Tribal HQ

Do you love or hate matrix questions?

There is good way to use them and mistakes that people make.

Consider how enjoyable it is for participants to complete the survey as they might not like them as much as you do.

• Don’t fill your survey with matrix questions, it will just cause people to not complete it.
• Make sure a matrix is not too big (ask for rating of too many aspects) as it is very intimidating to answer so people will either not complete it or ‘flat-line’ (answer the same rating for each question going down the page or screen).

A mindset of avoiding them, can result in not getting some very useful information for analysis and helping your organisation. So here are some good things to remember about matrix questions.

• They are very useful for finding out ratings of aspects on two scales so you can establish priorities. These could be a range of things you want to understand with two ratings: importance and satisfaction, or preference and availability, or importance and accessibility.
• They can have scales that are categorical (low, medium, high) or numerical (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
• You can then focus on particular aspects easily to develop priorities. For example which aspect has the highest percentage of people rating both high importance and high satisfaction. This is something you should be marketing as a strength. While, the aspect that has the highest percentage of high importance and low satisfaction is something that you need to set as a priority for improvement. This can be established easily without sophisticated statistics software.
• If the scale is numerical then you can work out the average for each aspect on both scales then find out the ‘gap’ to work out where the largest gaps between the two for each aspect. This is another way to work out priorities for driving change.

Data from numerical scales can also be imported into our ActionMap giving you easy to understand priorities – imagine the growth your business could achieve if you had an action plan that allowed you to:

• Know what to market as your unique selling points, to differentiate your business
• Know what to educate your customers about, to increase your perceived value
• Know what to improve, to increase your customers’ happiness and loyalty

Having a matrix in your survey can be useful, if they are used well.

If you are unsure about how you can use matrix questions well in your survey, our Survey Design Review can assist or contact us for further options.