What Are Surveys Used For? Real Examples and Use Cases

A team leader in Leeds wants to know how her team is feeling three months after the restructure. A final-year student in Bristol needs data for her dissertation. An online shop asks its customers, two days after the parcel arrived, how the whole thing went. Three situations, one tool: the survey.

What are surveys used for? Surveys are used to collect the opinions, experiences and feedback of many people at once, in a form that can be compared and analysed, whether those people are staff, customers, club members, pupils and their parents, students or the participants in a study. The point is never the questionnaire itself but the decision that follows it. We take you through every use case in this article, so you can see what a survey can do for you and how much of the work a modern survey tool such as empirio.ai now does for you. Most people underestimate that until they have tried it.

📌 Key points at a glance

• A survey pays off once one answer is not enough.
• Five groups use surveys: businesses, schools, universities, private individuals and organisations.
• The commonest occasions: staff survey, customer survey, market research, dissertation, events.
• Each occasion has a metric: eNPS, NPS, CSAT or CES.
• empirio.ai offers more than 90 templates for every use case.

Different groups use surveys

Who uses surveys depends less on the size of the organisation than on who creates the survey and why. An HR team asks differently from a Sunday league football club, a Year 9 form tutor differently from a PhD student. Change the person behind the questions and the occasion, the audience and the tone change with them.

The survey itself stays the same underneath: a structured set of questions put to everyone in the same way, so the answers can be compared and analysed. What changes is what you do with the results afterwards. A staff survey ends in a team meeting, a customer survey in a change to the product, a dissertation survey in a results chapter.

Five categories cover almost everything that surveys are used for in everyday life:

• Businesses: customers, staff, the market, the product, events and leads
• Schools: teachers, pupils, senior leadership, governors and parents
• Universities and students: module evaluation, dissertations, research projects
• Private life: parties, dates and decisions among friends and family
• Other organisations: clubs and societies, churches, parish councils, GP practices and charities

Let us take the five categories in turn.

Businesses: asking customers, staff and the market

In a business the survey is the tool that turns a hunch into a decision made on real feedback. The occasions run from the two-person design studio in Manchester that asks for a rating after every project to the national retailer that surveys its entire workforce every autumn. A survey tool for businesses therefore has to deliver three things above all: anonymity, data protection and a clean analysis.

Businesses use surveys for:

• Asking customers: A customer survey asks how satisfied someone was after a purchase, how the support call went or why a subscription was cancelled.
• Asking staff: An employee survey captures morale, leadership and satisfaction, from the first weeks of onboarding to the exit interview.
• Researching the market: Understanding the target group, testing what people will pay and measuring brand awareness before money goes into a product or a campaign.
• Collecting product feedback: Ranking features and checking ideas before anything gets developed.
• Rating events: Registration, choice of programme and feedback once everyone has gone home.
• Qualifying leads: Letting prospects answer a few questions before anyone from sales picks up the phone.

Schools: teachers, pupils, senior leadership, governors and parents

In school the survey is above all a way of hearing the honest feedback that never gets said out loud in a classroom. It has to work without a login, look right on a phone and be finished in five minutes, before the bell goes. A survey tool for schools is designed around exactly that.

Schools use surveys for:

• Evaluating lessons: Teachers ask a class for anonymous feedback at the end of a unit, via a QR code on the whiteboard.
• Asking parents: Communication, homework, wraparound care or school dinners, in England also a way of hearing from parents before Ofsted does.
• Measuring school climate: Wellbeing and belonging across every year group, as a basis for the school improvement plan.
• Testing knowledge: A quiz or a low-stakes test where every pupil gets a score.
• Voting: The class chooses the destination for the Year 6 residential or the theme for the sixth form leavers' ball.

Universities and students: evaluating teaching, collecting data

At university two worlds meet: the institution with its module evaluations and campus surveys on one side, the students running research of their own on the other. Both reach for the online survey as the standard tool, but with very different demands on method and scale. Universities need a survey tool for universities that can run dozens of modules side by side, students above all a free survey tool for their studies.

Universities and students use surveys for:

• Evaluating modules: At the end of term students rate the structure, the clarity and the support on a module. The National Student Survey does the same for whole courses once a year.
• Collecting data for a dissertation: A survey for an undergraduate or Master's dissertation has to be methodically sound and documented.
• Research projects: Departments survey large samples for studies, with quotas, routing and an export into their statistics software.
• Campus feedback: Library, halls, timetabling and the students' union, closer to a customer survey than to an evaluation.

