Module 1: All About Question Types and Getting Help

Quickstart your understanding of question types with this short video. 

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Hi there! This is Ellie with the Delighted Customer Concierge team. Welcome to our Core Certification training series! In these videos we’ll talk you through all you need to know to be successful with Delighted—the fastest and easiest way to gather actionable feedback.

All survey campaigns, from the high-stakes to the fanciful, share the need for a guiding methodology. So in this first video we must splash headlong into survey methods and question types.

As you design a survey campaign, start with this question, “What will my survey measure?”

Is it: Customer satisfaction?  Brand loyalty? Employee Engagement? Or reactions to a buttercream cupcake fundraiser you organized for a river trip for local youth? 

Luckily, there are sound methodologies to help you create survey campaigns to fit every situation.

And just in case you run into a few rapids and whirlpools along the way, we’ll show you how to access our Help Center first thing.

Should the waters around your survey campaign get a bit choppy, access our Help Center! The Help Center hosts all the information you’ll need to know about Delighted and all the topics presented in this training series.

To open the Help Center click the “Help” menu from anywhere inside Delighted, and then choose “Help Center.” 

The Help Center is divided into easily identifiable sections. 

For this module, we’ll open section 2. Survey Types—the main topic of this video. Pick any survey type from the list to open an in-depth article explaining its purpose, how to set it up, and the metrics you can expect to gather.

You can also reach the Help Center by entering help.delighted.com into your browser at any time. 

And don’t forget about search. For example, if you enter CSAT into the search bar, an article about Customer Satisfaction surveys will appear explaining this methodology to you—in shocking detail!

You can also launch our convenient support Beacon found in the bottom-right-hand corner of every Delighted page. The Beacon is context-sensitive; so as you open it, the article you're looking for may already be in the list. If it isn't, search with a keyword, like CES, and the relevant article about Customer Effort Score surveys will certainly appear. 

If you have questions that are not answered in the Help Center or in the Beacon, take advantage of a premium feature, the Customer Concierge team. We can help with everything from technical troubleshooting to programmatic best practices—whatever you need.

There are three ways to reach out to Customer Concierge. The first is to send an email to hello@delighted.com. Include any details about your question, your Delighted account’s email address, and the name of the project that you’re working in. The second is by clicking the Contact button at the top of the Help Center. Finally, contact us directly from the Beacon by clicking the “Ask” button. 

Okay. Now that we have finished our brief safety orientation, it's time to plunge into deeper waters. Hang on tight as we float into our main topic—survey types and how they fit into Delighted’s survey taker experience!

Delighted surveys are designed to collect high-impact data in a clean, clear way. They are fun to create and easy for people to respond to.

Delighted surveys follow an engaging, 4-step survey flow.

In Step 1, your respondents will choose a scale point from a score selection page. In this example, we’ve showcased a Net Promoter Score or NPS survey with its recognizable 11-point scale. NPS surveys are designed to reveal customer loyalty metrics.

In Step 2, respondents have the option of entering written feedback in a free response comment page. Comments add clarity around their previous score selection.

In Step 3, you’ll have the option of asking as many as 10 follow-up questions of varying types—yes/no, true/false, single or multiple answer, and free response. (We’ll explore these additional questions in the next Video.)

In the final Step, a Thank you page brings the survey to a tidy close.

And that’s it! A clean, clear, understandable NPS survey that takes just a few minutes to complete.

Beyond NPS, there are a host of additional survey types to choose from, each filling a unique niche in the survey space. And like NPS, some proven methodologies have earned their own acronyms, like CSAT for Customer Satisfaction, CES for Customer Effort Score, PMF for Product Market Fit, and eNPS for employee Net Promoter Score.

Don’t dismiss the more playful sounding survey types (which can be just as effective and a bit more flexible), including 5-Star, Smileys, and Thumbs.

The most noticeable difference between surveys is the range of scale points each method requires.

The extremes range from NPS, boasting 11 points, versus Thumbs, which works happily with 2 scale points. 5-star surveys have a five point range. (No surprise there.)

Adding more scale points allows for a broader range of intensities and provides more nuanced results. Fewer scale points compresses the results into more definite yes/no, for-or-against-type metrics. Both approaches have their merits. 

And some survey types use a hybrid approach. For example, NPS compresses its 11-point scale into just three intensity groups: detractors, passives, and promoters. (NPS is very clever.)

More important than the number of scale points are the unique questions posited by each survey method. Let’s take a look at how the questions are worded.

(We’ll borrow our examples from the Core Certification quizzes that follow each video—a gentle nudge to encourage you to give certification a try. And, we really need your feedback on our videos!)

