Overview
Open-ended surveys represent a generative market research technique that gathers customer ideas through accessible marketing channels. The method involves asking fixed questions without constraining responses—respondents provide free-text answers at their preferred length and detail level.
Key Details
Primary Questions Addressed:
- Who is our customer?
- What are their pains?
- What are the jobs to be done?
Applicability Tags: B2C, B2B, Qualitative, Customer, Generative market research
Time and Resource Requirements
- Setup: 1-2 hours for basic execution
- Distribution: Varies by channel; response rates typically 1-20% for existing customers
- Analysis: 4-8 hours depending on survey length, respondent count, and response quality
Methodology
Preparation Steps:
- Develop screening questions to identify target segments
- Include leading questions to identify "professional survey respondents"
- Craft non-leading, non-hypothetical questions
- Request anecdotes for concrete insights
- Conduct comprehension tests on survey questions
Distribution Channels: Social media, email, website pop-ups, regular mail, telephone, SMS
Analysis Approach: Read responses, transcribe salient points on sticky notes, identify patterns through sorting exercises. For suggestion-focused surveys, compile suggestions in a repository for later review.
Critical Cautions
The document emphasizes that open-ended survey data is qualitative and generative—"be careful to interpret any input as simply ideas, not as a vote from the customer." A significant risk involves misusing qualitative data to draw firm conclusions inappropriately.
Potential Biases:
- Selection bias: fixating on agreeable comments while dismissing others
- Sampling bias: sample may not represent general population
Integration with GLIDR
Within the GLIDR platform, users establish learning objectives through research, develop survey questions via customer conversations, collect data field-tested as "Evidence - Other," and analyze project impact during the analyze phase.
Adapted from The Real Startup Book, edited by Tristan Kromer and published by Kromatic, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.