After you’ve spent some time finding out what specific information you might want from a customer when you present them with an online survey, you need to decide what type of answers will best suit your needs.

If you’re trying to understand how people feel about the value of specific products or services that you provide, then rating scales can be a great way to measure your questions.

There are a few types of rating scales to think about when you’re designing your questions, a rating scale and an agreement scale. Both are known as Likert Scales after the inventor.

Rating Scale

A rating scale is designed so that you can ask your customers to rate your product or service. For instance a popular scale is a scale of 1-5, one representing “needs work” and five representing “very good” with the number 3 being “average”. You can use radio buttons or pull down menus and give numerical choices as well as choices like Excellent, Good, OK, Fair, Poor.

Agreement Scale

In an agreement scale you can give your respondents a statement and ask them to indicate how closely their feelings match the statement on the scale. One indication of the
scale can represent a feeling like “Strongly Disagree,” and the higher end of
the scale can represent something favorable like “Strongly Agree.”

Rating scales can be great for any business if you want to find out how your customers or your visitors really feel about you. You can ask them to rate many things or even just one! You can also put an open-ended question right after the rating scale and ask them to comment. Then you’ll get to the real scoop of why they felt a particular way.

One last note: If you have a few rating scales in a single survey make sure you keep them the same throughout your survey so as not to confuse your survey takers. Happy surveying and look to VerticalResponse for your survey needs!

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