Editor’s note: Cary Funk is director of the Commonwealth Poll and associate professor in the School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University , Richmond, Va.

Questionnaires and surveys are an important tool in customer satisfaction research. There’s no better way to know what customers are thinking than to ask. The survey (whether conducted in person, on the phone, in writing, or over the Internet) allows market researchers to gather feedback from large numbers of customers and rapidly analyze their responses. There’s one important hitch to the process, though. The feedback you receive on surveys will only be as good or as useful as the questions you have asked.

There are several things you can do to design useful questionnaires, such as being clear about your information goals and making sure your questions match up with those goals. In this article I’ll focus on the more mundane business of exactly how to go about wording the questions.

Regardless of your information goals, producing a well-designed questionnaire requires a clear focus on the customer. As a teacher of survey design to beginning researchers, I can attest that most first attempts at designing questionnaires lose that focus. Even more-experienced survey researchers find it hard to keep the customer front-and-center during the design process.

Every textbook on survey research has a list of dos and don’ts for writing good survey questions. Herb Weisberg and his co-authors Jon Krosnick and Bruce Bowen advise question designers to use clear, unambiguous wording, avoid writing biased questions, avoid double-barreled questions, and avoid using double negatives. Earl Babbie’s textbook on survey research methods recommends the following laundry list for question construction: make items clear; avoid double-barreled questions; ensure the respondent’s competency to answer; ask relevant questions; use short item...