How do you choose an attitude scale for your satisfaction questionnaire?

What satisfaction scale should be used in an online questionnaire?

Appvizer presents the prerequisites for a successful customer satisfaction survey or in-house survey.

Discover each attitude scale illustrated by an example question, as well as online services that meet quality criteria for recording your questionnaire, distributing it and analysing the results.

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The different models of satisfaction scales

When you want to include a satisfaction scale in your questionnaire, the aim is to define a measurement scale to assess the satisfaction of your customers or employees.

The respondent ticks a single mandatory answer. This is known as an attitude scale: the answers can be given on different rating scales.

Let's take a look at the different models commonly used to conduct a satisfaction survey.

Likert scale

The Likert scale is the most commonly used attitude scale for setting up a satisfaction barometer. The answers to a question are presented in text form, and are very simple to understand.

The proposed answers give the respondent the opportunity to state their degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, or to express their feelings in agreement or disagreement with a statement.

You can vary the range of possible answers, and therefore of feelings, by extending the number of possible answers from 3 to 10, for example.

Example of a 5-point likert scale
Question asked in the form of a statement: Your product meets your expectations.

Suggested answers (only one box may be ticked).
😄 Totally agree
😊 Agree
😶 Neither agree nor disagree
😕 Disagree
🙁 Strongly disagree

Example of a job satisfaction scale
Question asked: Are you satisfied with your workspace?

Suggested answers (only one box can be ticked).
😄 Very satisfied
😊 Satisfied
😶 Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
😕 Not very satisfied
🙁 Not at all satisfied

The 1 to 5 rating scale

In a customer satisfaction survey, it is sometimes difficult or tricky to find a qualifier to evaluate a product or service.

It is therefore easier to use a rating system to provide the respondent with a scale of values in the questionnaire.

Example of an evaluation scale from 1 to 5
Question asked: On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you?
(a mark of 1 indicates a very low level of satisfaction, a mark of 5 indicates a high level of satisfaction)

Suggested scores (only one radio button can be ticked) .

Questionnaire with a scale of 1 to 10

For a variety of reasons, the interviewer may wish to use a larger scale of measurement: to have a particular sample, to apply a specific quality survey method, etc. In this case, a scale of 1 to 10 may be used to allow the respondent to give a more precise assessment.

In this case, a scale of 1 to 10 can be used to enable the respondent to give a more precise assessment, while allowing a wider range of ratings.

Example of a scale from 1 to 10
Question asked: On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your experience in our shop? (a mark of 1 indicates a very bad experience, a mark of 10 an exceptional experience).

Suggested ratings (mandatory: only one radio button can be ticked) .

Note: you can vary the wording of each answer by a number, a rate, or highlight specific data.

The smiley satisfaction scale

Also known as emoji or emoticons, smileys are visual elements that feature human traits: each smiley represents the face of a man or woman and associates a human expression, a more or less pronounced smile, or displeasure.

The shapes, colours and visual features in the illustration reinforce the emotions for the respondent, who is thus plunged into a more emotional state when choosing his or her response.

Each smiley corresponds to a possible response and suggests a more spontaneous choice for the respondent, whether in a customer survey or a questionnaire for your staff.

Example of a smiley satisfaction scale
Question asked in the form of a request: How would you rate the quality of your stay?
(choose the expression that corresponds to your feeling)

Answers presented in the form of emoticons:
😭 😞 🙂 😀 😍

The question model on an even or odd scale

We can measure satisfaction with an even scale or ask for an assessment with an odd scale. The big difference lies here: only a choice from an odd number of answers allows the respondent to take a very clear neutral position.

Using an even-numbered scale makes sense if you want to detect neutral opinions, for example. Responses can be presented in text form (letters or numbers for scoring) or in visual form.

Visualise the differences: text reflects a rational mindset, images leave more room for emotion.

Example of a paired scale with answers presented in text form
Question asked in the form of a statement: You received a personalised welcome
Suggested answers (only one box can be ticked).
🗸 Totally agree
🗸 Agree
🗸 Disagree
🗸 Strongly disagree

Example of a paired scale with visual responses
We can imagine that when the Internet user hovers over the stars with their mouse cursor, the stars fill in with colour to indicate a rating of 1, 2, 3 or 4 stars.
In this way, the respondent assigns a rating intuitively by referring to the visual representations.

Question presented in the form of a request: Rate the quality of your stay
(1 star means poor quality, 4 stars means excellent quality)

Answers are presented in the form of stars:
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Example of an odd-numbered scale: 5-star rating
The star rating system for hotels and restaurants has been in use for a very long time. It is one of the universally understandable visual codes and a benchmark used by a very large number of e-tailers to evaluate customer reviews.

