Sample survey questions and examples

Although SurveyMonkey makes creating, conducting and analysing an online survey super simple, we know that sometimes the hardest part is working out how to ask that first question. Whether you’re looking for a survey template or just need some inspiration from sample questions, we are here to help.

With thousands of expert-written sample questions, it’s easy to get the insights you need. Learn more about our sample survey questions and examples below.

A good survey question provides you with valuable insights and important information about your audience, whether they are customers, parents or conference attendees. It is concise and strategic and will equip you with insights that are actionable. Here are the five elements of a good survey question:

If you get things right, your survey questions will show you crucial information about your target audience. You’ll find out what they value, what’s stopping them from doing business with you, why they leave your website without making a purchase and more. Here’s why it’s important to ask good survey questions: 

If formulated correctly, your survey will provide you with valuable data that can be reported on clearly. For example, a good closed-ended survey question can give you numbers in the form of percentages, such as the number of customers who have a positive experience with customer support. These types of questions are best for viewing SurveyMonkey automatic charts and graphs. If you use a good open-ended question, you will obtain feedback straight from the customer’s mouth, which can make reporting in a word cloud especially valuable.

You want your survey questions to yield answers that truly reflect how your survey takers think and feel. By removing any survey bias, you’re ensuring that you have the most accurate reflection of your audience. This includes making sure that your questions aren’t leading or loaded. 

Good survey questions will yield actionable insights that you can use to improve your overall business model. For example, if you ask a customer how satisfied they are with your product or service on a scale of 1–5, you’ll have the data that you need to make adjustments.

A good survey question can give you some eye-opening information about your audience, such as employees, for example. If you ask employees whether they would recommend your company to a colleague or friend and the response is overwhelmingly negative, then you’ve uncovered an issue in the employee experience that needs to be addressed.

By following the best practices for creating surveys, your survey will be successful and participants will be able to provide you with clear, actionable data.

Use of these best practices will ensure that your questions exhibit the following characteristics:

Related: 5 common survey question mistakes that will ruin your data

When it comes to analysing the responses that you’ve collected, your questionnaire data is only as good as the questions that you’ve asked. Let’s use a leading question as an example:

“Why don’t you like your job?”

This is a leading question because it assumes that your survey participants don’t like their jobs and the type of responses you receive will all be about a negative employee experience. 

Similarly, if you don’t provide an “Other”, “None” or “Not applicable” option for a question, you may force your survey-takers to pick an answer that doesn’t reflect their actual circumstances. For example, respondents to this survey may not have any pets:

Which of the following pets do you own? (Select all that apply.)

To avoid these, and other, survey question blunders, use SurveyMonkey’s question bank to choose a question that works within your survey. Alternatively, you can use one of our pre-written survey templates and simply customise it as you go along. Built-in AI can also help to score your survey in order to determine whether your questions need adjusting.

Asking good survey questions is key to getting those valuable results that you’re looking for. Our expert-written survey questions will help you to reduce bias and give you more accurate responses. We make it easy to avoid survey slip-ups because we comply with survey best practices by using expert-certified Likert scales and effective question types. 

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We get answers to over 20 million questions daily and we’ve found that our most popular survey types are about:

Below is an ordered list that shows the seven most popular templates. Once signed in to your account, you can start building your survey or questionnaire with these example questions and you can modify them to suit your specific survey requirements.

Choose a template below to preview sample questions. (Some templates may not be available in all languages.)

Customer satisfaction is defined as a client’s overall level of satisfaction with using your product or service. If you’re a business owner, you need to understand what your customers want in order to keep them happy and loyal. Our customer satisfaction survey template helps you to work out how your customers feel and allows you to catch small problems before they become big ones. 

Any business can benefit from using a customer satisfaction survey. If you’re a restaurant owner, you could use this survey to gather feedback about new menu items. Businesses that sell tangible products can ask customers questions about their experiences with the products and features and their overall impressions. Service providers may ask questions that help to prioritise their offerings. Our templates are customisable, so you can use them to obtain any type of customer satisfaction feedback.

Customer satisfaction surveys allow you to get an inside look at what your customers are thinking and feeling when they use your products or services. You can then take action to improve any sub-par aspects and reduce or remove problematic items. 

It’s important to measure employee satisfaction in order to avoid attrition, low morale, decreases in productivity and more. Our employee satisfaction survey template will help you understand what is motivating your employees so you can maintain a high-performing workplace. 

Employee satisfaction surveys are useful if your business is experiencing high turnover rates. If, for example, your employees are noticeably less productive or employee reviews of your business are becoming more negative, then this survey will help you work out why. You may also use an employee satisfaction survey if employee attendance at company events is decreasing, you’re re-evaluating remuneration packages or you have new leadership. 

When your employees are happy, your customers are happy. Let employees know you care about them by asking for their honest feedback and using it to adjust your organisation’s policies. As a result, you may see increased employee retention rates and a more positive company culture.

