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Best questions for civil servant survey about public procurement transparency

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Adam Sabla

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Aug 22, 2025

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Here are some of the best questions for a civil servant survey about public procurement transparency, plus tips on crafting them for meaningful insights. You can instantly generate a conversational survey on Specific and adapt it in seconds.

Best open-ended questions for civil servant survey about public procurement transparency

Open-ended questions give us rich, detailed feedback and reveal real challenges, perceptions, and opportunities in ways multiple choice questions rarely can. They're ideal for surfacing issues we never thought to ask about—especially important in complex topics like procurement transparency.

  1. What do you believe are the main barriers to achieving full transparency in our public procurement process?

  2. Can you describe a recent experience where you saw procurement handled transparently—or not transparently? What happened?

  3. How do you currently keep track of procurement opportunities and decisions within your department?

  4. In your view, how could the process for publishing tenders be improved?

  5. Where do you see the most confusion or uncertainty in our procurement procedures?

  6. What type of information do you find most lacking from current procurement documentation?

  7. How do framework agreements affect your ability to work transparently?

  8. What training or resources would help you improve procurement transparency in your role?

  9. Have you ever hesitated to raise a transparency-related issue? Why or why not?

  10. What one change would make the biggest difference in transparency for you?

These questions open the door to honest dialogue—and help us adapt processes where it matters most. Open-ended inputs are essential when, for example, only 27% of public sector tenders were published on Contracts Finder between 2015–2017. There’s a clear need for better, deeper insights to drive change [1].

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for civil servant survey about public procurement transparency

Single-select multiple choice questions are great when you need to quantify trends or nudge a conversation forward. They make it easier for people to get started—sometimes a list of options is what we all need before we open up. And once someone selects an option, we can use a followup for context.

Question: How transparent do you feel the current procurement process is in your department?

  • Very transparent

  • Somewhat transparent

  • Not very transparent

  • Not at all transparent

Question: Which stage of procurement do you find least transparent?

  • Publishing of tenders

  • Evaluation and awarding

  • Contract management

  • Other

Question: How often do you consult published procurement data in your daily work?

  • Daily

  • Weekly

  • Rarely

  • Never

When to followup with "why?" Especially when someone selects an option that might signal dissatisfaction or uncertainty, a natural followup—"Why did you choose this?"—can uncover the real pain points.

For example, someone might say "Not very transparent." Following up with "Why do you feel the process isn't transparent?" often leads to unique, actionable feedback.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Include "Other" when your options might not cover every experience—especially in systems as complex as public procurement. The real gold comes from respondents who pick "Other" and explain what you missed. Followup questions here can surface challenges or ideas you didn't anticipate.

NPS-type question for procurement transparency surveys

Net Promoter Score (NPS) isn’t just for products—it works well in public sector feedback too. NPS asks, “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our procurement process to a colleague?” This gives us a quick pulse on sentiment and, with followup questions, reveals why someone would (or wouldn’t) endorse the current system. See how easy it is to create an NPS survey for civil servants with Specific—setting up smart followups for low, mid, and high scorers feels automatic.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-up questions unlock what really matters. They cut through vague answers, and with automated AI follow-up questions in a conversational survey, your data becomes a true source of insight. Specific’s AI asks smart followups that dig deeper, always aware of previous answers and your instructions.

  • Civil Servant: "Evaluation seems unclear."

  • AI follow-up: "Can you share an example of when the evaluation stage felt unclear, and what information was missing?"

If you don’t ask a followup, you just get “Evaluation seems unclear”—a dead end. Followups make it actionable. For context: The value of contracts awarded via framework agreements soared from £10B in 2019 to £35B in 2023, raising debate about lost transparency due to poor publication of awards [2]. Without followups, this nuance gets lost.

How many followups to ask? Two to three followups are usually enough. It balances depth with respondent fatigue. With Specific, you can set rules for this and let users skip ahead when enough context is gathered.

This makes it a conversational survey—instead of a cold form. The respondent feels heard, and you get answers with real context and examples.

AI survey analysis is fast and intuitive. Even with big blocks of open text, Specific’s AI survey response analysis feature makes it simple to distill themes, segment answers, and pull out actionable next steps.

Automatic, smart followups are new to most teams. Give it a try—generate your survey and see how the conversation naturally flows and insights emerge.

How to compose a great ChatGPT prompt for procurement transparency surveys

If you want ChatGPT (or any GPT-based tool) to help draft questions, start by being specific about your audience and goal. Here’s the go-to approach:

To quickly get started, try this:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for civil servant survey about public procurement transparency.

But if you give more context about your organization, situation, and goal, the responses are much more tailored. For example:

We’re running an internal survey for UK civil servants about transparency in public procurement, focusing on framework agreements and publication of tenders. Our goal is to identify barriers and areas for improvement. Suggest 10 open-ended questions.

For structuring your survey, prompt ChatGPT to organize and improve:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Then, when you see categories like "publishing," "frameworks," or "day-to-day processes," you can dive deeper:

Generate 10 questions for the category "evaluation and awarding."

Iterate like this to create a complete, highly relevant set of questions.

What is a conversational survey?

A conversational survey isn’t a boring spreadsheet form. It’s an interactive chat—AI asks your questions, hears the answers, and asks followups where needed, just like a great researcher would. This chat-based approach is intuitive (especially on mobile), less intimidating, and gets more honest responses.

Manual vs. AI-generated surveys

Manual Survey Creation

AI-Generated (Conversational) Survey with Specific

Manual writing, copy-paste, time spent formatting and logic setup

Instant, high-quality questions with logic, tone, and structure created in seconds

Hard to personalize, no smart followups

Personalized, adaptive followups based on real responses

Analysis is manual—requires sorting through text

Conversational AI analyzes, summarizes, and segments insights automatically

Why use AI for civil servant surveys? AI tools like Specific remove friction from both survey creation and analysis. You prompt the survey, edit questions using a chat-powered survey editor, and the AI makes sure both the experience and the results are top notch. For more on this, check out our guide on how to create a survey for civil servants about procurement transparency.

For anyone searching “AI survey example” or “best AI survey builder for public procurement”, nothing matches the smooth, engaging experience of a conversational survey on Specific. Respondents stay engaged, you get deeper feedback, and the entire cycle—from setup to insights—is faster and lighter.

See this Public Procurement Transparency survey example now

Experience a smarter way to uncover actionable insights from civil servants—see how fast you can launch a conversational survey about procurement transparency and get results that matter, powered by AI-driven followup and deep analysis.

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Sources

  1. Wikipedia. Government procurement in the United Kingdom.

  2. Financial Times. The UK’s “framework agreements” and transparency concerns.

  3. Financial Times. Improving procurement oversight can save the UK government £500m a year.

Adam Sabla - Image Avatar

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.