To gain the best-possible insights from your data, you need to ask the right questions. In market research, closed-ended survey questions help you quickly gather data and enhance survey response rates. 

A closed-ended question is concise and offers a set range of potential responses. The simplest possible responses are Yes/No, while others could ask a respondent to select their favourite aspect of a product from five different options.

Let’s dive into the importance of effective questioning, outlining how closed-ended questions can be a winning tool in a researcher’s toolbox. 

Closed-ended questions offer a respondent a limited selection of potential answers. Respondents will choose from answers such as “true/false” or “yes/no”, or from a scale between “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree”. They differ from open-ended questions as your business sets the range of answers that a respondent will use to express their opinions.

Closed-ended questions help a business collect data that it can use in quantitative analysis. Gathering data from many respondents allows you to easily compare and analyse responses.

Researchers will typically use closed-ended questions to observe statistical trends and keep track of how responses change over time. For example, the question “On a scale of extremely satisfied to extremely dissatisfied, how would you rate your recent experience with customer service?” will yield quantifiable answers that reflect the efficiency of your CS department.

Although all closed-ended questions offer a limited number of potential responses, they do so to varying degrees. Some types of closed-ended questions only have two responses, while others can have many more.

Here are some common closed-ended question types that you’re likely to come across. 

Multiple choice questions are a popular type of closed-ended question. This format allows survey respondents to select an answer that they identify with. You can offer a range of answers, allowing users to intuitively find a response that suits them. 

Here’s an example of how a multiple choice closed-ended question can look: 

Rating scale questions (also known as ordinal questions) ask respondents to choose an answer from a set scale. Typical scales will range from 1 to 10, while some answers could expand out to between 1 and 100. 

Here is an example of a rating scale question from a Net Promoter® Score (NPS®) survey:

The Likert scale is a rating scale that measures feelings and opinions using closed-ended questions. It's most likely that you’ll have come across the Likert scale in terms of asking “how much do you agree or disagree” with a certain statement.

Here’s an example of a Likert scale closed-ended question:

Matrix questions are a way to ask respondents to agree or disagree with  several related questions in a row to gain a lot of data. These closed-ended questions work well when you need to collect information about various processes, ideas or opinions with the same scale of answers.

Here’s an example of a matrix question:

Dropdown questions are a simple and effective way of gathering survey responses without respondents feeling overwhelmed by too many answer options. A dropdown box gives a scrollable list of answers. Businesses commonly use this form of closed-ended question when asking for a customer’s year of birth or nationality, providing a long list of potential responses.

Here’s an example of a dropdown question:

Most surveys will use demographic questions to build up a personal context for demographic segmentation. Demographic questions give you the option to filter the data that you collect according to a certain demographic segment – such as married vs. single, as illustrated in the example below – to uncover any common preferences or behaviours. You can use demographic responses to create more personalised surveys down the line, helping to improve response rates.

Here is a typical demographic question that you’re likely to see:

A ranking question gives respondents a few core selections and then asks them to place them in order of preference or importance. Users can typically drag and drop options to order them or assign values corresponding to a scale to them. The value of a ranking question is that it will provide weighted data; respondents won’t be able to select all the options with the same level of importance.

Here is an example of a ranking question:

Image questions allow users to select from a range of images in order to give their feedback. These question types are especially important when the visual aspect of an answer is its focus, such as choosing a favourite design.

Here is an example of an image choice question:

As an alternative form of image choice question, click maps provide additional visual context and data. Businesses will commonly use this question type when assessing different parts of a visual medium, such as seeing where their eyes move to on a supermarket shelf or on brand packaging.

Here is an example of a click map question:

Slider questions are a form of rating scale questions where respondents use a slider to indicate their response. As an interactive question, these are useful to break up monotonous clicking content.

