Let’s say you decided to promote your own application that you just created. To create a positive image for the program, you can use two options:
1) Invest in advertising and marketing tools;
2) Receive positive feedback from customers.
Which option is the most preferable for you? If you choose the second one, then you should immediately admit that you understand how to work in business. In the realities of the modern world, where polls and reviews are constantly published, positive reviews are the best thing that can happen to an organization. It is no longer possible to invest huge amounts of money in advertising and create a positive review.
The next question is how do you want to ensure the satisfaction of your customers and employees with your own business, products and services? One of the best options is the Likert scale.
We understand that you already have a lot of questions, but be patient. Since within the framework of this material we will receive answers to all questions of interest by considering specific examples and tasks. Let’s get started.
What is Likert Scale Research?
First of all, before getting an answer to this question, it is important to understand what a survey scale is. This term characterizes a certain ordered structure, which contains certain sets of verbal and non-verbal responses. Through their use, you can collect information about the opinion of respondents about a particular product or service.
The Likert scale is a fairly common way of conducting psychometric surveys, since it allows you to obtain quantitative data about the opinions, attitudes and behavior of people. The name of the system was developed by Rensis Likert in 1932.
From a technical point of view, this scale is a kind of rating for assessing the personality traits of each respondent. At the same time, not simple answers like “yes” / “no” are used here, but questions that make it possible to assess the degree of consent of the participants. Therefore, this methodology allows you to effectively measure the level of engagement and satisfaction of your own employees and customers. This way you can collect accurate data to optimize your process. However, it is worth remembering that for different surveys, the parameters may differ significantly.
In most cases, the classic version of the Likert scale is used, which consists of several questions, each of which offers from 5 to 7 answer options. They allow you to take into account a range of opinions, ranging from “strongly dislike” to “very much.” Consequently, this format significantly increases the efficiency of collecting the opinions of respondents. Often, the scale additionally contains a midpoint, which is a neutral opinion, that is, an option when the service does not cause either positive or negative emotions. The Likert Scale can be used in a variety of online surveys, event polls, and product reviews.
Very often people confuse matrix questions and the Likert scale, because they believe that they are determined by the same concept, but this is not entirely true. The Likert scale is a kind of matrix question, and the matrix question is the format of the Likert question.
As you already know, one of the most important components in assessing the performance of an organization is employee engagement. In order to track this indicator, you can use the Likert scale, which will allow you to react to any changes in employee mood. This will help you understand how satisfied your employees are with the resources and opportunities provided to them, how they assess their own responsibilities and departments, and what they think about the culture of the company. This will significantly optimize all work processes, which will increase the efficiency of the company.
Example 1.
For example, your company is developing a new training program and presented the first model. You want to know what your employees think about this program and how satisfied they are with it. The best option in this case is a survey using the Likert scale. This can be done as follows:
Thesis 1: I am satisfied with the work of the new program.
Thesis 2. I am dissatisfied with the work of the new program.
Answer options:
- Full support
- Support
- Neutral
- Do not support
- Strongly against.
Consider another example of using the Likert scale to measure customer or employee engagement.
Example 2.
Let’s say you are a hotel manager and you need to collect information about how customers evaluate the performance of your staff. To do this, you compose an appropriate online customer feedback survey, which will contain questions that match the Likert scale.
Thesis 1. The work of the hotel staff suits me.
Thesis 2. The work of the hotel staff does not suit me.
Answer options:
- Satisfied as much as possible
- Satisfied
- Neutral attitude
- Not satisfied
- Strongly dissatisfied
Why use a Likert scale in your business?
You must understand that now the era of customers has come, which opens up tremendous opportunities for you in promoting your own products and services to customers. Your brand’s reputation is heavily dependent on every positive and negative review, which can lead to both a major improvement and a major crisis. That being said, this is true not only for your customers, but also for your employees, who are also involved in creating the image of your organization. Every modern employee expects that work will bring him a certain level of comfort and satisfaction, so that he can maximize his self-fulfillment. Thus, you are required to satisfy not only your own customers, but also your employees.
In this case, Likert scales will be extremely useful, since you can track the opinions of people in a particular area in order to develop and improve it. Especially when you want to get answers to the following questions:
What do buyers think of you?
How do employees assess their superiors?
How successful was the training of employees.
That is, the Likert scale allows you to measure the mood of the target audience in a specific topic or issue.
Another good reason for using the Likert scale is the ability to determine the dynamics of the intensity of respondents’ opinions. Many companies are constantly expanding the range of their products and services, adding new functions and capabilities that should help them stay relevant in the market. It is very important here to constantly monitor how useful these products or services are in practice.
If you simply ask whether the audience is happy or not, then at best you will get a straight answer: yes / no, but this does not allow you to measure the degree of customer satisfaction. They may be happy with the product, but would like certain improvements, but without a Likert scale, you can never know.
What types of questions can be used to create a Likert survey?
The Likert scale is the best way to get people’s opinion on a particular issue. In practice, there are 4 specific styles for creating questions for this type of survey. Let’s consider them in more detail.