Private life: planning parties, finding dates, making decisions

In private life surveys are used wherever a group has to agree on something and nobody fancies a WhatsApp thread with 200 messages. None of these cases turns up in any statistics, yet they are probably the most frequent of all. Nobody needs an account for them, just a link.

Private individuals use surveys for:

• Planning the Christmas do or a birthday: Date, venue and food settled in a two-minute poll.
• Choosing a holiday with friends: Cornwall, Lisbon or the Lakes, decided by a vote rather than by whoever argues longest.
• Guest list and who brings what: Who is coming, who bakes, who needs a lift from the station.
• Family decisions: The week for the summer holiday, a present for the grandparents, a date for the reunion.

Other organisations: clubs, churches, councils and the NHS

Between business and private life sits a whole field of organisations that survey people regularly without anyone calling it market research. What they have in common is that the people answering are mostly there voluntarily, which is exactly why they want to be treated with care.

Clubs and organisations use surveys for:

• Clubs and societies: Asking members about training times, the summer barbecue or the new kit and asking volunteers what keeps them coming back.
• Churches: Service times, activities for families, feedback after the parish weekend away.
• Parish and town councils: Consulting residents on the play area, parking on the high street or the future of the village hall.
• GP practices and hospitals: Patient experience after an appointment or a stay, anonymous and answered on a phone, in the same spirit as the national GP Patient Survey that Ipsos runs for NHS England.
• Charities: Trustees asking supporters what they think before the AGM, or beneficiaries how a service landed.

Below we take the most important use cases one at a time and in more depth, because even within a single category the forms differ. A staff survey might be an annual survey, an exit interview or 360-degree feedback, a customer survey might be an NPS survey or a rating after a support call. The overview at the end of this article gathers every use case in one table, with the matching tips and templates.

Staff surveys: measuring morale, leadership and satisfaction

An employee survey is the kind of survey with the most riding on it, because the people answering will sit in the same office tomorrow as the managers they have just rated. Success therefore hangs not on the number of questions but on whether staff believe the promise of anonymity and whether something visibly changes afterwards.

Questions cover satisfaction with the work itself, with line management, teamwork and working conditions, with workload and with whether someone would recommend the organisation as a place to work. Unlike much of continental Europe, the UK has no statutory works council whose approval a staff questionnaire needs, which makes trust the only currency you have. The NHS Staff Survey shows how much can ride on it: NHS England has run it every autumn since 2003 and calls it one of the largest workforce surveys in the world. Where a trade union is recognised, involve the reps before the invitation goes out, not after the results come in.

How staff can tell whether the anonymity is meant seriously:

What builds trust

• Being open that department, age and length of service are collected only for statistical grouping.
• Results shown only for groups above a minimum size, announced in advance (usually 4 or 5 people).
• A short note in the invitation email: the aim, the timeline and what happens to the answers.

What destroys trust

• An invitation via a personal link with the recipient's name in the subject line.
• Asking for department, age and length of service without saying why.
• Not a word about what is stored and what is not.

Types of staff survey

Staff surveys come in different forms depending on whether you want the big picture, a snapshot of one moment in working life or feedback for a single person. Some run once a year, others every few weeks, others only at the start or the end of someone's time with you. Nearly every organisation ends up combining two or three of the following types:

• Annual engagement survey: the whole workforce once a year, gives the big picture but is slow, because months pass between a problem and its result.
• Pulse survey: three to five questions every two to four weeks, always the same ones, so a trend emerges. Between two big surveys it shows whether the mood is turning, for instance after a restructure. Let the rhythm slip and you no longer have a pulse, just three random readings.
• Onboarding survey: after the first few weeks, while the newcomer still sees the place with fresh eyes.
• Exit interview: people who leave are often the most honest about why.
• Manager feedback and 360-degree feedback: feedback for one person from several directions, from the team, from peers and from their own line manager.
• Stress risk assessment: the survey many employers use as part of their duty to assess work-related stress. The HSE Management Standards Indicator Tool is the free questionnaire for it, 35 items across demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.

Whichever type you choose, every staff survey needs one number for the big picture, otherwise the trend cannot be compared from year to year. In many surveys that number is the Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS, the workplace twin of the Net Promoter Score from customer surveys. In small teams the figure is fragile, because a single leaver moves it a long way and anonymity starts to wobble.

Want to know how your team is really doing? Then you can get started today: with empirio.ai you create the perfect staff survey, anonymous, from a template and with the analysis done for you.

