Introduction

Survey creators are often seeking alternative ways to create a smooth experience for their respondents. It is now general knowledge that advanced logic methods in survey designs are a smart way to customize the survey experience for every participant.

Irrespective of the area of focus, from gauging or measuring employee satisfaction to assessing a new product line or simply collecting feedback from a training experience, you wouldn’t want to mix things up by showing respondents questions that do not apply to them.

Survey branching is a form of advanced logic that helps you design engaging surveys, based on the response or feedback from your respondents. It helps design engaging surveys tailored to your respondent’s answers. 

In this blog, we will explore what survey branching is, its benefits, uses, pros and cons, and more. 

What Is Survey Branching?

Survey branching is a feature that allows researchers to display only relevant questions to survey participants. In this case, the type of questions the respondents see is determined by the answers they provide.

That way, respondents follow or branch out to a series or lines of questions based on their previous responses. The path or line of questioning each participant would take is determined by their answers. This means that the destination of each participant would be different and determined by their feedback.

With survey branching, you can send your customers down different paths in the survey. Your customers have an experience uniquely tailored to them, based on the feedback that they provide and you can customize each respondent’s questions. 

This implies that you determine the path of each visitor and user on your e-commerce website and they follow a customized pattern and see pages that they are most interested in based on their answers. With survey branching, you can optimize each step of your automation marketing strategy. 

It is a feature that helps researchers have some form of control over the survey flow and show only the most viable content to the respondents. This way you can screen out respondents relevant to your research based on their answers. 

To do this you can set up multiple conditions while creating a logic flow, that send respondents to a particular branch of your survey.

Examples of Survey Branching

A customer lives within a specific location where a newly launched grocery store exists.

The first question in the survey branching in this instance would be what do buy from our grocery store? Please select all options that apply

Options

• Non Perishable goods
• Perishable goods
• Vegetables
• Fmcg Goods
• Toiletries
• Never

If the respondent selects never. The next question would be geared towards finding out why a purchase was never made despite the proximity. It will go like this;

• Why do you not shop at our grocery store?
• I never knew it existed
• I don’t like the product assortment
• The customer service is poor
• The items are overpriced
• I shop at another grocery store

The option the respondent selects at this point would determine the next question. So basically, the researcher takes the answer of the respondent into account and this is used to construct the next question.

Other examples of survey branching include;

• Product Launches: For example, if an FMCG brand wants to understand user preference for their perfumes usage across different demographic groups. A survey is conducted across the different target audiences so they can understand the unique preference of each demographic group and the reasons behind their selection.
• Employee Satisfaction Surveys: The experience of each employee in an organization is unique. Therefore a custom employee satisfaction survey path would be created and administered based on the individual employee experiences and answers. Survey branching can help present the right questions to the employee. 

For You: Free Employee Satisfaction Survey Template

How Does Survey Branching Work?

Survey branching is a smart and intelligent way of asking the right questions from the right people and it works by conditioning questions to display based on the respondent’s answers.

The survey flow is constructed based on each answer. Each question directs the user to a specific destination until they arrive at the perfect destination suited to their responses.

These responses are what determine the pages that are presented to them on your website or online platform. Each of the questions moves the respondents to a  specific destination question from where they are taken further to their preferred page.

In this case, if the next question is arranged chronologically but does not align with the respondent’s answer, that question is skipped and the user is directed to the more relevant question. In short, the path of the user is determined with every answer and keeps branching out until the user reaches their preferred destination.

With survey branching, there is no need for respondents to see irrelevant questions, not suited to them, and that way you can collate relevant and actionable insight.

How Is Survey Branching Useful For an Organization?

Survey branching can be used in various ways in your organization, depending on what you do.

• Launching a new product
• Employee Satisfaction 
• Event management

Launching a New Product

Survey branching can show you how successful your new product would be accepted and also help you know the rate of acceptance amongst your new and existing customers. Your current customers can tell you what they think about the product and it if appeals to them via survey branching. 

Employee Satisfaction

As earlier shared every employee’s experience is unique to them. One employee may find your onboarding process fun and engaging and another find it boring and extremely complicated.

So, using survey branching would allow employees to answer questions relevant to their experience.

Improve Customer Experience

Survey branching can help you create a perfect customer experience for your customers. You can use survey branching to find out what kind of service they would appreciate, their unique preferences, the kind of products or services they would want you to offer, and lots more. 

