Quizzes are educational and a fun way to learn about something new. Some very popular TV shows have a quiz format at their core for engagement for example ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’, ‘Pointless’, ‘Mastermind’, ‘A question of sports’, etc. Each country will have a take on the humble quiz. What typically make it engaging is some element of suspense, the risk of losing the whole prize pot, or sudden death aka elimination from the game. The level of difficulty and seriousness will off course be different each time.
Quizzes also get their fair share of bad press. Especially in the game design world, a lot of gamification is branded as ‘glorified quizzes’. (I can no longer count the amount of battles I have had on this topic with game designers and developers) Either way, they are still a great way to raise curiosity and to engage an audience. The quiz format also caused a bit of consternation with a client when we were trying to design a series of mini-games for them. The content was all knowledge-focused and not so much about behaviour and experience, so no surprise we pretty much worked questions into many of the mini-games. Simple game mechanic differences giving variations on the same theme.
What types of quizzes are there, to engage employees and customers?
The learning quiz
Traditionally in e-learning, we find a quiz at the end of a module. This makes sense for novice learners or people exposed to specific learning material for the first time. I would typically suggest leading with a quiz especially if you have experienced and knowledgeable workers in your midst. This allows them to test out and confirms their level of knowledge. What they get wrong raises curiosity and tends to open up the interest in learning.
From a learning perspective having some time pressure or a bit of challenge can be useful. The difficulty of a learning quiz should be in line with the content provided or the level you expect your learner to have. Teachers have often used quiz-style questions in classrooms and what can be great fun is for students to be the quizmasters for their peers. As a technique for learning it works both for in-classroom engagement as well as a precursor to online learning or at the end.
When you use a quiz for learning it is important to also provide the correct answers for learners to review either straight after or linked to the specific course material.
The quiz as a people connector
Quizzes can also be used to create connections between people. Think of a regular trivia quiz to find out who is the art lover, quiz buff, geography, or random movie fact master in your team. Having a regular trivia quiz can stimulate conversation about non-work-related items. Those conversations are the ones people will remember and connect over. They can be part of team-building events or just a weekly online activity for your remote or hybrid team. Seeing how much more knowledge your colleagues have than you or how much more knowledgeable you were compared to them can be an eye-opener for everyone in the quiz and a cool discussion topic.
Fun should be the driving feeling in this type of quiz. Having a leaderboard or showing who the experts are in random topics can be great entertainment and a good cause for conversation. You can even take the competitive route and add a duel or tournament into the mix where individuals or teams go head to head to win honours in the trivia quiz.
Getting to know you quiz
More and more frequently do we come across on-boarding quizzes for new team members. Where the existing team is introduced online through a quiz. I blame the pandemic largely for this, but it can be fun to see if you can match hobbies or skills with faces. The onboarding process can be stressful, so I would definitely keep these kinds of quizzes very light and high level. You don’t want to scare away the new person.
Pulse surveys or employee engagement quizzes
Here I would recommend little and often. Ask one or two questions on a regular basis, rather than the standard 15 to 20 question surveys we see floating about with clients. HR and management tend to have to chase for completion and typically most people just answer with what they think management will want to hear. It is a rare outlier who will truly express their opinion in these surveys. By all means, keep this kind of quiz anonymous.
What works better for real employee engagement is a daily or weekly question or even a poll. It may not lead to great depth but it will give you a snapshot. There are other indicators of employee engagement that are more worthwhile to watch than the results of an annual survey. I am thinking of attrition rates, team culture, informal and formal complaints, exit interviews as well as productivity measurement.
The lead generation quiz
In lead generation, quizzes are often used to gain insights into the suitability of a solution or person themselves. People love quiz games on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but quizzes don’t have to be silly or trivial – you can use them as part of your business process with great results! Using a quiz at the beginning of an email campaign, for example, is a great way to see the knowledge gaps that exist in your prospect database. If they don’t know something important about your business or industry, it could be because they are not qualified at all and should be taken off your target list immediately.
The quiz allows you to gauge which of them might have some level of interest in what you are selling before wasting time and effort on the ones that aren’t interested. You might also want to quiz them at the end of an email campaign, like when you reach out with a proposal for your service or product. This will allow you to see if they remember anything about your business; it’s kind of like making sure they got your email in the first place!
A lead generation quiz can also lead to a scorecard or a downloadable report or movie.
The customer feedback quiz
Quizzes are also a great way to quiz your customers about their experience with you. This is especially true if they have purchased something from your company or completed an event of some kind. By asking them what they liked most and least, you will get honest feedback that may help improve future sales efforts. Short and to the point is the best way forward.
Customer feedback quizzes can be simply image-based, like the emoji-style buttons, which I am sure you have seen before somewhere on your way out.
Top tips on how to get started with your quiz?
To get started with a quiz, there are a few things to keep in mind.
- Have a clear purpose: what is your goal, what do you want your quiz participant to do straight after or as a result of the quiz.
- Know your audience and their preferences: it goes without saying that a quiz can also set the tone of a relationship, so knowing your customer including the internal one is important.
- Feeling you want to evoke: although this may sound woolly when you are writing a quiz for fun or to challenge someone, the style is quite different.
- Understand how difficult the quiz needs to be to engage: this is closely linked to knowing your audience and the purpose of the quiz, because if a quiz is too easy it may not deliver but too hard equally so.
- Look for templates and examples
- Test where you can with a representative group of your target audience and listen to their feedback
- Have fun with it! Yes, quizzes can be serious business but really you should instill a bit of that tv-game show quizmaster spirit in them if you ask us.
Our quiz services
As you have read all the way this far, I guess we have permission to promote our quiz-based services:
Quizgraphic is our ready-made and topic bundled quiz and infographic service. Our first topic bundle is all about Cyber security for the regular employee. Your learner starts with a quiz to see how much they already know and then we top off their questions with a score, a benchmark, and an educational infographic. Snack-sized learning for employees dressed in a quiz and infographic. Contact us to find out more about our Quizgraphic service.
Done-for-you quiz services: we can design your quiz for you. We ask you to think about the top tips you see above or to give us the questions and answers and we will create an embeddable quiz for you. Again get in touch to find out how you can be quizzing your audience.
