26/02/2019 Beginner's Guide: What is a Likert Scale and How to Use It?

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by Lindsay Liedke on Jul 3, 2018 tutorials, and other resources.

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Do you want to know what a Likert scale is and how to use it? Using a Likert scale
on your WordPress forms to gauge your site visitors’ opinions, feelings, or SUBSCRIBE
attitudes offers you more insight into how people really feel.

In this article, we’ll explain what a Likert scale is and how to use it to calculate the
subjective feelings and experiences of your site visitors.
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What Is a Likert Scale?
A Likert scale is a rating scale, often found on survey forms, that measures how
people feel about something.

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It includes a series of questions that you ask people to answer, and ideally 5-7
balanced responses people can choose from. It often comes with a neutral
midpoint.
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Likert scales are perfect for helping people answer complex questions about your
business. For example, you might use a Likert scale to measure how people feel
about products, services, or experiences.

Some common Likert scale questions include:

This company invests time in providing quality support to its customers

Express your level of satisfaction after using our products
I require help from speci c departments when I shop

Each of these questions would then have a set number of responses for people to
choose from, respectively:

Strongly Agree, Disagree, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree
Highly Dissatis ed, Dissatis ed, Neutral, Satis ed, Highly Satis ed
Never, Almost Never, Neutral, Almost Every Time, Every Time

In addition, Likert scale questions help you avoid having to ask people dif cult
survey questions like open-ended, ll-in-the-blank, simple yes/no, select all that
apply, and ranking questions.

Lastly, using a Likert scale makes your job easier. It answers speci c questions
and results are easy to interpret since they’re arranged on a scale you’ve
con gured.

How to Set Up a Likert Scale That Gets Results

Setting up a Likert scale is easy if you use WPForms, the best contact form plugin
on the market today, and the Surveys and Polls addon.

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26/02/2019 Beginner's Guide: What is a Likert Scale and How to Use It?

In fact, for step by step instructions, check out our tutorial on how to add a Likert
scale to your WordPress forms.

And, be sure to check out our tutorial on how to create a survey form in
WordPress if you haven’t done so already.

If you’re new to Likert scales, and aren’t sure how to go about creating the actual
questionnaire part for your survey form, follow these steps.

Step 1: Decide What to Measure

The rst thing you’ll need to do when setting up a Likert scale on your survey
form is decide what exactly you want to measure. This will serve as the
foundation for all your questions and the response scale.

Make sure that what you want to measure can be scaled in terms of opinion,
attitude, feeling, or experience. There should be two clear extremes and room in
the middle for a neutral midpoint.

Some examples of things to measure include:

Agreement: Strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Frequency: Often to never.
Quality: Very good to very bad.
Likelihood: De nitely to never.
Importance: Very important to unimportant.

You can apply these measurements to your business in any way you want.

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26/02/2019 Beginner's Guide: What is a Likert Scale and How to Use It?

Find out how people feel about new products, customer support, pricing options,
their buying decisions, your brand design, and much more in an effort to make
improvements and boost both customer satisfaction and sales.

Step 2: Create Likert Scale Indicator Questions

If there are several things in uencing the way your customers feel about
something, that’s when you know it’s time to use a Likert scale on your survey
forms.

In fact, Likert scales are great for learning about your business when one
question, and one answer, won’t cut it.

For instance, let’s say you want to measure the amount of customer satisfaction
people have with your company. There are many things that will in uence this
satisfaction, such as perceived quality, pricing, speed of service, and support.

That’s why you need to develop Likert scale indicator questions to make sure you
address all of these things. If you don’t, you won’t receive reliable responses that
can be used to make your company better.

Here’s an example of good Likert scale questions:

To get the best results, follow these survey question best practices:

Be speci c when it comes to what you’re asking

Cater to your target audience using terms they’ll understand
Stay away from biased survey questions that can lead people to answer a
certain way or force people to choose between extremes
Avoid asking long, complicated questions or run the risk of actually asking two
questions in one, leaving the customer not knowing how to answer

The more accurate you are with your Likert scale questions, the better the
results will be.

Step 3: Decide on Likert Scale Responses

The last step in setting up a successful Likert scale is deciding which responses to
make available to people taking your survey. Remember, you already decided
what to measure. Now you need to decide on the actual responses.

Stay Odd. Use an odd number of responses. Ideally, you should include ve or
seven. If you go below ve options, people won’t be able to answer how they

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truly feel. If you go above seven, people will feel overwhelmed and pick
random options, which hurts your chances of receiving real results.
Label Using Words. If you use numbers to label responses, people may
confuse which end is positive and which is negative and answer incorrectly.
Use the Entire Range. Make sure your responses span the entire scale range
so people on both ends of the extreme can answer truthfully.

And, if you really want to make a good impression on those taking your survey,
consider enabling smart conditional logic on your Likert scale.

For instance, let’s say someone expresses dissatisfaction with your company’s
customer support team. With conditional logic, you can show them an additional
form eld asking them to explain their answer.

This use of conditional logic on your survey form is a great way to show people
you care about their responses, even if negative, and that you’re making an effort
to improve.

And there you have it! You now know what a Likert scale is and how to use it to
your advantage.

If you really want to gauge customer loyalty check out our tutorial on how to
create a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey in WordPress. Unlike a Likert scale, an
NPS survey gives you an of cial calculation on how people feel about your
company. This way, you can concentrate on driving the right kind of traf c to your
site and making more money online than ever before.

So, what are you waiting for? Get started with the most powerful WordPress
forms plugin today.

And don’t forget, if you like this article, then please follow us on Facebook and
Twitter.

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COMMENTS
SYED BALKHI
July 3, 2018 at 8:00 am

Thanks for reading this article – I hope you found it helpful.

I wanted to let you know about our new WordPress survey plugin that allows you
to build interactive polls and surveys within minutes. You also get best-in-class
reporting, so you can make data-driven decisions.

You can get it 100% free when you purchase WPForms Pro plan.

Get Started with WPForms Today and see why over 1 million websites choose
WPForms as their preferred online form builder.

Syed Balkhi
CEO of WPForms

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