Let’s start with 5-Star. Delighted’s 5-star surveys provide a lightweight, easy-to-understand platform for measuring satisfaction. 5-star survey questions can be a bit more flexible than those required by other methodologies.

Thumbs are set apart by the power of simplicity. Using a classic gesture, Thumbs surveys are super intuitive and quickly collect unambiguous takes from respondents!  (Like casting the “ayes” and “nays” in a vote.) 

CSAT offers granular insights into customer sentiment for a brand, product, or service, asking a variation of the question: “How satisfied are you with [a brand, product, or interaction]?” The gradation of answers range from 5: for Very satisfied to 1: for Very dissatisfied. (CSAT also comes in a 3-point scale variant.)

Smileys stand apart from other methods in that, when people view a face, they inherently connect a response with an emotion: happiness with satisfaction or sadness with dissatisfaction. (I dare say, there is no better way to gather reactions to a buttercream cupcake fundraiser than with a Smileys survey.)

CES measures the effort required for a customer to complete a task. CES surveys actually start with a statement: “[This Company] made it easy to [resolve my issue.]”

CES respondents pick from a 7 point scale where 1 represents “Strongly disagree” and 7 represents “Strongly agree.” CES also has a 5 point scale option. 

PMF measures the degree to which a product satisfies market demand. PMF asks a question similar to: “How would you feel if you could no longer use [this brand or product]?”

Respondents choose a smiley face corresponding to either “Not disappointed,” “Mildly disappointed,” or “Very disappointed.” 

Let’s end with NPS and, as we do, add some context on how your choice of survey type can influence your survey’s 4-step survey flow.

Originally designed to measure customer loyalty by Fred Reinholt at Bain & Company, NPS is one of the most established, respected, and studied methodologies in use today. Incidentally, Reinholt is an advisor to Delighted. (We thought we would mention it nonchalantly so as not to appear self-serving. Did it work?)

NPS surveys begin with a carefully crafted question:

“How likely are you to recommend [your company, brand, or product] to a [friend, colleague, or family member]?”

While Reinholt’s survey seems simple on the surface, behind the scenes, NPS is actively compressing its 11-point scale by segmenting respondents into three categories with these iconic names: 

• Detractors, for people selecting 0-6 (Not what you want.) 
• Passives, those that pick 7 or 8 (Better, but not grand.) and . . .
• Promoters, who choose 9 or 10 (Everyone wants as many promoters as they can earn!) 

We've placed the link in the show notes to this NPS calculator so you can experiment with the methodology.  

Reinholt's tripartite division guarantees insightful filtering, trending, and reporting outcomes, which we’ll demonstrate in Module 3: All about the Dashboard. 

The NPS methodology has also been applied quite effectively in eNPS or employee Net Promoter surveys. eNPS can measure the effectiveness of your leadership and company environment in relation to the employee experience. 

Importantly, the three NPS and eNPS loyalty groups can enhance the design of your 4-step survey flow introduced at the beginning of this video.

For instance, in Step 3, you can create a unique set of Additional Questions for Detractors, Passives, and Promoters—showing some questions to one group and not to the others. 

The Thank you page in Step 4 can also be changed to message each of the three NPS loyalty groups appropriately. These same concepts can be applied to CSAT, CES, PMF and the other survey types as well. And of course, we'll show you how to do all of this in future videos.

So how do you choose which survey type is right for any given situation? One “best practice” is to perform a touchpoint analysis.

Touchpoints are crucial movements along a customer journey—the pain points—the moments when customer needs expand, shift, or change. Understanding these changes will lead you to the optimal survey methodology for each touchpoint.

Touchpoint analysis is just one proven approach. To further help you navigate your survey type selections, we've added links in the Show Notes to a variety of best practices.  

It’s time for a quick knowledge check! Let’s see if you can guess the survey type being used by Hem & Stitch, our simulated clothing supplier, as it surveys its B2B retail partners.

Question 1: “Hem & Stitch made it easy to return our unsold product.”

Yep. That’s CES. ("Made it easy” is the giveaway line.)

Okay, now for question 2: “How would you feel if you could no longer stock Hem & Stitch custom clothing?”

That’s a tricky one, but it's PMF. (“If you could no longer” is the tell-tale phrase.)

Finally, question 3: “How likely are you to recommend Hem & Stitch branded clothing to your friends?”

Yep! An NPS question, which depends on some variation of, "are you likely to recommend.”

How did you do?

And with that, we’ll bring Module 1 to a tidy close. We’re now ready for Module 2, where we’ll create a survey project from the ground up while picking a survey type to power the project forward.

See you then!