Looking for creative, proven survey ideas and survey sample questions?

In this article, we’ll take you through:

10 interesting survey ideas to try for your brand and survey question examples
35 survey question examples to ask your target audience
The 5 types of surveys you can conduct in 2025

Click to jump to the section that interests you.

10 Survey Ideas to Try for Your Brand

Surveys are super valuable for businesses, whether big or small. But to really grab your customer's attention, you need unique and interesting survey topics. That's what we're here to help you with.

In this section, we're going to talk about some unique survey ideas that you can use right away.

Interesting survey ideas
Customer survey ideas
Research survey ideas

Interesting Survey Ideas

Are you looking for some creative survey ideas that brands don't usually think about? Let's dive in!

1. A Survey To Bring Change

Goal: To provide a platform where customers, employees, or users can share their ideas, suggestions or concerns—openly or anonymously.

Remember 2021? Since then the world has shifted; companies operate differently, employees work remotely, and customers have become more cautious about their health. By running a survey (or an open platform) to learn what they think should change, your brand shows that it listens.

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2. A Survey To Just Talk

Goal: To ask simple yet meaningful questions like, “How are you doing? What’s bothering you the most right now? How can we help you feel better?”

Every survey idea needs a purpose. But it doesn't always have to focus on your products or company. A "just talk" survey like this can build a stronger connection between you and your customers. In the mental health sector, it can also provide 24/7 support.

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3. A Survey To Get New Ideas

Goal: To ask for suggestions that could lead to the next big thing for your brand.

In the list of cool survey ideas, this is one of the best. Every brand faces the pressure to innovate, and one great way to do that is to gather new ideas from your customers and employees. We’ve done that here at SurveySparrow with offline surveys, and our clients have done the same.

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Customer Survey Ideas

These survey ideas go beyond simply asking for feedback. They help you put them to use to improve key areas of your business.

4. A Survey To Market Better

Goal: To shape a more effective marketing approach using customer feedback.

Why should your marketing team carry all the weight of developing a strategy when your customers can help? This survey involves customers directly in your marketing efforts by asking them what they want to see, what resonates with them and how they prefer to be engaged.

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5. A Survey To Know Why Customers Would Leave

Goal: To understand why customers stop using your product or service.

This is one of those survey ideas that work best when targeted at long-time users. Avoid sending it to new customers (those who’ve never used your services), or churned customers, as they require a different type of survey.

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6. A Survey To Understand Promoters

Goal: To turn lukewarm customers into loyal fans.

NPS surveys are great for finding your brand's promoters. But not every customer will automatically be one. So how do you turn them into a promoter for your brand? Find their specific needs. That’s where a survey comes in—ask them directly how you can turn them into brand evangelists.

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Research Survey Ideas

From brand identity to work culture, research surveys help businesses get the answers they need to guide their decisions. Let's explore four cool survey topics you could use.

7. A Survey To Understand Workplace Changes

Goal: To ensure that the the workplace adapts to meet your staff's needs.

These are good survey topics for employees. For instance, if an employee is planning to move back to office after a lengthy WFH spell, you need to know what changes are needed to ensure a smooth transition.

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8. A Survey To Optimize The Buying Process

Goal: To simplify the purchase process.

Is your purchase process too long or complicated? Are you asking for too much information? To find out, simply use this survey idea—it will help you optimize the purchase path or process. The result: a smoother experience that saves time and adds value.

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9. A Survey To Evaluate Your Website

Goal: To evaluate the content, layout, navigation, design & UI of your website, from the customer's perspective.

Your website is often the first point of contact between your brand and target audience, so it needs to be user-friendly. Plus, it's your key to building brand authority. So a website evaluation survey is one of the best survey ideas, as it ensures your visitors get a near-perfect first impression.

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10. A Survey To Check When To Survey

Goal: To understand the best time in the day, month, and year, to contact a customer for surveys, offers, webinars, and more.

As you know, one of the key things about customer satisfaction is to not end up in their email, again and again, i.e., contact them when they’re most willing to talk. This is one of those survey ideas that gently nudges your reader to provide these details, showing that you respect their time and privacy.

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You have the survey ideas now, but what about the survey questions? Keep reading.

35 Survey Questions That Always Work

Need some more survey question ideas? What are some quality survey questions that always bring the right results? We’ll address that here. So, keep sipping on that coffee, and enjoy reading.

