When it comes to writing surveys, it may be difficult to know how to start. When done correctly, surveys can be a great tool for receiving essential information for your bank. However, when done poorly, the information you gain from them will be practically useless. Here we’ll go over three big tips for writing great surveys for your bank.
Start Off With a Research Objective
Your objective should state your research tool (in this case surveys), who your audience is, the main idea of the research and the type of questions that will be asked. Once this has been settled, you can generate potential topics and categories and then create the first draft of questions.
Create Your Questions With Your End Goal in Mind
By creating your questions while knowing what the end results should look like, you’ll be able to hit every mark and not miss vital information. Start by creating a mockup of crucial tables produced after you analyze the survey answers. In other words, think about what you want to include in your final report and create mock ups of it. Once these mockups have been created, review them to make sure that it includes all the information you need. This is a great way to identify questions you don’t need and also identify missing questions.
Make Sure All Bank Stakeholders View Your Survey Draft
Sharing your survey draft with people in different departments is essential to having a successful survey. Someone who’s not in your department may have a different outlook on the questions you provided. Or they might notice a question that’s missing. You might need to make multiple changes to your survey and that’s okay. Creating the right survey is a group effort and sometimes requires multiple eyes in order to make sure you have all the right information.
I’ve Followed These Tips, Now What?
Here’s an extra tip – PRETEST YOUR QUESTIONS. This is something that many banks don’t do. Usually they’ll create the questions and launch. Pretest your questions with a small number of consumers. This will show you if/ when people are leaving the survey and allow you to edit that specific question. It will also show you if it’s getting a good response rate. If many people aren’t going past the first couple of questions – that’s a problem. Go back and edit the questions and try again.
Now that you know the major tips for creating a bank survey (or any survey for that matter) go ahead and start! If you still don’t feel confident taking a stab at it then check out these best practices for creating surveys.
Interested in learning about other research tools you can use for your bank? Check out my other post on focus groups and how they could be a great tool for you!
