You may have wondered: Does it really matter whether I allow a short or long free-text response?
The short answer: It does matter.
Whether you use a Short Free Text question or a Long Free Text question depends on the goal of your question, your target audience, and the context of the question.
Advantages of Short Free Text responses:
- low effort for customers, resulting in higher response rates
- targeted answers instead of vague statements
- easier analysis of responses including AI topic clustering
Short Free Texts are well suited for additional follow-up questions, such as after a rating scale (“Why did you give us this rating?”). They are helpful for brief sentiment checks (“One word you associate with our brand”) or quick improvement suggestions (“What can we improve?”).
Advantages of Long Free Text responses:
- detailed feedback
- deeper insights into needs and problems
- more context for ratings and suggestions
You can use Long Free Text responses, for example, to collect comprehensive feedback about what users find good or bad about your service. People tend to provide more negative than positive feedback, so don’t be discouraged if positive responses are very brief.
With free-text questions, you must always expect that some responses may not be helpful. Additionally, you should be aware that longer responses require more analysis resources.
Our tip: Set your character limit deliberately.
How many characters are truly necessary to obtain the information you’re looking for? Are your customers willing to provide you with lengthy feedback, or might a high character count deter them?
You can conduct A/B tests to find out how your customers think and which approach yields the best, most useful responses.