Modifying Survey Questions and Response Options

Last updated: October 8, 2025

When you need to update your survey questions, you have several options depending on the type of changes you want to make. Here's how to handle different scenarios while preserving your historical data.

Changing Question Wording Only

If you're only changing the wording of your question while keeping all the same response options, you can edit your current question directly. All historical data will remain intact and continue to appear in your analytics.

Adding New Response Options

You can add new response options to existing questions at any time. New responses will appear in analytics immediately, and no historical data will be removed if you disable old response options.

When working with "other" responses, we recommend:

  • Disabling any responses that make up less than 1% of total responses

  • Reviewing your "other" responses and adding frequently repeated answers as new response options

  • Reclassifying existing "other" responses to help clean up your data

Modifying Response Option Wording

If you need to change the wording of existing response options, you can edit them directly. However, our data team will need to perform a data merge to ensure historical responses are properly aggregated with the updated options. Reach out to our support team to let us know about the change and we will merge the data for you.

Changing Question Type

If you need to change a question type (for example, from single response to multiple response), you'll need to create a new question. You cannot convert existing questions between different response types.

Important: Multi-response questions cannot have follow-up questions. If a customer selects multiple responses, the system wouldn't know which follow-up to show them. If you need follow-ups, use single response questions instead.

Data Migration Services

Our data team can help migrate historical data when you make significant changes to your questions. This includes:

  • Migrating data from old response options to new ones

  • Merging historical responses when you change response wording

  • Moving data from old questions to new questions when changing question types

To request a data migration, contact our support team with details about which responses you'd like merged and how you want them mapped to your new options.

Best Practices

  • For marketing segmentation purposes, single response questions are often better than multi-response as they place customers in one category rather than multiple

  • All historical data remains accessible in your analytics even after disabling response options

  • When in doubt about preserving historical data, contact our team before making changes - we can help ensure your data integrity is maintained