5 Survey Questions Examples to Start Right Away

If you wish to change one thing about our product, what would it be? 😇
On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate us? (0=terrible, 10+excellent)
How would you rate our product? 👀 – Disappointed, Okayish, Good, Extremely good.
What’s your mood right now? 😬 – Picture choice questions
Was this survey useful? – Yes, No.

Suggested reading: 12 Types of Survey Questions

Questions For The Buying Process

What specific information would make your buying decision easier?
Is the purpose of your website visit today fulfilled?
What stopped you from making the purchase today/yesterday?
How can we improve the checkout process?
Were you having second thoughts before making the buying decision? If yes, what were they about?
What part of the product did you like the most?
How would you rate the complete buying process on a scale from 1 to 10?
Is there a step in the buying process you think is unnecessary?
Where did you come to know about the features of the purchased product?
Did you have any concerns regarding purchasing from us?

Questions Related To Product

What’s the best feature of [product name] according to you?
What changes could be brought into [product name]?
Does [product name] need an update to include more functionalities?
What aspect of [product name] do you wish to test carefully in the free trial?
What persuaded you to choose our product over our competitor’s?
Which functionality of [product name] do you find challenging to use?
What new product ideas should we be working on?
How satisfied are you using [product name] on a scale from 1 to 10?
Is there any part of the product/service that isn’t working as per your expectations?
What new functionality or feature should we include in [product name]?

Questions On Employee Engagement & Satisfaction

How would you describe working at [company name] in a single word?
Would you refer a friend or a family member for a job here?
On a scale of 10, how would you rate the workload based on the role?
What part of the organization’s culture do you like the most?
On a scale of 10, how satisfied are you working at [company name]?
Are you recognized and appreciated for the work you’re putting in?
What can we do better to improve your satisfaction levels?
When facing a problem, how comfortable are you talking to the manager/superior?
In a meeting, how comfortably can you share your honest opinions?
Do you think the higher management thinks about your engagement and satisfaction levels?

Admittedly, choosing from a question list can be tricky. If you need a category-specific prompt, then you can use our random question generator.

Here’s a sample survey for you, made with SurveySparrow!

Oh, and we have an AI survey maker too.

Sign up below and get access to our AI surveys, plus 1,000+ survey templates, for FREE. They will help you generate loads of surveys for every idea that can help your organization.

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Choose From These 5 Survey Types

To put it crisply, you now know why surveys can’t be ignored, and why it’s better to use new, interesting, and often ignored survey ideas in 2025. But what about the different survey types? Knowing about them is important so your teams can choose the right one at the right time.

You get its importance. So, time to start here. Keep reading. The last bit of crucial information is here.

#1. Online Surveys

A survey type that came with the age of technology. And with technological advancements, online surveys are getting better and better. This survey type or technique requires online survey software to send selected questions to the target audience for their feedback.

The best thing about online surveys is they can be accessed from anywhere (literally!) and even without an active internet connection, see offline surveys. Plus, they take far less time to design than any other survey type you’ll see in this section. Impressed, aren’t you?

Now, online surveys again have 6 categories depending on the purpose they’re being used for. Let’s quickly know about them.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys– NPS surveys help understand the likelihood of your product or service being recommended by the customer. It shows your customer’s loyalty and brand advocacy towards your company.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT)– As the name suggests, CSAT surveys help you measure the satisfaction levels of your customers regarding your offerings and brand.
Market Research Surveys– A type of survey that’s conducted before launching a new product or service. It helps understand the market trends and viability of the new launch.
Post-Event Surveys– Used by event organizers to measure how successful their recent event was based on the collected attendee feedback.
Employee Satisfaction Surveys– Employee satisfaction surveys help the HR teams engage and understand employee needs better while measuring their satisfaction levels.
Academic Research Surveys– Majorly used by grad students to support and validate their research with fresh, real-world data.

#2. Paper Surveys

One of the more traditional survey types, paper surveys were extensively used before online surveys took their place.

The pen and paper approach is used to collect feedback from the respondents and then analyzed manually (in most cases) to find actionable data.

Their sheer volume makes paper surveys an expensive survey type, but they can go anywhere. Just get the questions on pieces of paper, give out pens, and the feedback would be collected then and there. Great for places where technology and online surveys can’t reach.

