Do you have a purpose for your survey? If you do, then use that purpose to drive the creation of specific questions. This sounds like an obvious statement, but most surveys fail in sticking to a purpose. That's because a hundred voices in your head will want you to insert other questions that are not related to your immediate goal. Resist those voices and filter out everything that does not get you closer to getting information that is relevant to your purpose. If you are not strict with yourself, you will loose the goodwill of your customers. The length of your laundry list of questions will be a put-off and customers will ignore your next request for information. In addition to protecting customer goodwill, you need to protect your creative energy. Save your energy instead for creating fewer, but better crafted questions.

With tightly crafted questions, you will get meaningful and actionable answers. The opposite is sloppy questions generating vague and irrelevant answers. A stack of irrelevant survey answers is what you will get, if you are not careful.

Example: you are a laundromat owner and want to know if you should increase the stiffness of the finished work shirts for better customer satisfaction. So you create a survey to elicit the as yet un-articulated preferences of your customers. In the process of crafting your survey, you see a show about new fashionable garments that require special handling. You are then tempted to insert a question to find out the fashion preferences of your customers. Do you do this? No, not for this survey. It is not relevant, because the answers to the fashion question is not an actionable item related to increasing or decreasing shirt stiffness.