Poor design and a lack of branching questions make many surveys tedious, diminishing the quality of the data they obtain. Use the power of skip logic to take surveys to the next level as part of your customer feedback workflow.
Leverage skip logic to improve the quality of your surveys for you and your customers. This will unlock the quality data you need to drive your business successfully. There are loads of testimonials from companies that prove that branching questions with skip logic taps into the customer experience.
Let us take a deeper look at how skip logic works for any and your business.
What Is Survey Skip Logic?
Skip logic is a conditional feature that alters the course of questions a respondent sees when taking a survey. Also known as branch logic, this custom path allows survey designers to specify a route through their survey map that varies depending on the answer given by the respondent.
How a respondent answers the current question charts their course through the rest of the survey, minimizing wasted time, maximizing efficiency, and capturing the data you need for your business. Whether we’re talking about general customer feedback or user research, you’ll need to be able to put all-in-one data collection in your hands. Using the power of skip logic to the benefit of your business and customers can help in collecting quality feedback.
Who Needs Survey Skip Logic?
Anyone who needs to get in contact with users. If we’re talking about in-product surveys, skip logic is quite important for product managers, designers, customer success managers, and customer experience managers. They all benefit greatly from being able to configure feedback surveys with skip logic, in order to get conditional responses based on the 1st response given.
Alternatively, if we’re talking about website surveys, this could be useful for marketers, designers, and sales managers. Why? Because in knowing and understanding how potential customers interact with your website, you can find how out and why your website performs the way it does, and what you can do to improve. In short, a lot of business personas benefit greatly from a survey skip logic functionality.
The Types of Skip Logic
The easiest way to understand skip logic is to think of a living reactant survey. These surveys essentially create different flows depending on the skip logic or branching used in each question.
Depending on a skip survey taker’s answer, you can route their path through the following questions appropriately, without wasting time and energy on questions that become irrelevant based on their previous answers.
Unconditional branching skip logic
Unconditional branching takes the respondents to the same succeeding questions irrespective of their response to the current question. This method may inadvertently hit the customer or other survey-taker over the head with questions that have become irrelevant based on their responses. Or it could be relevant, such as the example below.
To return to our customer satisfaction survey example, consider your unhappy customer. In an unconditionally branched survey, successive questions may ask about the likelihood of them recommending your business, even though they indicate a dissatisfactory experience.
This illogical data mining fails to capture the information you need to improve your customer experience and business, It may also annoy the customer even more.
As Andy Mura says, “competition is always just a few finger-taps or mouse clicks away.”
Conditional branching skip logic
In a survey that utilizes conditional branching, each response anchor can help you create a different path for the respondent. Using branching questions, you can zero in on the essential data you need and that your customer wants to share.
Let us use a simple example to elucidate how conditional branching works. Say your first question asks if a customer was satisfied with a recent purchase. If they say yes, you can move to questions focusing on what satisfied them and what will make them come back again.
On the flip side, if they were unsatisfied with a recent purchase, your follow-up questions can focus on their experience and what part of the experience needs improvement.
Skip Logic Use Cases
The fundamental aim of skip logic is to harvest the largest pool of information possible from all the different audience types without annoying them with dull or irrelevant questions.
For example, if you are writing a survey about why employees quit poor bosses, it does little good to drag respondents through questions that do not account for their previous answers. If they are deeply unhappy at work because of their long commute, and the next question asks about how the cost of food in the commissary, your questions risk alienating the survey taker.
A poorly designed and illogical survey does not get the data you need, and it may even result in a respondent failing to complete it.
Here are some examples of how skip logic can improve your survey and the quality of the data you obtain for your business.
New product launches and product tweaks
If you are premiering a new product or looking to understand where you need to modify it, Usersnap’s customer feedback software can capture the data you need quickly. Then you can quickly evaluate the demand for a new or upcoming product or even gauge what your users think about newly launched products or services.
