What is the Likert Scale, and how to use it in surveys?
As a business owner, especially if you are into digital marketing, you will regularly research how you can improve your business. Carrying out surveys among your customers or audience is one of the ways you can make better decisions that will move your business forward. You can either do this through questionnaires or interviews. One of the essential questionnaire tools you can use is the Likert Scale.
The Likert scale works perfectly for research questionnaires when you don’t want the audience to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the questions. Instead, the scale works with a degree of agreement to situations, questions that ask you how much you agree or disagree with situations.
In this blog, we want to find out the Likert scale and how you can use it in a survey. You have to continue reading to find out all you need to know about the Likert scale.
What is a Likert Scale?
If you don’t want your audience to answer questions with either “yes or no,” the Likert scale is your best bet. It works when you measure people’s attitudes or opinions to a situation in order of degrees, whether from highest to lowest or vice versa.
The Likert scale, also referred to as the satisfaction scale, is a set of questions that use a 5-point or 7-point scale. It measures from one extreme of opinion to the opposite side of the extreme. For instance, when you have extremes from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” A standard Likert scale will usually include the “neutral” or “moderate” option.
If you are interested in measuring your customers’ behaviors, perceptions, or opinions, using the 5 point Likert Scale is your best bet. It will typically help you find out if your product is just bad, manageable, or excellent. But, unfortunately, it is against your customers answering “yes or no” to your questionnaires that will not give you the more profound insight you need on the areas you can improve your product.
As a business owner, it is also possible to use the Likert scale to carry out a survey among your employees, finding out whether or not they are very dissatisfied, dissatisfied, neutral, or satisfied, or very satisfied with how you treat them. Most times, it could be a bit challenging to get accurate answers when you ask your employees to answer a questionnaire with the “yes or no” options. You may not get the exact areas that need improvements that way.
Benefits:
You cannot rule out decision-making within an organization, and this is where the Likert scale can serve as a great help.
It’s necessary for business owners or digital marketing experts to make decisions from time to time on how to improve their services or products. While some decisions end badly, others end brilliantly.
If you want to increase your chances of making more positive decisions, you need to find out how your customers react to your product or service. There are different tools you can use, but the Likert scale stands out. It helps you to find out your customers’ accurate perceptions about you, and you can make more critical decisions from there.
Apart from helping you get more from your strengths, you can also improve your weaknesses.
Through the Likert scale, you can find out what works and what doesn’t. It’s that simple. The best people to get feedback about your products from are your customers, and the this scale gives them a variety of options to rate you accurately.
When to use the Likert Scale
There are various kinds of survey questionnaires, and it’s essential to know when you can use the this scale.
We usually use the Likert scale to find out more about people’s views concerning a particular topic. It is more about digging deeper into what people stand for about a matter.
You would usually use the LS when you want to find the following:
- The success of a public event held by your company. Suppose you want to find out how helpful it was for the attendees.
- Your customers’ feelings about the organization’s customer service. Some customers are likely to demand improvements.
- When you want to know what your employees think concerning a current development that happened within the company. It will most likely help you to provide a more viable environment for your employees to work better.
- Whenever you want to know how your customers react to your products. It could be a new product that you’ve just released. Generally, it will help you find out the opinions your customers hold concerning you.
Examples of a Likert scale
Let’s assume you want to find out customer satisfaction for your new cookie recipe. It’s essential to use the Likert scale to understand the degree to which your customers enjoy your new recipe instead of using a “yes or no” reply.
In this case, you should use the 5-point scale, which shows various options regarding satisfaction.
Usually, you will have options such as “very satisfied, satisfied, neutral, dissatisfied, and very satisfied.”
Using a scale like this will ensure that your customers can choose the best option that suits them.
Other sentiments in the LS may include the degree of frequency, agreement, and desirability. For frequency, it’s helpful when you want to find out how often your customers visit your website. You will have something like “frequently, often, sometimes, rarely, and never.”
Suppose you want to get feedback from your customers about their interest in a new service. In that case, you will have something like “extremely interested, very interested, somewhat interested, not so interested, and not interested at all.”
Conclusion
If you are yet to use the Likert scale in your survey questionnaires, then you’ve not taken advantage of this beautiful tool. The crucial thing about using the Likert scale can provide your audience with several options so that you can dig deeper into their perception of you. Generally, the Likert scale will help you make better decisions that can improve your business.
The Likert scale works like a 5-point or 7-point scale in the degree of agreement, interest, satisfaction, and others. However, instead of using the typical “yes or no” answer options, limiting your chances to get more accuracy, the Likert scale works as a better option.
If you’ve not tried the Likert scale before, it is the best time to use it, especially if you are a marketer who wants to find out how your customers react to your product. Everything you need is in this blog; kindly read to find out more.