Here is an example of a slider question:

Open-ended and closed-ended questions provide respondents with different answer formats. In open-ended questions, respondents will have a textbox space where they can type in an answer that may not be included as an answer option. This format allows people to provide personal opinions about a service or product, as well as give extensive feedback to a question. It also allows you to uncover answers that you may not have considered but that are important to your customers.

On the other hand, a closed-ended question offers a limited pool of answer options that are predetermined by the survey creator. This format provides a list of answers and the survey respondent will select the one that aligns most closely with their belief.

Open-ended questions give respondents full creative licence over their response, which can lead to a varied and random list of answers. Closed-ended questions establish a set of answer options that respondents can choose from to represent their thoughts most closely. 

As respondents all select from the same range of answers, closed-ended questions are useful when collecting specific forms of data. Their click-box style allows respondents to engage with questions quickly and efficiently, helping to improve the data collection process.

Here are some leading benefits of closed-ended questions.

For companies to produce actionable insights from data analytics, they must first collect as much data as possible on a subject. When it comes to survey data, one problem that companies can run into is a lack of completed responses.

Incomplete surveys could be a sign of a survey that is too long or too laborious to complete. Often, a simple solution to these problems is to increase the number of closed-ended questions you ask. If you only rely on open-ended questions, respondents will have to spend more effort completing each question.

Closed-ended questions are much faster to complete, helping to increase the likelihood that a respondent finishes your survey. By relying on closed-ended questions where possible, and limiting open-ended ones, you’ll streamline the data collection process and achieve higher survey response rates.

Closed-ended survey questions are fantastic when you're aiming to gather data for quantitative analysis. As each of these question types has a limited number of responses, you can easily gather numerical data about your audience. Every survey response populates a pre-built data response, making it easy to categorise responses into quantifiable data.

The standardised format of closed-ended questions helps businesses to apply quantitative analysis techniques, such as correlation analysis, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. These techniques help researchers identify trends, patterns and relationships in the data.

Another leading benefit of using closed-ended questions is that they decrease the amount of effort required from survey respondents. Open-ended questions ask more from users as they have to type out a response. On the other hand, closed-ended questions simply ask respondents to click on an answer that they identify with.

When using the Likert scale for closed-ended questions, all your users will simply click on one of between five and seven answers. This response takes significantly less time than thinking of an answer and typing it out.

By including closed-ended questions, you significantly reduce the time it takes for a user to respond to your survey. This approach helps to improve survey response rates and enhance data collection.

Although closed-ended questions are useful for various reasons, they shouldn’t be the only types of questions you use. Using a mix of closed- and open-ended questions will help you quantify your data and then discover the qualitative reasoning behind those figures.

However, there are a few scenarios where it’s more useful to focus on closed-ended questions.

Although open-ended questions are useful when finding the “how” behind your data, they also require a larger time commitment from all parties. For respondents, providing a response to an open-ended question takes much longer. Researchers then have to read the entire response and search for useful data within it. 

When dealing with a large respondent pool, it’s more efficient to use closed-ended questions where possible. If you have a sample size of 1,000 candidates, reading through a few paragraphs of response for each one would quickly become a mammoth task. However, you can use data analysis tools to gather closed-ended question responses quickly, in a matter of seconds.

The larger your respondent pool, the more necessary it becomes to use closed-ended question responses. This approach will help you manage your resources more effectively and also obtain more useful data from the surveys that you send out.

Many customer experience metrics require statistical analysis to help researchers make sense of their data. Closed-ended questions provide the numerical data that is most compatible with statistical analysis, making this a useful choice.

For example, if a business is looking to improve its customer experience programme, it may decide to run a Net Promoter® Score survey. This survey uses a single closed-ended question to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. It asks: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” 

Respondents will then be able to click on a response ranging from 0 (not likely to recommend) to 10 (extremely likely to recommend). Based on this data, businesses can work out the number of Promoters (9 or 10 ratings), Passives (7 or 8 ratings) and Detractors (0–6 ratings) that their company has.

