Best Practices for Web Surveys

Back when the economy was flourishing and consumer spending was at an all-time high, many businesses were content with customers that were merely satisfied, not truly engaged.  Today, money is much tighter across the board, and these same businesses are realizing the importance of building strong and healthy relationships with existing customers AND employees.  Research shows that an organization's health directly correlates to how well they engage these two groups.

So how do you ensure your business is retaining clients and not losing them to competitors?  Perhaps the most important facet is providing exceptional customer service, and this level of service stems from employees who are passionate about their job role and their company.  They know that employee opinions are valued when management makes decisions. They are loyal, often times reccomending their organization when asked about their job.

Because these employees are guiding the customer experience, it is critical to keep them engaged.  Passionate and dedicated employees make for passionate and dedicated customers who are willing to purchase more and promote your business.  Companies who have such an engaged workforce are constantly collecting and analyzing employee feedback about their day to day experiences on the job.

In addition to collecting feedback from employees, it is extremely important to gain customer insights about their thoughts and experiences.  This information can help you make important business decisions, but can also help you to win back the favor of clients who may have had a recent negative experience.  Keeping a pulse on your client base to ensure high customer retention is simple and easy through the use of survey forms.

The most important thing to remember is that it is not the data alone that will help you to retain your clients and employees.  Being able to synthesize the information and make the appropriate adjustments is the key to improving employee morale and client satisfaction.

Surveys are an invaluable tool for researching the community attitudes, employee concerns, product needs, customer loyalty and priorities held by different groups or target audiences.  Designing a questionnaire and collecting survey responses from a sample allows us to draw a profile of the group as a whole, and perhaps perform some correlation analysis to understand the source of those feelings.  The online survey findings can then support fact-based organizational decisions or improvement projects to help continually improve the organization over time.

Survey research can be applied to many venues.  Here are just a few practical applications listed below:

An Internal Employee Survey could identify reasons for low employee retention and provide ideas for reducing those costs, such as a better designed benefit program, improved training opportunities, or problems in the way the organization functions.

A Training Survey can identify how a training program has improved the capabilities of some group and how the training program itself can be improved.  

A Product Satisfaction Survey can identify initial customer experiences with a product, providing data to address unforeseen problems and help the next product release.  

A Market Research Survey can identify customers needs when creating these new service and product offerings.  Surveys can be part of Design for Six Sigma activities.  

An Association Survey, which is similar to market research and customer surveys, can show the member benefits most of interest.

However, a survey program is only valuable if it is properly designed and executed.  While performing a survey project seems deceptively simple – it's just a bunch of questions, and survey software tools make electronic surveys quick and cheap – a small mistake in the survey questionnaire design or survey administration can skew or bias the data, leading to erroneous conclusions.  No organization should ever make critical business decisions based on unreliable or invalid data.

Bad data is worse than no data!

Creating a survey is a lot like taking a trip: there's a definite start, and there's always a finish.  Before you even start to write that first question of your survey, here's a few things you might want to consider.

1) Who will see the results of this survey?  Often times, those who are expecting to see clear and concise results from your survey are not even considered when writing survey questions.  Will your data stay within a particular department, or will it be run up the flagpole to directors or C-level employees?  Perhaps the results will even be the basis of a publication or news article?

2) Who will work with the survey data?  These days, almost anyone can put an online survey together, but have you considered the person responsible for analysis of the data after it has been collected?  Do they have an understanding of charts, tables, percentages and frequencies? 

3) What is the basis for conducting this survey?  What is the survey's business driver, and how will the data be used in your business?

4) What data points will satisfy that business purpose you've identified?  Ensure that answer choices, particularly survey rating scales, are providing enough data points to clearly provide insight into your objective.

5) What are the best ways to ask about and to measure those data points?  Have you crafted the appropriate questions to collect the desired data points to satisfy your goal?

Maintaining a "begin at the end" thought process is crucial to crafting an effective survey.  If you ask yourself these five questions before, you'll see vast improvements in the performance of your surveys.

If there's one thing that can be frustrating about building surveys online, it's putting together the appropriate questions and responses that will give you the survey data you're looking for.  Furthermore, manually inputting questions you re-use in different surveys can be tedious at best.  But you don't have to continue this repetitive task.

Cvent's feedback management solution comes equipped with both question and response libraries designed specifically to save you time and energy when building out your surveys.  Once you've crafted that perfect question or set of answer choices, simply save them to your libraries for future use.  Take it one step further and categorize them so you can find them quickly and easily.

In addition, Cvent's online web survey system provides standard questions in multiple categories, including Customer Service, Demographics, Marketing and Sales, HR, and Training.  Standard responses range from demographic questions, income levels, frequency and survey rating scales.

Here's my plea: Don't get bogged down in adding the same questions and responses over and over again.  Utilize robust question and response libraries in your survey software tools to springboard your thinking and streamline your survey creation processes.

When designing survey quesitons, it's always important that you clearly define exactly what it is you are asking, especially when there is context given in the question itself.  Take the following sample survey question found in many demographic surveys:

This would be a perfectly acceptable question to ask in conversation, but for a written survey question, the problem lies in the fact that the question is asked first, and the definition is asked second.  Research shows that in self-administered surveys, respondents read the question, believe they've understood what is being asked, skip the context, and then answer the question.  Each respondent may have their own definition as to what jobs fall under the "Legal Professionals" umbrella, and if they are typically skipping the context of your question, you are left with inaccurate and unreliable survey data. 

Fortunately, the fix is an easy one: simply switch the order of information you are presenting, putting the context first, then ask the question.  Now that all of your survey respondents understand the context of the question, your data will be much more reliable, thus making your survey report all the more accurate.