Customer surveys: measuring satisfaction, loyalty and effort

A customer survey asks people who have bought, used or booked something about their experience of it, as close as possible to the moment that experience was formed. Ask three weeks after the support call and you get a memory of the call, not the call itself.

Unlike staff, customers are not a captive audience: anyone who cannot be bothered simply closes the tab. Response rates therefore depend on brevity, timing and channel far more than on how thorough the questionnaire is. Two questions answered by half your customers beat twenty questions answered by a handful.

When a customer survey goes out matters almost as much as what it asks, which is why the different types are worth a closer look.

Types of customer survey

Customer surveys differ above all in when they are asked: straight after a contact, at fixed intervals or at the moment someone leaves. The closer the question sits to the experience, the more concrete the answer. Ordered by the moment they are sent, these are the types of customer survey:

• Post-purchase satisfaction survey: one to three questions right after the order or the delivery, usually scored as CSAT.
• Support rating: after a ticket is closed, often with the effort question of the CES.
• NPS survey: at fixed intervals to the whole customer base, for the overall picture of loyalty.
• Annual customer survey: longer, for regular customers, with questions on product, service and price.
• Cancellation survey: when someone leaves, ask why while the reasons are still fresh.
• Website and checkout feedback: right there in the shop or on the page where people get stuck.

NPS, CSAT and CES: the three metrics of the customer survey

Three metrics have established themselves for customer surveys and they measure three deliberately different things. The mistake many people make is to take the NPS and believe they have measured satisfaction. The NPS measures willingness to recommend and that can be high even when someone was unhappy with their last purchase.

For everyday use that means:

How the three fit together

• CSAT straight after a contact, with a single question.
• CES after a process such as an order or a complaint.
• NPS at longer intervals to the whole customer base.

How they break

• All three metrics in every survey, so respondents switch off after the second scale question.
• Changing the scale from one wave to the next, after which no comparison is possible.

Want to know how satisfied your customers are? Then you can start right away: with empirio.ai you create the perfect customer survey, with an NPS question and ready-made templates for CSAT and CES.

Market research: understanding your audience, price and brand

Market research by survey is about people who are not your customers yet and that is precisely what separates it from a customer survey: there is no mailing list, no existing relationship and no natural occasion. You have to go and find your respondents first. In return you hear from exactly the people you have not been reaching and those are usually the most interesting ones.

The big advantage is that you de-risk decisions before they get expensive. A survey with a few hundred respondents tells you in advance whether your assumption about a product, a price or a campaign holds. The sample is what matters here. Ask only your own followers and you learn what your own followers think, which says little about the market. When a survey genuinely speaks for a whole group is explained in our article on representative surveys. The Market Research Society, the professional body for UK researchers, goes a step further in its Code of Conduct: members who call a sample representative are expected to report how it was drawn.

Market research is not a single format. Behind it sits a whole bundle of questions that all come down to one decision: is this worth it? A questionnaire about a price looks nothing like one about a campaign. Typical questions a market research survey answers:

• Audience analysis: who are the people who need this offer and how do we reach them?
• Willingness to pay: at what price does a product look too cheap, at what price too expensive?
• Brand awareness: how many people know the brand unprompted, how many only once it is named?
• Concept and product test: which of three versions convinces people and why?
• Competitor comparison: where does your offer stand against others in the eyes of the audience?
• Advertising effectiveness: does the message stick and does it trigger what it is meant to?

For the price question the Van Westendorp method has proved its worth: instead of asking for a single ideal price it asks for four price thresholds. At empirio.ai it comes as a ready-made template, as do the audience analysis and the advertising test, so you never have to construct the questions yourself.

Want to understand your market before you invest? Then you can begin straight away: with empirio.ai you create the perfect market research survey, from audience analysis to price test.

Product feedback: prioritising features before you develop them

Product feedback by survey means asking the people who use your product what is missing, what gets in the way and what they never touch. That way scarce development time goes into the things that genuinely help most people. Hardly any other use case leads so directly from answer to action, because what comes out at the end is a list the team can work through.

The temptation is to ask users straight out which features they would like. The result is a wish list in which everything is important. You do better to ask about concrete situations: where did you last get stuck? Which task takes longer than it should? What did you sort out outside the product because it would not work inside it? Answers like these translate into tasks, wish lists do not.

The channel plays a part too. A survey that pops up right after an action in the product yields answers about that action. An email to every user yields the general picture. Both have their place, just not in the same survey. And anyone who asks for feedback has to be ready for criticism and able to take it, otherwise the question was never honest.