#3. Telephonic Surveys

Telephonic surveys are used to conduct research and interview people over telephones.

Respondents need to answer questions asked over a call and based on the responses, research data is gathered. Another traditional survey type!

#4. One-to-one Interviews

For collecting feedback on a research topic, one-to-one interviews are way better than telephonic surveys.

Sure, they also are time-consuming. But the survey taker will get the complete attention of the respondents, which allows them to get better and more thoughtful responses. Most suitable if the target audience is small.

#5. Kiosk Surveys

One of the more modern survey types, kiosk surveys has a very interesting way of collecting respondent feedbacks.

A computer screen at a physical kiosk is used, where customers are requested to take up a feedback survey right after they make a purchase or complete a hotel stay. The responses they give here are more authentic, as their experience is fresh. And that’s what you want, right? Quality data from your surveys.

Suggested reading: Kiosk Survey: Meaning, Importance and Examples

Bonus Content: Surveys Can’t Be Ignored. Here Are The Top 7 Reasons Why.

Before discussing anything else, it’s important to first talk about the reasons for conducting surveys in your business, and why can’t you ignore them? Let’s jump right in, then.

#1: Know Customers Better

As a leader, if you want to know your customers and target audience better, conduct surveys. This is because any product or service should fulfill the needs and wants of customers, and knowing fully about them is the only way your development team can do that.

Conducting surveys helps in knowing their likes, dislikes, hobbies, behavioral patterns, personal information, and even their thought process, which your teams can use to give the right experience.

#2: Gauge Customer Satisfaction at a Glance

This is a crucial point that comes when someone is already your customer. You want to know how happy or satisfied they are with the products, service, and brand.

And conducting surveys like the Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT) is the easiest way to find that out. Trust us on that!

#3: Find Your Promoters

This is where Net Promoter Score surveys come into the picture. As they let your teams find out promoters for the brand from the existing pool of customers.

This helps to pivot, strategize better, and ultimately turn more customers into promoters.

#4: Demystify The Future

Success once is far easier than repeating that. If you want the business to keep growing, you and your teams can’t bask in the glory of just one successful product. Keep building better products. That should be the mantra, and surveys are the best bet here.

How? As they let you know how the customers are evolving? What new do they want or like? And what old do they wish to leave? Based on the feedback collected, the product team can upgrade existing offerings or build new ones that can do justice to the customer’s needs.

#5: Customers Leave, But Why?

Here’s a fact, no matter how good your offerings are, some customers would still leave. It doesn’t mean you or the team were doing something wrong. Well, they might be, which is why there’s no harm in conducting exit surveys to find why they left?

The responses from the feedback surveys would help identify and rectify the problem areas, which would ultimately mean – Low customer churn in the future. Ain’t that the goal?

#6: Customer Service Team’s Performance

This is crucial to figure since your customer service team’s performance influences customer satisfaction immensely. An Internal Quality Survey (IQS) would do the job here.

It’s a metric-based evaluation type survey taken by peers, managers, and leaders to evaluate every customer representative on a quarterly, half-yearly, or annual basis.

#7: Status Of Your Employees

Employee satisfaction has garnered tremendous attention in the pandemic’s wake. And we also think it’s right to focus on the satisfaction and growth levels of your employees.

A 360-degree feedback software would help in doing that with ease. Do check it out, as happy employees, bring happy customers, and you want that in your organization!

Wrapping Up

When we first got the idea about this topic, we wanted to focus primarily on survey ideas. But when the research started, it was clear it won’t be enough, rather, it would be incomplete!

The reason is, only survey ideas aren’t enough for any team or business to start with it. So, we found the top reasons why conducting surveys is essential for a company’s growth, worked on including some time-tested survey questions, and gave the needed information about the different survey types.

A complete guide to conducting engaging surveys. That’s what we’ve tried to do here, and this is where your and your team’s work starts! Whatever value you’ve taken out of this, it’s time to use it in your next survey.

The way your customers interact with your brand, the way they reply, show interest, and give feedback, everything’s changed. So, what’s the point of conducting the same old surveys when you can go fresh?

We’ll leave you with this thought while waiting for your reply.

Keep surveying!

Survey Ideas For 2025: The Only List You Will Need!