Collect Feedback with Online Surveys

So, it is clear that Cvent Web Surveys software is always getting better. Remember that 80 percent of the changes made in your accounts with our quarterly product releases are enhancements that were requested by current clients. However, it is not only the online survey application that is consistently changing for the better. Here at Cvent, we are also constantly rethinking and revamping our training classes to serve our clients the best that we possibly can.

I wanted to write a post today just to let you know we recently rewrote the script used for the Survey Creation and Management training class. Another member of the Web Surveys Client Services team and I spent about a week meeting with the Senior Vice President of Client Services and Relationship Management to completely revamp this training class in order to better suit your needs. Although the material covered in the training class is by and large the same as it was before, it is our firm belief that the Survey Creation and Management class is now easier to understand and follow than it had been previously.

Just to reiterate, if you recently signed a contract with Cvent, it is highly recommended that you sign up for this class. Survey Creation and Management is offered every Wednesday from 2:30 PM EST to 4:30 PM EST. We also offer separate classes for our clients in the UK and Australia. The class for UK clients is every Wednesday from 8:30 AM to 10:30 AM GMT. The Australia class is offered Thursdays from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM Australian Eastern Time. Finally, you can also listen to our recorded training classes if your schedule does not permit you to attend the live training.

In summary, if you are a new survey client or a new user of the Cvent system, please attend the Survey Creation and Management training class at your earliest convenience. Since this class goes over how to set up your first electronic survey in Cvent, how to import your contacts in bulk into the system, and how to send your survey invitations with the Cvent email survey tool, it is extremely beneficial for you to take as soon as possible.

I think I have always thought of myself as a "planner." While some people "fly by the seat of their pants," I am constantly thinking ahead to the consequences of my actions. The way I see it, this can be a good thing and a bad thing. Being a "planner" is bad because I am not as spontaneous as some of my friends. The "life of the party" is usually not someone who thinks ahead. However, it is a good thing at the same time, especially when operating in the corporate world, and specifically when designing online surveys.

I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about the importance of thinking ahead to reporting before designing a questionnaire online. I want to address a related issue: survey question logic. We on the Cvent Web Surveys Client Services team always strongly encourage our clients to use survey logic to their advantage. Lately, however, I have been getting lots of calls from clients who are having trouble with the logic they have applied. The reason for this is simple: too many clients do not plan or map out the logic they'll apply to their electronic survey. This lack of planning can cause numerous problems, most notably conflicting survey logic.

In the past two weeks, I have spoken with two clients who applied both branch logic and advanced logic to their online surveys. Both of these clients called because they were concerned there was a technical issue which was prohibiting the logic from functioning as it should. "But, I set up my branch logic correctly, and I know that my advanced logic should be working fine too, so what is wrong?" In both cases, the problem was the clients had applied branch logic which conflicted with the advanced logic, and the survey system therefore did not know where to send survey respondents when they answered a question a particular way. "If only these clients had planned ahead and mapped out the survey logic before launching their surveys," I thought, "then this problem could have been avoided."

Moral of the story: Please take advantage of the wonderful survey logic functionality available with Cvent Web Surveys software. However, at the same time, make sure to plan ahead. Even if you are someone who generally "flies by the seat of your pants," when designing online survey questionnaires, you should be a "planner" for once.

One of the great things about Cvent Web Surveys software application is that it is constantly getting “better.” I, for one, am not aware of another survey software company that can state with confidence that 80% of all product enhancements come directly from the requests of current clients. Cvent, however, has certain processes in place so that every time a client expresses interest in seeing a new feature added to the online survey application, this request is quickly relayed to our technical team.

For those of you who were clients before our most recent product release in August 2009, you definitely noticed at least one big change in your account the first time you logged in after the release. As soon as you logged into your Cvent Web Surveys account, you saw that your surveys were no longer organized into folders on the Survey Selection page. Instead, they are now displayed in “views.”

Now, you may wonder why I chose to write my blog post this week on the transition from folders to survey views. It may seem like a pretty dry topic. I wanted to write on this particular survey subject because I get so many calls from clients asking how to create a new survey view that pull the appropriate surveys into view. If you have a lot of surveys created in your account, then this is a pretty important thing to know how to do, so that you don’t have to sort through all of your company’s surveys just to find the few that you are personally working on!

When you are ready to create a new survey view and filter the appropriate surveys into this view, you need to remember 3 simple steps:

1) Create a survey custom field. You can create survey custom fields under the Administration tab, on the same page that you create contact custom fields. Survey custom fields are primarily used to classify the surveys in your account and pull them into the appropriate views on the Survey Selection page. So, for example, if your marketing department and human resources department are running surveys, you may want to create 2 separate survey views, one for each department. The first step to do this would be to create a survey custom field for department.

2) Create a new view on the Survey Selection page. You can create a new survey view by choosing “add new view” from the Display drop-down menu. When you add the new view, you will need to name it and also specify certain options (i.e. whether you would like the view to be private or public). Finally, at the bottom of the page, you should apply an advanced filter based on the survey custom field you just created for department. For example, if you are adding the survey view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should choose “department” as the field, “equals” as the operator, and “marketing” as the value.