Question presented in the form of a request: Estimate the quality of your product.
(1 star means poor quality, 5 stars means excellent quality).

Answers are presented in the form of stars:
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

The frequency scale for your questionnaire

An attitude scale can also be used to evaluate the use of a product or service over time and the regularity of its use, or to assess the quality of the response.It can also be used to assess the frequency of use of a venue, exhibition, physical sales outlet, website or e-commerce site.

A frequency scale is then used in the questionnaire.

Example of a frequency scale
Question asked in the form of a statement: Do you use a shopping trolley to do your shopping?

Suggested answers (only one box can be ticked).
🗸 Always
🗸 Often
🗸 Rarely
🗸 Never

Another example:
Question asked in the form of a statement: You go to a gym :

Suggested answers (only one box may be ticked).
🗸 Daily
🗸 Once a week
🗸 Once a month

Download the free sample satisfaction questionnaire for collecting feedback:

How to choose an attitude scale

The quality of the answers depends on the quality of the questions! Here are some important points to bear in mind when choosing your satisfaction scale.

Advantages and disadvantages of attitude scales: comparative table

Before choosing an attitude scale for your satisfaction questionnaire, it is useful to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of each scale. The table below lists and summarises the scales mentioned above:

Criteria to watch out for when formulating your responses

When a company or association implements an online satisfaction survey, it is necessary to put yourself in the respondent's shoes.

This approach allows you to test the effectiveness of the questionnaire and, more specifically, the satisfaction scales proposed.

appvizer has drawn up a common-sense checklist to help you make your choices:

• only one sign (text, figure, visual) per proposed response; mixing up the nature and number of signs complicates understanding and misleads the reader;
• use the conventions: a scale of values begins by expressing a negative value on the left and moves towards a positive feeling on the right;
• below each question, it is advisable to describe what each end means (1 = negative; 10 = positive) to avoid any misunderstanding on the part of the reader;
• use unequivocal sentences (only one possible meaning): the reader must quickly understand what they are being asked without having to ask any further questions;
• If you choose a low-amplitude scale, it is advisable to use the same amplitude to make it easier to read and choose answers;
• It is also advisable to consider processing the results before formulating your questions and related answers.

The "Don't know" or "Not concerned" box

When you put yourself in a respondent's shoes, or even in the shoes of several types of respondent, you often realise that it is necessary, or even essential, to offer an additional box called "is not concerned" or "has no opinion", in addition to your evaluation scale.

This box is particularly useful in the following cases:

• an evaluation scale with an even number of answers that encourages you to express a clear opinion, but for which you need to detect respondents who cannot give an opinion on the question because they have not (yet) used the service or product, for example ;
• in the case of an odd scale, you can also use this box to differentiate between neutral opinions and opinions that are not concerned or undecided.

Why manage your survey with an online service

Choosing a satisfaction scale and creating a questionnaire is an important step: the success of your survey depends on it.

Distributing the questionnaire and analysing the results are equally important steps in ensuring the relevance of your survey.

At the end of the chain, you need relevant answers to assess satisfaction and adapt your marketing strategy, your customer relations, or the characteristics of your product or the quality of your service.

Companies and associations use an online service to successfully create a scale from A to Z and manage all the stages within the same tool.

An overview of the most popular software.

The benchmark online services for a successful satisfaction survey

It's a major challenge for all types and sizes of company: large corporations, national or international groups, as well as SMEs, start-ups, VSEs and associations are all setting up satisfaction surveys to better satisfy their respective audiences, and to better position themselves by anticipating changes in their market.

Drag'n Survey: multi-account monitoring to be proactive

Designed by marketing specialists and ergonomists, the Drag'n Survey solution makes it easy to create and manage online satisfaction questionnaires, surveys, opinion polls, market research and quizzes. Discover the Drag'n Survey online service in video:

Drag'n Survey allows you to add accounts to be supervised. For example: a sales department can supervise the accounts of its employees, a general management department can supervise the accounts of the sales department, etc. Sharing, distributing surveys and collecting information are thus centralised, with a hierarchical model to respect if necessary.

The advantages of creating your own survey

20 questionnaire templates and over 500 questions to get you started and inspire the design of your survey. Standard questions help you enrich your survey: yes/no, multiple choice, image rating, rating bar or matrix, ranking, etc. You save time with these ready-to-use templates. Another advantage: these suggestions ensure that you don't forget any type of question that is essential for your survey.

When it comes to design, you can fully customise the theme with a simple drag-and-drop: colours, title, logo, text blocks, layout options to match your graphic charter and enable your respondents to identify you at a glance.

