Hi everyone! Justin here. I'm new to the community. We currently use Delighted at my full-time job. I have been tasked with making recommendations for our product team to collect satisfaction ratings from our website users. However, I was also told that if we are providing recommendations for the team, we would like them to be grounded in some sort of academic/psych study if possible, and lean less on what the popular tech trends are.
So, does anyone know of any studies or science behind how to phrase a CSAT question? How about the logic behind using a 5-pt scale, smileys, thumbs up/down, etc? What is the best approach?
My gut feeling is we should use a 3-pt smiley scale as the thumbs up/down is binary and does not capture neutral responses.
Any thoughts or findings would be greatly appreciated!
Good morning from a sunny Sweden and hello and welcome into the vast universe of survey methodology! :)
Short answer: There is, my knowingly, not ONE definitive study or science behind all the technical little details around how to survey a group of people.
I had to study a lot online, read best practices, attend webinars and conferences to build an idea of what I (and the team) thought and felt was the best suit to adapt and use for our business case and our customers. As many industries are different and target a different subset of individuals, there are of course a vast variety of possible setups best suitable to use for that specific subset.
But I can tell you the methodology we have adapted as a corporate standard for many (but not all) of our surveys in our portfolio:
CSAT
How would you rate your experience with X?
5-star scale, whole stars only.
For us it was easy to implement and force the user to take a stand for how good he/she thought the experience was. I personally could argue to use a 10-star scale as that enables the user to be more detailed around their experience.
Our initial testing showed that the end result very much ended up being the same from our A/B testing using a 5 and 10-star scale, so we went with the "smaller" version.
I personally would not use smileys but that is primarily because I feel that is a bit too un-professional for the targets we are aiming at in our company. But if I were to do a more personal tones down survey I wouldn't mind it.
But as you will soon learn, there is no clear answer. The best you can do is educate yourself around the different practices, learn the different pros and cons. Discuss within the team and align behind a joint "corporate standard" you can stand behind and debate and argue WHY you've chosen this specific setup.
Lastly, a little tip: Once you've learned your things and you want to convince someone of your point of view. Use the word "industry standard" as that sets the perception that this is how it's done. Remember, you're the expert here. That has gotten me out of lengthy discussions with difficult "know-it-all"-people several times. :)
Good luck!
-Mattias
Thanks MattiasM! I appreciate your input. I love the tip for using the phrase "industry standard" and I agree that it will likely come down to just creating a standardized format and standing behind it.
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