Usersnap leverages intelligent survey design and a host of easy-to-use customer feedback tools. This makes it easy and efficient for a customer to give you the feedback and data you need to pivot accordingly.
Some of the widgets on offer include:
Skip logic feedback on existing products
The same suite of software from Usersnap can help you design surveys similar to NPS, CES, CSAT, and exit-intent surveys, which use the power of conditional branching to understand the reasons behind the customer’s responses.
You can ask a follow-up question based on the rates they give you. For example, if they rate your product with 1 star, you would want to take the opportunity and ask them on the spot what can be improved or even offer them the opportunity to book a meeting.
Whether you’re a customer success manager, a product supervisor, a designer, or a developer, you can be left in the dark by feedback that lacks depth. Usersnap’s feedback tools capture relevant data that can add that depth of information, improving your exchange with each customer, informing your workflow, and helping you tailor your operations based on customer feedback.
Exploring new product opportunities
As a business owner or product specialist, you need to gauge how well your products meet customer expectations. Any time something you sell fails to deliver, you need to gather customer suggestions to improve it. But you also need to understand where there are opportunities to penetrate new markets.
Feedback forms make it easy for your customer to share their experience, capturing the data you need swiftly. The result is that your software or SaaS company channels the results into increased product-market fit through customer-led growth.
Understanding customer preferences with skip logic
Customer satisfaction surveys represent an opportunity to exchange with your customers, mining their feelings and thoughts about their experience.
Usersnap can add a dedicated feedback button to your website or app, making it easy for customers to offer reviews and suggestions. You can even link to your messenger chat. In-app feedback widgets allow users to pin comments to their screens, offering a simple and effective way for them to offer feedback. Plus, they can capture videos and screenshots.
Perhaps most importantly, harvest the relevant technical data from your app, like URL and browser info, automatically. There is even a feature request widget. ComplianceRank calls this “smart feedback,” and it’s easy with Usersnap.
Event planning
When you are coordinating an event, having an accurate attendee headcount is essential. So is planning activities around their needs.
With skip logic data collection tools, you eliminate the need for dedicated event management and planning software. The information that these tools harvest, categorize, and label allows you to create an event that meets their demands. It also helps you provide the activities and actions they need.
Disqualifying respondents
Utilizing feedback collection tools to gather your data is only half the equation. The other half is knowing how to design the tools in Usersnap’s suite of software to manage feedback intelligently.
Functions like search, filtering, bulk sorting, and labeling bring greater clarity to your data. You can also add attachments and assign feedback items to various members of your team, all through Usersnap’s interface.
Identifying new potential prospects
When potential customers arrive on your landing page, they’re already inside your funnel. Don’t miss the opportunity to collect information from them. Use Usersnap surveys to exchange with interested potential clients that visit your website.
This gives you a leg up on understanding what the market is craving and where your services fit into the ecosystem. Pivot toward the demands of your clients intelligently by not only listening to their questions and gathering feedback but intelligently sorting the data you obtain.
How Does Survey Skip Logic Work With Usersnap?
Surveys don’t have to be clunky and unengaging. With skip logic, your data exchanges will garner deeper insights into each different respondent’s behavior with one living, branching, intelligent survey. Usersnap provides question branching and skip logic, as well as smart data collection features in their software, and you don’t have to write a single line of code to deploy it.
Usersnap is a turnkey solution to your data collection needs. With widgets, inline website forms, email surveys, mobile app forms, and an entire suite of tools for every type of data harvesting, you have a wealth of options to engage with your customers.
Manage it all with a simple user interface that makes building surveys and other data collections easy and fast.
Skip logic survey creation
Skip logic is a powerful tool that aids and informs survey creation. That’s one reason Approval Studio considers Usersnap one of the best design feedback and annotation tools in the world.
1. Choose your survey question
Each survey needs a strong flow of targeted questions. The targeted questions you include represent the backbone of your data collection, determining the feedback you collect from the respondents.
