Skip Logic in Surveys: All You Need to Know

CRM

Skip Logic in Surveys: All You Need to Know

Sulabh Chauhan

August 13th, 2020

Editor’s Note: This blog has been republished after adding fresh information about the topic.

When you own and run a business, you would want every penny you spend on it yields you positive results. One of the best ways to find out about the areas of growth in your business is – conducting surveys.

After all, the data received from survey helps you to predict future outcomes of your business. But while creating Surveys, you need to maintain accuracy, ensure completeness, and create defined paths for respondents.

As simple as creating and sending a customer survey seems, it may not be actually ‘that’ easy. There are a lot of things to consider while creating a survey. First things first, making sure to keep it relevant, on point, and engaging.

In this article, we will acquaint you with Skip Logic, one of the most important aspects of a well-developed survey; and help you understand its significance.

What is Skip Logic?

Skip logic, also known as “branch logic” is a feature that decides which question the survey respondent will see based on the answer they provide for the previous question. To create a skip logic survey, you can define rules in the survey based on which a custom path and skip pattern will be created for the respondent. This tailors the survey according to the respondent and their interaction with your brand.

How Skip Logic Can Strengthen Your Surveys

One-size-fits-all questions aren’t always feasible and useful. There may be times when your target audience largely varies in terms of age, religion, profession, nationality, preference, or more. In such scenarios, you can’t define a specific set of questions that go with every type of audience. And here arises the need for a skip logic survey.

Let us try to understand it with a simple example.

If you create a CRM survey for your audience that comprises three categories – full-time employees, part-time employees, and freelancers. If you have decided a particular set of questions for each of these three categories with no similarity in any two sets; survey branching is required.

Further, if your target audience not only includes earning people only but also non-earning people also matching certain age criteria; you have to apply survey branching at two or more levels.

Suppose you want to include participants of only a certain age group – say 25-40 in your survey and branch questions further according to the above suppositions, your first question would be:

1. Which age group do you belong to:
(a) 18-24 (b) 25-40 (c) 40 and above

If the respondent picks (a) or (c), the survey will redirect them out of the survey. (As you have specified in the condition that the candidates should be between 25 and 40 only) 

Once you have got the respondents who picked option (b), your next question will be:

2. Do you have a source of income? – (a) Yes (b) No

If the respondent picks the option (a),  you can ask: 

3(a). What kind of job do you have?

(a) Full-Time (b) Part-Time (c) Freelancing

However, if the respondent picks (b), you can either redirect them out of the survey or to another set of questions you have thought for those who don’t have any source of income but lie in the age group you specified.

So, what you see here is a skip logic based survey where skip logic has played an important role in survey branching as per responses to questions.

This example is just to introduce you to a few branching questions examples. You can create as many surveys with as many levels of survey branching at various levels.

Whether you launch an advertising campaign, a new product, or asking people’s viewpoints about a particular product/service, applying skip logic in surveys not only cuts down on customers’ survey-taking time but also streamlines the survey flow keeping it relevant from beginning till end.

This way no matter how lengthy your survey is skip logic enables you to shorten it by showing only the questions relevant to a particular customer based on their responses.

Importance of Skip Logic in Surveys

A variety of projects can use Skip Logic in their surveys. Be it the CRM admin of a product-based company willing to find out the potential of the product as a bestseller, or an HR manager of a huge company who wants to get insights into employees’ views on current company policies and tweak them as per their inputs, Skip Logic can always lend a helping hand.

In the same way, event managers can also find Skip Logic for the surveys they send to collect participants’ preferences in games or food.

Organizational Benefits of Skip Logic

1. Intactness of Relevance

Taking your customers for granted is a mistake you can’t afford to make. Therefore, if you really want your customers to take your surveys, retaining their relevance is of utmost importance.

A simple example from our daily life:
If you have to ask someone to pick between Cricket and Football, and the response is Football, what would be your next question?

Would it be:
Which footballer is your favorite?
OR
Which cricketer holds the record of the highest number of runs?

Obviously, it would be the first question – as it is relevant!!

And if you ask the latter one even then, the answer would be random and most probably ‘wrong’ as the respondent would not know the answer.

The same holds true for a survey. As long as your survey is not relevant, it is of hardly any use. Skip Logic does exactly that – it keeps the survey flow relevant. With the survey flow kept intact, chances of random responses and difficulties in assessing them reduce to a minimum. This is because you get to show only those questions that apply to your respondents at every level, not any random question respondents haven’t any clue about.

2. Shortness and Crispness

Taking your customers’ valuable time for granted is a big mistake that you won’t like making!
If you want your customers to take surveys – and more importantly complete them – short surveys are far more effective.

Asking a lot of information through a seemingly ‘endless’ survey can be a big putoff for your respondents. And your surveys – instead of giving you valuable information can backfire and leave your customers disappointed.

Survey Branching using Skip Logic helps you make sure that your survey stays not only relevant but also short and succinct. These short surveys help garner prompt responses thereby saving customers’ valuable time and achieve higher completion rates.

3. Higher Engagement Rates

If you don’t want your survey participants to get overwhelmed with a plethora of irrelevant questions in a disorganized manner, you should use skip logic. Skip Logic ensures that your surveys don’t serve just as a medium to collect customers’ info but also a medium of interactive conversation between you and your customers.

Picture your customer sitting right in front of you. How would you keep them engaged?

By having an interesting and engaging conversation – that actually relates to them. Or would you rather keep beating around the bush and talking of irrelevant things that are neither useful nor engaging?

Of course – you will talk sense! And that is exactly what Skip Logic does – it lets you talk sense – through surveys! Survey participants, thus, remain happy and engaged throughout – and don’t leave your survey in the middle.

4. Data Accuracy

Logical and relevant questions mean accurate answers. If you ask a customer a question that doesn’t apply to them, the response will either be ‘wrong’ or ‘inaccurate’. Consequently, the final responses collected and survey analysis data won’t be accurate – and the very purpose of conducting surveys will fall flat.

Therefore, a skip logic survey also ensures that the final data collected through surveys is logical and accurate. Only with this accurate data, you’ll be able to form future marketing strategies to target your different customer groups accordingly.

Ready to Use Skip Logic to Rule with Your Surveys?

Skip Logic is crucial to making a CRM customer survey highly engaging, relevant, response-oriented, and of-course – effective. To help you define skip logic for your surveys, a number of CRM survey modules are available to pick from.

Our Survey Rocket – a cutting edge Suite/SugarCRM survey module can help create engaging surveys as it has got data piping, skip logic, data reporting, NPS, and all the features that are sure to make your surveys stand out.

Steps to Create Survey Logic with Survey Rocket

Here’s how you can go about creating Skip Logic in Survey Rocket.

Step 1: CRM admin creates a survey.

Step 2: As soon as the survey is created, admin can create Skip Logic of following types:

– Redirect the respondent to any page of the survey

– Hide upcoming questions of a particular page according to the response given

– Redirect respondents to an external URL

– Divert respondent to the end of the survey

Step 3: Admin saves the survey and sends the link to customers through emails/WhatsApp or through any social media

Step 4: Respondents open the survey link and attempt it

Step 5: Skip logic is applied based on the path decided by the admin

AppJetty has an all-inclusive and no investment partnership program for our tool, Survey Rocket. Affiliate with us through this program and expand your business. Interested? Learn more about the program from here.

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