Facilities for distributing your survey

You have a choice of ways to share your survey:

• by hypertext link/url: with a web address, you can share your questionnaire anywhere on the web if you so choose, on social networks, in comments on a web page (commenting on an article or on a forum, for example). In particular, you can choose to authorise only one response per IP address;
• by email (including email relaunch): by importing your contact list (or manually entering your contacts), you can segment respondents by contact group, personalise your messages, send your emails directly from the tool and track recipients' reactions;
• on your website by simply integrating it: simply copy and paste the web link to display your questionnaire on your website. You can also customise the options for this response collector.

Precision for analysing and sharing results

You can create visual reports by selecting the following filters, for example:

• the number of responses per type of collector (web link sharing, email, your own site),
• a view that hides certain responses to highlight an important element,
• the number of respondents, etc.

Each view can be saved as you wish, so you can re-use them for comparison purposes. Another remarkable advantage is that you can set up automatic alerts that notify you by email when a threshold of respondents is reached, for example. When it's time to share your results, you can export them in PDF or Excel format, or even better: a password-protected web link to ensure that the results are accessible in complete confidentiality.

Companies using Drag'n Survey

Business sectors and company sizes are very diverse: the need to assess internal and external perceptions explains this diversity. Drag'n Survey software users include : L'Oréal, SACEM, IBM, BNP Paribas, Michelin, Renault Trucks, Groupama, etc.

Eval&GO: complete management made easy for faster-than-a-shadow surveys

Eval&GO is a solution that is constantly being enhanced with the best practices and features to enable its users to set up their surveys, polls and questionnaires intuitively and ensure effective follow-up.

Discover the Eval&GO online service in video:

Speed of creation is one of the undeniable advantages of the EVal&GO solution. As speed must go hand in hand with quality, an impressive number of functions are available to assist you at every stage, from the creation of your questionnaire, through distribution, to the creation of your reports.

Features that speed up questionnaire creation

20 types of question and hundreds of options are available to enrich your questionnaire with variables, a Likert scale and customise your questions, such as random display of answers, when this is relevant so as not to influence the respondent. Numerous options make it easy to create your survey, such as duplicating a question or adding it to a library for re-use, or redirecting it to a specific page depending on the answer chosen.

A design module with over 200 variables lets you customise your questionnaire, right down to the font, cursor and questionnaire colour codes, and of course you can upload your company logo. Is your survey a bit long? Add an introduction to draw the respondent's attention to the importance of your survey and what it can do for them. Also display a progress bar to motivate them to respond!

Simplifiers for sharing your survey

The sharing possibilities are equivalent to those of Drag'n Survey. We'd like to take this opportunity to mention some useful features that are common to both solutions, such as :

• a test link to simulate the respondent's journey before launching the survey,
• personalised emails with surname, first name and customer number,
• password protection to restrict access to your questionnaire,
• integration of your survey in a pop-up on a specific page of your website,
• integration with iframe or javascript code, for example,
• the ability to share your questionnaires and make them available to every member of your team (for distribution, re-use, etc.).

Constantly fast report generation

Creating your reports is made much easier.

The following options are available

• automated report generation
• customisation of tables, colours and graphs
• view by questionnaire, multi-page, or reports with customised views.

As for export options, you can choose between PDF, Excel, Word and PowerPoint formats, or even the online format by sharing a link to a web page with password-protected access.

Note: a very wide range of possibilities allows you to customise the design and layout of your reports.

Companies using Eval&GO

Organisations using the solution also come from a wide range of sectors. Eval&GO software users include more than 150,000 customers. They include Royal Canin, Disney, Toyota, Hermès, Carrefour and Alcatel-Lucent, to name but a few.

See all software Marketing

A comprehensive tool to help business managers achieve their objectives

To remain competitive and anticipate the expectations of their respective audiences, entrepreneurs, marketing and human resources managers, for example, need to know the opinions and satisfaction levels of their customers, prospects, users and employees.

The online software services (in SaaS mode) that we have presented to you meet the needs of all the business managers concerned, simplifying their opinion-assessment missions and assisting them with the complete management of their surveys.

These tools help you to achieve your objective, whatever its nature:

• Identify user expectations through market research before launching a project,
• assess the quality of your service or products through a satisfaction survey, to help you improve them,
• identifying new user expectations in a market through a survey,
• evaluate a service provided to employees using an online questionnaire,
• collect data to identify the competition or carry out research,
• improve the customer experience, customer relations and build loyalty using a marketing survey,
• understand the behaviour of visitors to your website to improve their experience.

Get ready to survey with ease. This software offers a wealth of possibilities: a personalised demonstration is a must!