Where clunky survey-taking tools fail to react to user input, your questions need to remain broad enough to capture the date you desire despite any logic. The lack of flow can annoy respondents, asking them to repeat information or asking redundant or improper static questions.
With well-chosen survey questions and an eye toward logic, you can drill down into the data exchange much more effectively.
2. Map out skip logic possibilities for each question
Using Usersnap’s interface, you’ll ensure that your survey follows the correct sequence for each question. Think of the cascading branches of your survey as a map through the data, where you design all the possible survey branches.
Positive feedback leads in one direction, while negative feedback heads toward a different series of questions. Customers who are likely to return see appropriate follow-up user experience questions, while customers who are unhappy and unlikely to revisit get different questions that target the essential negative feedback you need to address their concerns.
Just as importantly, you will be able to separate unqualified respondents by sending them into a different branch of your survey, leaving the relevant collection streams free of their superfluous data.
3. Make sure the survey is linear
Skip logic surveys require a linear approach, ensuring that the respondent always moves forward. Your branches and logical formatting should never dump a user back to earlier questions or risk tangling the branches, overlapping your data, and fouling your entire collection.
Smart linear designs allow the respondent to travel through your questions intelligently. Question number one might not always lead to question number two on your list. But, question number two can never point back to question one.
4. Design your survey
Usersnap is easy to use, and you can set your survey up for success by first adding all your questions as screens or pages. This is the backbone of your survey. Then add appropriate branching nodes to the appropriate responses in each question.
With a simple, graphical design, you’re mapping the flow of your survey efficiently and intelligently. Usersnap’s streamlined, no-code solutions offer major companies like Dynatrace the survey design tools they need to manage website feedback for their thousands of employees. And that starts with intelligent survey design, with the help of smart website feedback tools.
Now, Dynatrace’s Web Marketing Director Gerald Haydtner explains that they reap the reward of “an easy to use and streamlined feedback process.” The power of Usersnap “is essential to scale up internal feedback exchange.”
5. Test the survey
Even when you think you’ve created the best survey, you need to test it. Unlike other survey tools, Usersnap makes this crucial part of the design and implementation simple.
Don’t risk deploying a half-baked survey. It will fail to collect the data you need and may well lead to survey abandonment. Inaccurate and unreliable results won’t help you drive your business.
So, use Usersnap’s integrated testing procedures to see how the survey works across platforms. Test functionality, logic, and branching to ensure a smooth and efficient experience for your respondents, guaranteeing enhanced data quality for your business. Check out what it looks like in the demo page in advance.
6. Deploy the survey
Finally, after successful testing, it’s time to deploy your survey. You know your target audiences, so put the power of skip logic to work where you need it, whether it’s embedded on your website or app.
You can also make it part of your customer experience, integrate it into products, or make it accessible via any desired locations where you identify a relevant target audience.
Benefits of Using Skip Logic in Surveys
By leveraging its powerful analytics, you can also ensure that the respondent experience in your survey isn’t an impediment to getting the data you need.
Prepare customer personalized surveys
Follow-up questions that resonate with the previous answer provide a focused and custom experience for your respondents. By maintaining this cohesiveness throughout the entire survey, your survey taker enjoys a personalized experience.
That individualized path through the survey will yield the sort of high-quality data your business needs. Relevant questions and efficient information collection are the hallmarks of skip logic and Usersnap.
Decrease abandonment rates of survey responses
When a user fails to complete a survey, it’s often due to its design. The reasons people abandon a survey vary, but one that is too long, poses inappropriately personal questions, or even irrelevant questions are bound to chase away respondents.
When a survey taker feels questions do not apply to them, survey abandonment becomes increasingly likely, creating a critical impediment to your effort. Using skip logic, you can curate a logical path through your questions, shortening the completion time, customize the respondent’s path, and harvest the data.