Businesses can use this initial data to calculate the overall NPS® score, revealing a figure from -100 to 100, representing customer loyalty. With open-ended questions, a mathematical formula that discerns this information wouldn’t be possible, as the answers could vary so much.

Alternatively, businesses can use closed-ended data for a range of statistical analyses:

If your business is racing against the clock, then you’ll need to gather data as quickly as possible. In order to rapidly capture data, you can send out short, specific and closed-ended survey questions. Short surveys of between one and three questions with closed-ended answers will take users a few seconds to fill in.

This approach will lead to a high survey completion rate, generating as much data for your business as quickly as possible. Another example of this in action is using a social media platform to poll a larger audience. On X (formerly Twitter), businesses can instantly publish a poll with a select number of responses to their entire audience.

Launching a poll in this fashion will help expose your question to a wider audience and help increase the speed of data capture. Alternatively, you can launch a private survey via email and send it out to all of your mailing lists. This will also gather a lot of responses but will be less public, thus preventing any potential false responses from diminishing the quality of the data. 

When it comes to collecting data as quickly as possible, closed-ended questions are the way to go. 

Organisations can specifically tailor closed-ended questions to gather certain quantifiable information. This type of question can provide useful data in several fields of customer experience, business operations and industry research. 

Here are some common examples of closed-ended questions that you may use.

The aim of customer satisfaction surveys is to gather data about how customers feel across various touchpoints in their journey with your company. You can use automatic triggers to send out surveys once a customer completes a certain action, such as purchasing a product or interacting with your sales team.

A popular CX survey that uses closed-ended questions is the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey. The CSAT survey asks customers to rate their satisfaction with your company on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being very satisfied. This closed-ended question format allows you to rapidly generate numerical data for statistical analysis. Gathering this form of data will reveal how satisfied your customers feel with your business. 

Market research allows you to gain a more comprehensive insight into customer opinions and decision-making factors. Closed-ended questions allow you to ask customers to choose factors that influenced them most or that captured their attention when interacting with your brand. You can then turn these insights into actionable data to enhance your customer experience.

For example, you could ask customers: “Which of the following factors influenced your purchasing decision the most?” You could then list the following potential answers:

Depending on your business, you can tailor the responses to encompass every area where you want to generate data. You can use market research in a range of areas, such as ad testing, global surveys, concept testing, messaging testing, idea screening, usage and attitudes, price optimisation and more.

When discussing the power of closed-ended questions, we mainly think about how we can use them to enhance the customer experience. But their utility doesn’t stop there. We can also use closed-ended questions to track, monitor and improve the employee experience.

We can ask the following questions using these employee feedback surveys:

Surveys like these can rapidly generate insight into how your employees are feeling. By measuring these satisfaction surveys with closed-ended questions, you can easily model how opinions change over time. This is especially useful when charting the impact of any internal changes you make. 

Product feedback moves away from iterating based on gut reactions and helps pinpoint data-driven improvements you can use to improve. Quantifiable closed-ended survey response questions help companies to clearly monitor what customers like and want to see next with regard to a product.

Here are some typical product feedback closed-ended questions that you can use:

A company’s website is often its main touchpoint with customers. Improving it over time by using data-driven insights is a powerful way of positively iterating upon and enhancing your business. After certain events, such as making a purchase or filling in a response form, you can trigger short, closed-ended survey questions to collect data.

Here is a range of website feedback survey questions you can use:

You can always contact respondents who leave a negative response and ask for more feedback to help close the feedback loop.

Another powerful use of closed-ended questions is to gather information about how attendees perceived an event that they attended. As a one-question survey that’s quick and easy to fill out, these typically have high response rates. Using event evaluation surveys, you can gauge how effective your event was and whether the participants got what they were expecting from it.

Here are some examples of general event feedback survey questions:

When gathering data, we need to ensure that we ask the right questions without overwhelming our respondents. Sometimes, the best question for the job is closed-ended. Using these questions will help you rapidly gather numerical data that’s perfect for statistical analysis.

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