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Head of Customer Research
Open-ended survey questions can give you incredible insights about your customers, employees, and market—but only if you know how to write and analyze them effectively. And even for the most experienced market researchers, that isn’t always easy.
Many researchers struggle with formulating open-ended questions that actually generate useful responses (and enough of them!).
Too often, these questions result in vague answers like “It’s fine” or lengthy responses that are difficult to analyze at scale. Or, people simply don’t feel like answering them at all. So the challenge isn’t just asking the right questions—it’s knowing when to use them, how to phrase them, and then also what to do with the qualitative data you collect.
In this guide, you’ll learn the art of open-ended questions: how to write better open-ended survey questions, when to use them instead of closed-ended alternatives, and practical methods for analyzing the responses you receive. If you’re looking for meaningful answers and more context from your potential customers, consider this article your launching pad!
Open questions are those that allow respondents to answer in their own words, in a free form answer, without being limited to predefined response options, aka multiple choice questions. Open ended ones give participants complete freedom to express their thoughts, feelings, and opinions in whatever detail they choose. You’ll often get longer answers, more like having a conversation, but since it’s in the format of a survey, it remains easy to digest and analyze.
Unlike multiple-choice or rating scale questions, open-ended questions don’t provide answer choices. Instead, they typically include a text box where respondents can type their response. But that’s not the only difference. Here are the differences, beyond the obvious formatting. You’ll see the way close-ended questions are formatted, and what their open-ended ”counterpart” could look like.
Both being different, means they also both have different pros and cons. Here is how each format can benefit you, or be a disadvantage to your research.
Here are some key examples of when you can use open-ended questions.
Explore unknown territory
Understand the “why” behind behaviors
Generate ideas and insights
Capture authentic customer language
Measure and compare
Make quick decisions
Reduce respondent burden
The most effective surveys often combine open-ended and close-ended questions strategically:
Example combination:
The type of open-ended questions you’ll ask depends heavily on your research objectives. Use these examples as inspiration, adapting the wording to fit your specific context and brand voice.
These questions help you understand brand perception and awareness without leading respondents toward specific attributes:
Find out how your brand-building work is going
Learn what consumers think about your brand and how opinions change over time with brand tracking through Attest.
Use these questions to gather detailed insights about customer experience and satisfaction:
These questions help you understand price sensitivity and value perception:
Use these questions to understand competitive positioning and market dynamics:
These questions help you build detailed customer personas and understand user journeys:
Build a true picture of your ideal customers
Find out what your ideal customer profile (ICP) wants from brands like yours with customer profiling research.
Use these questions to gather insights for product innovation and improvement:
💡Pro tip: Open-ended questions are powerful — but only if they’re asked the right way. Check out our guide to writing better survey questions to learn how to phrase them clearly, avoid bias, and get more honest, useful responses.
Asking open-ended questions sounds easy: just let the survey respondents do the talking, right?
Wrong. Asking open-ended questions is more complicated than it sounds, because you’re relying on your respondents to give you meaningful open-text answers. It’s therefore SUPER IMPORTANT that you structure your market research well so that you give respondents the best chance of understanding what you’re asking and that you carry out genuinely useful qualitative research. Follow these best practices to improve response quality and analysis efficiency.
We recommend not kicking your survey off with an open-ended question. Normally it helps to start with some closed ended questions to qualify your survey respondents and as a way to ease your respondents into the context of your survey, before you ask those open-ended questions.
When you are designing a survey, it is important to only ask for information that you will actually use. Open-ended questions can be helpful for getting detailed feedback, but they can also be more difficult to analyze because you don’t end up with the more typical quantitative data you can more easily gather through close-ended questions.
Also keep in mind that for respondents, answering open-ended questions takes a lot more time and effort than selecting from predefined lists. Make sure you are not exploiting their willingness to answer your survey, and keep answers of high quality by limiting the amount of open-ended questions you are asking. Nobody started your survey because they wanted to write an essay!
We’re often inclined to cover multiple subjects in one sentence, but this can blur your answers and confuse respondents. Don’t ask who their favorite actor is and why in one question, but split questions up as much as you can. This will make it a lot easier to analyze the results in the end, and you will make sure every single question gets fully answered.
When asking an open-ended question you’ll want to be super-specific.
Asking someone what they like about your product can give you a full range of answers that might be hard to categorize and analyze. Instead, split it up in smaller pieces. So instead of
What do you like about our product?
Ask questions such as:
If you need these questions answered with detail and therefore choose open-ended questions, you will at least be able to categorize the answers.
Leading, your honor!
Leading questions push respondents in a certain direction. They already contain information that you are either trying to confirm or deny. This means you won’t get a true unbiased answer from most respondents.
Here are some examples of open-ended questions that are leading, so don’t use these!
The risk with leading questions isn’t just that you get answers that don’t add any value, it’s also a slippery slope towards getting a single word answer. Formulate your question in such a way (and test it on yourself and others if in doubt) to see what the instinctive response is.
Closed-ended questions can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” and do not provide respondents with an opportunity to speak up. But sometimes we ask closed ended questions, thinking they’re open-ended. But unfortunately, having a text field ready for respondents, doesn’t necessarily mean your question is open-ended. For instance:
Sure, a respondent might be able to say no and expand on that, but it would be better to ask a closed-ended question using the Likert scale and follow it up with an open-ended question for added context:
[open-text response]
Getting high-quality responses to open-ended questions starts with encouraging participation in your survey. Use these strategies to improve response rates and data quality.
Longer surveys have dramatically lower completion rates. Aim for surveys that take 5-7 minutes maximum to complete, including time for thoughtful open-ended responses.
Even within open-ended formats, you can reduce the effort required:
Consider providing incentives that match your audience and survey length. This could include:
The real value of open-ended questions emerges during analysis. Here’s a systematic approach to extracting insights from qualitative responses.
Start by reading through all responses to get a sense of the overall patterns. Then group similar responses into themes:
Example themes for “What do you like least about our product?”:
Use spreadsheets or qualitative analysis software to organize responses into these categories.
Once you’ve identified themes, tag each response with relevant categories. This allows you to:
Example tagging:
Create a summary that includes:
Tools that can help:
Start gathering your insights
Learn about how to gather quality consumer insights with Attest. You can reach 150+ million people in 59 countries, and get on-demand research expertise from our in-house team of experts.
Elliot joined Attest in 2019 and has dedicated his career to working with brands carrying out market research. At Attest Elliot takes a leading role in the Customer Research Team, to support customers as they uncover insights and new areas for growth.
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