Want to know which feature comes next? Then you can ask your users directly: with empirio.ai you create the perfect product feedback survey, embedded in your website or shared by link.

Event feedback: before, during and after the event

Event feedback has the shortest window of any survey: the day after the event plenty of people still answer, a week later almost nobody does. Plan the survey only once the event is over and you throw away the very hours when impressions are fresh and people are still willing.

An event is not one occasion but three. Before the event a short survey helps with planning, during the event a quick mood check gives you the basis to adjust and afterwards comes the real verdict: will there be a next time? Covering all three with one survey does not work, because the questions and the moments are too different.

1. Before the event. Ask about dates, topics, travel and dietary requirements, so the programme fits the people rather than the other way round.
2. During the event. A QR code on the screen or at the stand, behind it three questions on the session that has just finished. That way a workshop can be adjusted the same afternoon. A survey with a QR code takes less than ten minutes to set up.
3. After the event. Overall satisfaction, ratings for individual sessions, the organisation and whether someone would come back or recommend it. Send the next day, one reminder after three days, then stop.

At trade shows and conferences a fourth role appears: the survey at the stand as an ice-breaker and a way of collecting contacts. That one belongs to lead qualification rather than to feedback, though. Mixing the two is tempting and waters down both.

Want to know how your event landed? Then you can prepare the survey today: with empirio.ai you create the perfect event feedback survey, with a QR code for the room and a send-out the morning after.

Lead qualification: surveys as an opener for sales

Lead qualification by survey means prospects answer a few questions about their situation before anyone from sales rings them. The conversation then starts with the right people and the right offer. Instead of a contact form with a name and an email address, the relationship opens with a short dialogue.

Both sides gain. The person enquiring gets a call that starts at their actual problem rather than a generic callback. Sales know in advance whether they are talking to a ten-person team or a company with several sites. The point is less about selling than about sorting: which enquiry needs a phone call, which needs an email with three links and which needs nothing at all?

Unlike every other use case in this article, a survey like this is never anonymous. Its whole purpose is to link answers to a person. That is exactly why it needs a clear note on what happens to the details and a lawful basis for contacting people afterwards. Under the UK GDPR you have to settle that lawful basis before you collect a single answer and document it. The ICO's guide to lawful basis adds a reminder that people can object to direct marketing whatever basis you rely on. How to set up a survey that collects contact details properly is covered in our article on data protection in surveys.

And keep the questionnaire short, ideally under five questions. Every extra question costs you completions. Anything you will clear up in the conversation anyway has no business in the form before it.

Want to sort enquiries before sales pick up the phone? Then you can start straight away: with empirio.ai you create the perfect lead qualification survey, with 100 % EU hosting.

Education and research: school, university, dissertation

In education and research surveys are used for two reasons: to improve teaching and to collect data for academic questions. Both ask something different of a survey than a customer survey does. In the classroom simplicity counts, in research the method does.

Common to all three fields is that the respondents are mostly young and answer on a phone. A questionnaire that looks fine on a laptop quickly becomes a chore on a mobile at the back of a classroom. Short questions, little text and a QR code instead of a typed-out link make the difference here between a full response and half of one.

Surveys in school: lesson feedback and parent surveys

In school, teachers gather feedback from their pupils at the end of a unit, headteachers survey parents on communication or wraparound care and the school council votes on where the Year 6 residential goes. Anonymity matters more here than almost anywhere, otherwise pupils answer what they think the teacher wants to hear. In England parents already know the format from Ofsted Parent View, the online survey Ofsted uses to hear from parents, above all during an inspection. It closes with the question whether a parent would recommend the school to another parent and publishes a result only once at least 10 parents have answered a question. A school's own survey can borrow both ideas. What counts as consent for surveying pupils depends on the school's own policies, so a quick word with the office or the data protection lead before the first parent survey is time well spent.

Surveys at university: module evaluation and campus feedback

At university the module evaluation is the commonest use case. At the end of term students rate the structure, the clarity and the support on a module and the results go back to the lecturer. Once a year the National Student Survey does the same for whole courses: final-year undergraduates across the UK are asked about their course, commissioned by the Office for Students, run independently by Ipsos, with the results published on Discover Uni for the next intake. Alongside these sit surveys on the library, halls and timetabling, which look more like customer surveys. Anyone who wants to improve their own module without waiting for the official evaluation needs only a short survey of their own after week three, while there is still time to change something.

