The first step in customer experience management is to measure the experience. To find out what kind of customer experience your customers have, you can use open-ended or closed-ended questions that fit the Likert Scale.
Open-ended questions are open to interpretation and do not give the respondent a choice.
Here are some examples of open-ended questions:
What about our service today do you think could have been better?
What do you think about our product quality?
Can you share your suggestions and opinions so that we can serve you better?
Open-ended questions are effective when you want to listen to your customers and need their suggestions and opinions. For open-ended questions, you can use the Comment Entry component in the Wiseback Form Creator.
Since there is no scoring behind open-ended questions, you cannot create metrics from the answers given.
In closed-ended questions, on the other hand, a scoring system works behind the answers you provide to your customers and offers you the opportunity to make a rational measurement.
In this question, each option has a numerical value. According to the most widely used and accepted likert scale, a scoring works in the form of 1-2-3-4-5. If we write these scores over 100, it will be in the form of 20-40-60-80-100.
Developed by Rensis Likert in 1932, the Likert scale has become the most widely used attitude and tendency measurement technique in many fields such as social sciences, political science, psychology, marketing and education. The grades given in primary schools as 1-Fail, 2-Pass, 3-Average, 4-Good, 5-Good are examples of the widespread use of this scale.
The most common 5-point scale
Likert scale can be 3-point, 5-point, 7-point, 9-point or even 11-point. However, the commonly used form is the 5-point Likert scale. The 5-point scale is also used in the AppStore and Play Store today.
Amazon and many e-commerce sites use a 5-point scale to measure customer experience. Another important brand that uses the 5-point Likert scale is Uber.
Apart from the Likert scale, another closed-ended question option is the Like / Dislike type questions that ask your customers to choose between 2 opposite answers.
Netflix offers this kind of evaluation for its content
In Wiseback Form Creator, you can ask your customers questions with the Like / Dislike component.
Wiseback calculates the happiness rate on response, form and overall basis by calculating with Likert Scale in the background for all these components used in forms. The Happiness Rate can be displayed in the desired time interval.
Using only open-ended or closed-ended questions to measure customer experience is not the right approach. Ask your customers closed-ended questions, turn them into metrics to measure customer experience, and use open-ended questions to improve customer experience.
If you offer customer experience in an omni-channel structure, you can make question types different on a channel basis. You can also determine your question type according to the generations of your customers. While Generation X answers open-ended questions without getting bored, Generations Y and Z may prefer closed-ended questions that they can answer quickly.
You can find our detailed article about NPS (Net Promoter Score), the popular customer experience measurement method of the 2000s, here.
