help to identify issues that may not be evident to you.

Good survey questions are key to effective market research. The right questions will solicit actionable data that puts product development, marketing campaigns and CX initiatives firmly on the path to success.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a survey expert to write survey questions. SurveyMonkey has 400+ expert-written survey templates and prebuilt forms that you can customise to suit your specific requirements.

NPS, Net Promoter and Net Promoter Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.