Best Practices for Online Surveys

Incentives with surveys are often used to increase response rates.  Well, do you handle internal trainings? Is your organization involved with continuing education courses? Use online surveys to gather information on those attendees: What is their satisfaction with the training course or training instructor, what kind of courses would they like to see, etc.

Then, let those attendees know how important that information is to your work by giving the certificate of completetion only after they have finished the survey (by the way, with Cvent Web Surveys software that can be automatically done for you). Survey incentives can work both ways - as a gift for the respondent OR a gift for the survey creator (which in this case is incredibly high response rates!).

Don't inundate survey respondents with too many questions though. After all, they may have just paid for a class, seminar, or workshop. Get your data quickly and easily and let them be on their way. They'll appreciate it.

Customer care and client service novices (and professionals) often wonder: What is the best survey formula to ensure customers have the ability to share their satisfaction, concerns, evaluations, etc. of their company?

My customer service suggestion: Whenever your customer care employees speak to a new client, make sure they make that client aware that your company does quarterly (bi-annual, annual, etc.) customer satisfaction surveys, as well as surveys pertaining to satisfaction of other aspects of your company, events, product enhancements, new marketing initiatives, etc.  Let them know that data is benchmarked and used for important decisions pertaining to customer initiatives. Validate that the customer information is being assessed and acted upon.

Do you want higher response rates? Do you want data that is useful from your customers? Set the stage early with your customer service team, and your customers WILL REMEMBER to give you feedback!

Don't be frustrated with survey data after the fact. Deal with client expectations up front so your customers give you data time and time again.

Why should you conduct 360 degree feedback surveys when you can't always determine whose feedback is accurate? If you're using another data collection tool, conducting anonymous surveys can be difficult for technical reasons. But you don't need to give up on collecting employee feedback, instead use employee assessments similar to 360 surveys.

360 surveys allows employees to see that their opinions matter, no matter what their title says.  Collecting employee feedback through 360 degree surveys shows your organization takes this feedback seriously as a measure of employees' satisfaction and effectiveness.

The survey questions you ask should get specific, if possible. 360 feedback surveys ideally will have most or all questions be the same for all survey respondents. This helps ensure survey data accuracy. When it comes to designing 360 degree feedback performance surveys in 360 survey software think accuracy!

Most students these days have seen an education survey or completed a course evaluation or teacher evaluation form after a class, but are universities paying attention to what the results of the survey data collection means?

Tuitions have skyrocketed, suggesting student satisfaction levels should have increased as well. Are universities aware of how poor classrooms, faculty, staff and administration ratings can truly effect the return on the student, and more likely, the parents' investment? Perhaps universities should consider this part of their own investment.

Universities should use academic surveys and course evaluations as indicators to estimate the likelihood students will talk about their school in a good light, suggest their school to a friend and even... the likelihood of future donations as alumnus. Schools can literally calculate the possible ROI of education surveys. Here's an education survey example:

A private institution of 2,000 students with an average tuition is $20,000 roughly equates to a $40,000,000 business. Why risk the losing the potential for even more down the line with a poor university student experience survey that student believe will never be acted on? How much would you pay to protect that size business and make it part of your organizational culture?