Choosing the right survey scales
Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash
When developing your customer survey, it is important to choose the right answer choices or scales, but how do you decide?
For custom questions, our team will help you determine the optimal scale. For the customer experience (CX) questions, including Net Promoter ScoreSM (NPS®), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Product Quality (PQUAL), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), the 3 primary scales to choose from.
- 11-point scale
- 5-phrase scale
- 3-emoji scale
In the image below, you see the 3 primary scales used in LoyaltyLoop, aligned to the Net Promoter Score corresponding groupings of Promoter, Passive and Detractor.
While these are the primary scales, there can be variations of each. For the vast majority of our customers, they choose either the 11-point scale or 5-phrase scale. The 3 emoji scale may appear to be the simplest for your respondents, but lacks the granularity the other 2 scales offer you.
Pros & Cons
There are 2 main pros of the 11-point scale:
- The use of zero as the lowest choice. In our culture, it is difficult (although not impossible) for a respondent to mistake zero as something good. Scales that use a 1 can sometime confuse customers into thinking 1 is good, as in we're #1.
- There are 2 choices that relate to Promoters, both 9 and 10. Some respondents are "never top choice" people. Regardless who much they love working with you, they will never give a 10. To address this, the 11-point scale on the NPS question maps Promoters to both 9 and 10 responses. Similarly, NPS Passive respondents map to both 7 and 8, and Detractors are 0 through 6.
By far, the biggest pro of the 5-phrase scale is its simplicity. It is very easy on the respondent, by offering a limited number of choices, yet provides good granularity for your results. The primary con is that when statistically mapped to the 11-point scale, it provides only one choice for NPS Promoters and Passives.
If you start with the 5-phrase scale and see a high number of Passive customers, this might indicate you have a lot of "never top choice" customers. You might consider switching to the 11-point scale. The general rule of thumb is to pick a scale, and stick with it so that historical responses are comparable. Rely on our team to help you decide.