Use relevant questions
Questions that don’t follow a logical sequence quickly become irrelevant. Even the most well-worded and intelligent individual questions become clunky and off-the-mark when they don’t follow analytical parameters.
Instead, use a survey with question branching that charts a path through your questions according to the respondents’ choices. This design guarantees relevancy and may bolster the customer’s perception of your company.
Improve data quality
Surveys aim to collect accurate, reliable, and actionable data. Getting that data requires you to refine questions and intelligently chart a course for your respondents. Personalizing your surveys using skip logic will allow you to streamline your datasets and overcome the largest obstacle of survey strategy.
Failing to use skip logic pollutes your data streams, rendering ‘dirty’ data that is hard to decipher. The better the quality of your data, the more actionable it becomes.
Remove irrelevant responses
If you have a readily accessible survey on your site, page, or app, it may harvest some irrelevant information. Since you realize that not every visitor is your customer, you need to filter the noise so you can focus on actual customer feedback.
By using skip logic, you can automatically disqualify unwanted, irrelevant respondents. Or, you can even allow them to opt out of the survey without abandoning it. This may even yield data about how your website is designed and help you chart a course for visitors that doesn’t lead to them entering a survey they’re not ready to take.
Short surveys = less time to complete
Don’t waste your customer’s time. Prevent your respondents from seeing unnecessary questions and reduce the effective survey length with customized branching. It’s not just about time savings, either.
A shorter survey length means preventing respondents from getting frustrated and quitting mid-survey. Higher completion rates will yield better, more complete datasets and actionable intelligence.
Multiple responses from the same survey
Branching logic allows you to incorporate different question types into the same survey. This enables you to widen your data collection into more diverse data sets.
Instead of creating multiple surveys, use the power of skip logic and branched questions to capture all your users and funnel them appropriately through relevant questions. You don’t need a different survey for customers A, B, and C. Instead, you need one survey strategy that encompasses all your data points.
Tips
Consider a few of our essential starting points as you design your survey.
- Ensure that you turn off numbering in your survey questions so respondents don’t see random or unsequential questions.
- Always remove the progress bar from the survey.
- Disable or remove backward jumps in the survey with skip logic.
- Make sure the survey is linear.
Final Thoughts
The goal of your survey is to obtain quantitative results and relevant, actionable data. Usersnap has all the tools you need to do so, and its interface makes your job a breeze.
You don’t need to write any code, and you can tap into data collection tools that make it easy for respondents to give you feedback. That data exchange is precise and logical, leveraging the power of conditional branching and skip logic to keep questions relevant.
With powerful filtering tools that help you collect, mine, share, and act upon the data you collect from your page visitors, customers, and potential stakeholders, you’re setting yourself up for success. Don’t let tired survey tools and irrelevant questions create a roadblock for your customers. Tap into their experiences efficiently and intelligently today.
People Also Ask Questions:
Here are some questions that come up all the time.
How do you use skip logic?
Use skip logic to create a survey schematic that allows respondents to travel through a web of questions that are relevant to their answers. Their current feedback will determine the questions they see next.
How do you use skip logic in Usersnap?
In the configuration, you’ll want to apply question branching and skip logic conditions to certain questions. This is easy to accomplish and described within this article.
What is skip logic in Qualtrics?
Qualtrics is an experience management company that uses skip logic to help create conditional options. Qualtrics branch logic isn’t as easy to use as the tools on Usersnap.
Skip logic and sectional branching can also be a part of google forms. But unlike Usersnap, you will have to do most of the work yourself.
How do I use skip logic in Surveymonkey?
SurveyMonkey’s advanced branching allows you to add skip logic to individual questions within their survey design tool.
Capture user feedback easily. Get more insights and make confident product decisions.
Getting feedback has never been easier and we hope you’ve realized that after reading this article. Let us know what you think, your feedback is important.
And if you’re ready to try out a customer feedback software, Usersnap offers a free trial. Sign up today or book a demo with our feedback specialists.