How Do Branching Questions Improve the Respondent’s Experience?

Survey branching improves the survey participants’ (usually called respondents) experience in many ways:

1. Customized questions
2. Fluff-free questions
3. Seamless Survey Experience

Let’s get to know these experiences in detail:

Customized Questions

When asking respondents questions, survey designers need to realize that relevance is key. Hence, respondents would be uninterested if they have no need or connection with the question and may just provide a random response which would ruin the outcome and essence of the survey.

For example, you cannot ask questions about pharmaceutical products to architects. Guiding respondents along a relevant line of questioning will help them avoid 

Fluff-Free Questions

It is key to keep asking fluff-free questions. There is no point beating about the bush. With survey branching, the questions are direct and straight to the point. 

This ensures you have fewer questions which lead to more engaged respondents and higher response rates.

Seamless Survey Experience

Just as you would be more relaxed in flowing with a genuine discussion you are interested in compared to a conversation you are not interested in, survey branching questions greatly improve the survey experience and take respondents to a space they are comfortable with.

This way you get genuine feedback that depicts how they truly feel.

For example, if you are not interested in football, you would find it boring to answer any questions related to the sport. 

Their survey branching ensures you present only relevant questions to the respondent which will keep them engaged and interested to the very end.

Advantages of Survey Branching

The following are the advantages of using branching in surveys:

1. Less completion time
2. Accuracy
3. Higher Completion rate
4. More Engaged participants
5. No need for incentives
6. Quality Data

Let’s learn about them in detail.

Less Completion Time:

People no hardly have patience for long surveys with unending questions. With survey branching the surveys are shorted as respondents can skip to the only relevant question. 

This reduces the time of completion drastically.

Accuracy

Asking them relevant questions would only produce relevant insights. Survey branching ensures that surveys are tailored to the responses of the participants.

 So if respondents are not shown questions that are irrelevant to them, there is a higher chance of accuracy in their responses. Relevant survey responses increase the accuracy of the data and generate reports that can be trusted.

Higher Completion Rate

Many respondents stop a survey halfway when they are asked irrelevant questions, which affects the completion rate. However, survey branching ensures a higher completion rate.

The survey dropout rate is very high when the respondent sees the questions are unsuited to them. For example, if a respondent responds that they do not like to travel and the next question asks them to choose their favorite travel destination, they would quietly drop out of the survey process.

However, with survey branching logic configured into the questions, the software would skip the irrelevant question to the most relevant questions.

More Engaged Participants

When survey participants realize that a survey is smart and only asks relevant questions based on their responses, they would become more interested, and engaged and are like to follow the survey to its completion. 

 Less Need for Incentives

Survey incentives in form of monetary rewards via gift cards, cash, or purchase discounts can be expensive to sustain. However, for long surveys, it is necessary to give the respondents a reason to complete the survey process.

Survey branching questions are shorter, use relevant questions, and require less time, hence eliminating the need for any form of incentives(cash, gift cards, discounts) can get costly but are sometimes a necessity when surveys are long. 

Higher Quality Data

The quality of data in survey branding is higher because the questions are relevant, and the participants are interested hence they are most likely to give more thought to their responses, which improves data accuracy.

Disadvantages of Survey Branching

Response Bias: Sometimes, respondents may respond to required questions randomly just to get through the survey, and most times it can be difficult to tell.

quotations unsuited to their experiences and save them time.

Read More: Response vs Non-Response Bias in Surveys + [Examples]

Privacy Policies: In certain populations, policies may stop researchers from requiring responses. Most institutional review boards (IRBs), for example, have a policy that allows people to avoid answering any question including compulsory questions.

Data Errors: Due to the kind of questions, non-responses may exist. The number of respondents who choose to answer a survey question may vary from those who decide not to respond, thus creating bias. Also, the questions may be interpreted differently by respondents which can lead to errors in data.

Conclusion

A well-designed branched survey focuses on the right questions and getting the right answers. It involves creating a questionnaire that reduces the cognitive work for your respondents, by directing them automatically to a line of relevant questions. Survey branching is a useful tool for accurate results as the respondent is asked only relevant questions hence they can effortlessly skip questions that are irrelevant for them to answer.

As such,  having an online survey tool that is robust enough to handle complex logic on the back end is important. Formplus offers advanced auto grading and question branching options that allow you to create dynamic forms that show or hide survey questions based on previous answers. Get started here today.