Surveys for a dissertation and research projects

In a survey for an undergraduate or Master's dissertation the method is part of what gets marked. Good questions on their own are therefore not enough. The questions have to follow from the research question, the scales have to suit the planned analysis and the sample has to be documented, from operationalisation to how you recruited participants. Many departments also expect ethics approval before you collect a single answer, so allow for that in your timetable. Whether you ask openly and exploratively or with fixed answer options depends on whether your dissertation is qualitative or quantitative and that decision comes before the first question, not after it.

Want to back up your teaching, your module or your dissertation with real data? Then you can start now: with empirio.ai you create the perfect school survey, the perfect module evaluation or the perfect survey for your dissertation.

Clubs and teams: the underrated use cases

Clubs and small teams use surveys less often than would do them good, because both believe they are too small for it. The opposite is true: the smaller the group, the harder honest criticism is face to face and the more an anonymous survey brings.

A club asks its members about training times, the refurbishment of the clubhouse or the new kit. Before the AGM the committee collects the items people actually want on the agenda, afterwards it asks whether the two hours in the village hall were worth it. And the volunteers get asked what keeps them going and what makes them think about packing it in, an answer no committee ever gets in passing at the bar. Members need no account for any of this. If you want to try it yourself first, you can create a survey without signing up.

A team without an HR department benefits from the small survey too: a five-question retrospective after the project, topic requests before the away day, the question of what is still missing after the move to the new office. Say your team has eight people. Eight anonymous answers are often more honest than a team meeting with the boss at the table.

A survey is worth it whenever one person's answer is not enough and the discussion in the group would cost more than five minutes with a questionnaire.

Want to ask your club or your team quickly? Then you can have it done in five minutes: with empirio.ai you create the perfect survey, free and with no account for the people answering.

All survey use cases at a glance

Everything surveys are used for comes down to one question: what do you want to do differently after the survey than before it? Anyone who can answer that finds the right use case in seconds. Anyone who cannot should postpone the survey until they can.

The table matches the most common goals to the use case that fits and the metric that comes out at the end. For each of these cases empirio.ai has a ready-made template, 91 templates in 8 categories in total, all free to use.

Which use case fits your goal?

If you want to get going straight away, every business use case has its own solution page: create a staff survey, create a pulse survey, create a customer survey, create a market research survey, collect product feedback, collect event feedback and qualify leads with surveys.

For education and research there is the survey tool for schools, the survey tool for universities, the free survey tool for students and, for departments and institutes, the solution for academic research surveys. Clubs, teams and private individuals need no solution page of their own, just a template and a link.

Common mistakes when using surveys

Most surveys fail not on a single question but on a handful of mistakes that crop up across every field, from the allotment society to the FTSE 100. What makes a survey better from the start, from the order of the questions to the reminder email, is gathered in our 8 tips for the perfect online survey. The biggest mistakes include:

• Spending too little time on the questionnaire. Plenty of people assume it will sort itself out. When questions and answer options do not fit together cleanly, the answers cannot be analysed at the end and the whole survey was for nothing.
• One survey for everything at once. The annual survey asks in passing about the canteen, the logo and the Christmas do, because the whole workforce is reachable anyway. The result is 60 questions, a falling response rate and answers that no longer match any decision.
• The wrong metric for the goal. Ask for the NPS when you want to know how the support call went and you get a number about loyalty, not about the call. The question has to be fixed before the metric is.
• The wrong moment. Three weeks after the event or the support call, impressions have faded. The closer the survey sits to the experience, the more honest and concrete the answers.
• Results with no consequences. If nothing visible happens after the first survey, the second gets half the response rate. Whoever asks promises a reaction, at the very least a note on what became of the answers.
• Promising an anonymity that does not exist. The invitation says “completely anonymous”, the questionnaire asks for department, age and length of service. In a team of twelve every answer can be traced. How genuine anonymity works is explained in our article on creating an anonymous survey.

Conclusion

Surveys are not a tool for businesses alone but for any group in which a decision gets better when many people are asked instead of a few. Choose the use case and the decision behind it first, then the metric and only at the end the questions. Keep to that order and you will rarely need more than ten questions and still get answers you can actually do something with!

Where to go next

• Got your use case and ready to write the questions? How to create a questionnaire: guide and example
• Answers already in? Evaluating a questionnaire in five steps

Know which survey you need now?

empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, has a ready-made template for every use case in this article, from the staff survey to the parent survey. See all 91 templates