Agreement
The most popular type of questions for the Likert scale because they are versatile and can be used for any purpose. It lets you know how much people agree or disagree with a particular thesis, product or service. Using a five-point Likert scale, the answers will look like this:
-
- Full support
- Support
- Neutral attitude
- Do not support
- Strongly against
This will allow you to most accurately determine the characteristics of your customers’ behavior. Will they want to continue to cooperate with your company and purchase goods or services from it? Will they recommend your company to others? A likelihood scale is a great way to answer these questions.
Let’s say you are the manager of an online store that sells clothes. You wanted to understand if customers would recommend yours to others. Here you can use a Likert scale with a question like this:
Based on your experience with us, how likely or unlikely is you to recommend our clothing brand to your family and friends?
It is possible to omit the neutral answer here in order to get more accuracy, since this question gives a very clear division so that the client can determine the point of view:
- With a high probability
- Probably
- Not Probably
- No probability
- Satisfaction
Do you want to know how satisfied customers are with the service or product you offer? How often do you use this thesis in relation to employees?
Remember that according to existing statistics, the high involvement and interest of your staff can significantly increase the efficiency of all processes. However, more than half of consumers will not use your services again if they received poor service. In return, 93% will come back if they receive an excellent level of service.
As you should have understood by now, ensuring high employee engagement results in high profit margins with low employee turnover. Likert questions are a great help when you need to get people’s subjective opinions about your brand, their satisfaction with working with you, etc.
Let’s look at some examples:
How satisfied or unhappy are you based on your experience with our support team?
There are two polarities here that will allow you to avoid the neutral option, similar to the previous option considered. Then the following answers are available:
- Fully satisfied
- Satisfied
- Dissatisfied
- Fully dissatisfied
- Importance
Thanks to the use of a Likert scale of this type, you get the opportunity to assess the client’s attitude to a specific product category, as well as its features. That is, you will be able to better understand the existing customer expectations and their requirements. For example, if you have released new software, and now you are thinking about how to understand how convenient it is for your customers. If so, you can ask the following Likert question:
You have used our software. We hope you have a great experience. Now is the time to evaluate the listed features in terms of their importance to you. Next, you need to indicate the available list of functionality.
How to create an effective Likert survey?
Let’s take a look at the basic steps to creating a Likert survey that will be highly effective.
- Decide what you want to measure. It is very important to understand what information you are going to collect and analyze in order to create specific and comprehensive questions with the right answer options. Otherwise, your survey will be too ineffective. Remember that you can make your choice based on your own opinion, experience or feelings, the main thing is that in the end you achieve the required level of efficiency to ensure quality results.
- Decide on indicators. The Likert scale is best suited if one question does not allow you to fully assess a person’s opinion or feelings. For example, this is relevant for a situation where a manager wants to assess satisfaction with the quality of service, which is determined by a fairly wide list of factors that must be taken into account. Therefore, here it will be necessary to take into account each of these factors, which will act as a kind of indicator for the final conclusion.
- Decide on the scale of answers. Once you have clearly decided what you want to know, determine which answer options will help you most comprehensively get an opinion. It is necessary to select simple answer options that do not allow ambiguity or distortion of the option. Remember not to use too many choices as this can confuse the respondent and not want to take your test.
- Check your testing regularly. Remember that in order to increase the relevance and effectiveness of the collected data, you need to conduct surveys with a certain frequency. Frequent surveys using the Likert scale will help you understand your audience significantly better. An effective option is to use survey automation software. Thanks to this, they will be automatically generated after specific periods of time, after which you will receive a notification about the need for them.
- additional tips on how to write Likert scale questions
As part of this part of the material, we tried to collect even more useful tips and tricks that will allow you to write the most effective surveys on the Likert scale. This way you can get the most informative and useful data.
- Do not pose ambiguous questions that lead to confusion. Let’s say you wanted to know the opinion of customers about your product or service, but here you need to specify the question in order to clarify a certain aspect. For example, are customers satisfied with the speed of processing requests for requests, whether they like the interface of the software product. As the specificity of the question increases, the likelihood of receiving meaningful answers increases.
- Make sure that the generated answer choices do not lead to confusion and do not force the client to try to figure out which one means what. Remember that customers tend to complete surveys quickly, and any time delays increase the likelihood that they will decide to simply opt out.
- Nobody likes long polls. In this regard, you cannot specify more than seven answer options. If there are too many answer options, then with a high probability the respondent will put down a random answer, as a result, your sample will be simply incorrect, and therefore meaningless.
- Use more Likert questions instead of specific statements. Do not try to make harsh and harsh statements, but use streamlined but specific formulations typical of the Likert scale. This increases the likelihood of getting a truthful response from your client.
- Follow the sequence of answers. Your answers should be ranked from top to bottom, from highest grade to lowest. You cannot mix the answer options, as well as use different wording. If you wrote the variant “like it very much, then the lower variant should be“ strongly disliked ”, the use of other forms is prohibited, as this leads to confusion.
So, now you have the most complete information about the features of the survey using the Likert scale, which will allow you to significantly increase the effectiveness of the information collected, as well as improve the work of your own organization or brand.