We’ve all had positive and negative experiences with customer support. When a customer needs support, they are looking for a positive experience, which will naturally lead to long-term loyalty. A customer services survey will let you know just how effectively your representatives are turning problems into solutions. Not sure what questions to ask? If so, our customer service survey template is a great place to start.

If you want to know why your customers are churning, or you’re trying to win them back, then a customer service survey might be a good idea. You can also use these surveys to understand how customers are using your products and services and whether they experience any friction during their experience: purchase, usage, delivery, etc. 

Not only can you determine which employees may require more training on the products and services that your business offers, but you can also uncover aspects of your products and service that require improvement.

Launch your product successfully, test ideas for new product features, produce more effective marketing and advertising campaigns and gain market intelligence with a little help from market research surveys. Detailed feedback from your target market or consumers will allow you to make changes and improvements to your strategies. Begin with our market research survey template and customise it to suit your needs.

Market research can help you to do a variety of things. The most common method of market research is product testing to find out how your product is working. You can also use market research to gain an understanding of your competition. Market research allows you to reach out to your target market and glean useful insights before making any decisions that may affect their perceptions of your brand, product or service.

Before launching a new campaign, product or service, your business can use a market research survey to make sure that your marketing plan is successful. Gauge your target demographic’s thoughts on your policies before stating them publicly. Know in advance which features your customers want from your product update.

Conduct a survey to find out what the parents, and teaching and non-teaching staff, think about the climate at your state school. The climate at a state school plays a crucial role in the student experience. 

A state school survey is conducted to enlighten school leadership about a school’s climate, culture and atmosphere. Our simple school climate survey will help schools to home in on people’s perceptions.

State school climate data will reveal whether your school has the right environment, resources and relationships for its students to thrive. You can use this data to inform changes to enhance your school community.

SurveyMonkey has many education surveys to choose from: for administrators, students, instructors and more.

Colleagues evaluate each other by means of a 360-degree employee evaluation. Unlike a typical performance review completed by a manager, this survey also takes into account feedback from peers, customers, reporting staff and anyone who the individual has contact with. This template will help you to get started with 360-degree employee evaluations. 

These types of surveys can help organisations to become more efficient by learning where there might be friction or areas for improvement. They help managers to act on feedback from their employees and also help colleagues to become better collaborators. These surveys help employees to assess their strengths and weaknesses, management styles and more. 

An employee receives feedback from multiple sources about various aspects of their job. This can build and strengthen work relationships, reveal areas for development, provide insight into training needs and develop teamwork and accountability.

Our K–12 parent survey template was created in collaboration with The Harvard Graduate School of Education (USA). It is used to survey parents on their thoughts, feelings and attitudes about their child’s school. 

Teachers and administrators can distribute this survey to find out whether parents are promoting learning outside of the classroom, how they view the school’s discipline system, whether they feel classroom lessons are motivating to students and other factors affecting the success of the school.

This survey provides parents with a way to express their views about the school and offers educators and administrators clear feedback about parents’ perceptions. Find out what’s working and what’s not with our expert template.

Do you need to gather feedback about distance learning? Try our distance learning survey template.

From open-ended to closed-ended question types, we offer over a dozen types of survey questions. The most popular (and often the most useful) are multiple choice questions. However, different question types serve different purposes. Learn more about choosing the right question type and writing good survey questions.

Multiple choice questions are the most popular survey question type. In this type of question, respondents select one or more options from a list of answers defined by you. Multiple choice is the type of question used to provide structured data for analysis. 

Survey question examples:

Which of the following options best describes our brand?

Which product feature is most important to you?

In rating scale questions, respondents are offered answers on a scale with a range (e.g. 0–10). By providing a range rather than simply “yes” or “no”, customers can express their opinions without committing to an absolute.

Survey question example:

How likely is it that you would recommend this product to a friend?

Not at all likely               Extremely likely 

To gauge your respondents’ opinions or attitudes about a range of topics, you’ll use Likert scale questions. They generally offer between five and seven options with extreme opposites at the ends and a neutral choice in the centre. 

Survey question example:

How would you rate your experience with our customer service representative?

Are you interested in gathering information about your respondent’s background, income level or relationship status? If so, demographic questions will give you insight into your target audience. The answers to these questions will allow you to segment your audience and examine your data in detail. Learn more about using demographic questions in your surveys.

Survey question example:

What is your age?

Open-ended questions require respondents to type their answers into a provided comment box. There are no answer choices. These questions give respondents the opportunity to personalise their answers and offer feedback in their own words. These answers may be more difficult to analyse, but they can uncover information that you hadn’t considered before.

Survey question examples:

Do you want to know the difference between open-ended and closed-ended questions? 

Related: Survey with file upload: How-to, examples and tips

Are you ready to build and send your survey?

We hope that this got you thinking about which questions you’re going to ask on your survey. Just for fun, see if you can guess what the most frequently used questions are!

Start with one of our expert-designed survey templates or build your own using the certified questions available in our question bank. We also provide guides on how to write good survey questions and calculate a sample size as well as how to create and conduct surveys. Explore those too!