3) Now that you have created the survey custom field and added the new view, all you need to do is pull the appropriate surveys into the view you just created! When you added the new view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should have gotten a message, “no surveys match your criteria.” This is because you have not yet applied the survey custom field at the survey-level! To do this, simply go into an individual marketing survey, and click on  Settings on the top navigation bar. On the General Information page, you should click on the Custom Survey Fields tab. Here you can apply the “marketing” label to the individual survey, so that it will show up in the “Marketing Surveys” view.


Hopefully this post will be helpful to those of you who are struggling with the transition from folders to survey views. Believe me, survey views are completely customizable and will help you organize online surveys in your Cvent Web Surveys software account.

Some of you may have read my post a couple weeks ago about thinking ahead to reporting before you design your survey in an online poll generator. Well, I recently received a phone call from a client who works in the health care industry, and this particular call convinced me to write another post on the same subject, but with a slightly different spin on things this time.

The client who called me, we can call her Melanie, had set her online survey up perfectly considering the reports she wanted to run. She called because she wasn’t sure exactly how to filter for the appropriate data in each report. Melanie had conducted a client satisfaction survey. She wanted to run a survey report to pull contact information for all of survey respondents who had answered they were either dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied with their customer experience. However, she only wanted to pull those respondents who had also indicated they were willing to be contacted regarding their survey responses.

Because Melanie had asked for the above information in two separate survey questions and she had also made these questions required, it was easy to walk her through the steps to generate the desired report. I instructed Melanie to run the Answer Details for All Respondents report, checking off the survey questions she wanted to see in the report and also the contact fields she wanted to view for each survey respondent. I then had her set up two advanced filters for the criteria she wanted to use to filter the report. I told her that she should apply the filters on all of the above criteria.

Since Melanie considered reporting before she sent out her survey invitations, she did not have any trouble pulling the report she wanted in the end. Always remember you can filter your final reports by contact information and survey questions, so make sure to follow Melanie’s survey reporting example and make these fields and/or questions required in your survey if you plan to filter by them in your reports.

The Invitation Forwarding feature is one of the absolute coolest things about Cvent Web Surveys software. After all, who doesn’t love having someone else do their work for them? Invitation Forwarding allows your survey respondents to email survey invitations to up to 10 other people. This in turn allows you to grow your database of contacts exponentially, as the system will automatically put all of these new contacts in your Cvent Address Book for you!

In my humble opinion, Cvent does a fantastic job of updating your Address Book for you, and Invitation Forwarding is one of the reasons why. Many of our clients actually find that their Cvent Address Book is more inclusive and “up to date” than their organization’s internal database! Remember that you always have the option to export your entire Cvent Address Book, which in turn enables you to update your internal database, if need be.

Like many of the features present in the online survey application, Invitation Forwarding saves you time that you otherwise would have had to spend hunting down people who were relevant to your survey. Allowing your survey respondents to forward the survey along to other people obviously has other perks as well, since it will undoubtedly increase your response rates and the reliability of the data you collect.

In summary, here is my advice to all of you out there reading this post: Leave the Invitation Forwarding feature turned on on the Thank You page, as long as you are not conducting a private survey. Invitation Forwarding will definitely save you time, increase you response rates, and grow your database of contacts, all of which are guaranteed to make your boss happy.

When I was being trained here at Cvent, I remember Chuck Ghoorah, the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, telling all the new hires that we were henceforth in the business of "alleviating pain." I immediately thought Chuck was a really smart guy. Cvent Web Surveys software application takes away our clients' "pain" because it makes their lives easier. While I obviously think the online survey platform as a whole will save you time (and thus "alleviate your pain"), email alerts is one feature you should definitely be aware of.

Email alerts are just cool. You should familiarize yourself with them in particular because they will help you tremendously in a variety of situations, including any of the following:

1) You are the Director of Marketing at your organization. You are currently targeting a certain age group (say, 18-24 year olds) with your marketing initiatives. Every time someone indicates they are 18-24 years old in an online survey, you want to be notified automatically via email. You can set up a trigger-based email alerts to do just this!

2) As the Senior Vice President of Client Services and Relationship Management, your job is essentially to make sure that your clients are happy. As such, you would like to set up an email alert so that you receive a notification each time a client indicates that they are "very dissatisfied" with your services. This way, you can personally follow up with unhappy clients as soon as possible.

3) You are in charge of training a large group of new hires at your organization. At the end of the training period, all of the trainees will take be tested on what they have learned. You build the quiz in the online survey application and apply scoring to all of the questions. Being as busy as you are, you don’t have time to review everyone’s test responses! However, you want to know if someone does not receive a passing score. So, you set up a score-based email alert that will be sent to you automatically each time someone receives a score below a certain benchmark!

As you can see, email alerts are beneficial for a wide variety of people in lots of different situations. They will alleviate your proverbial pain, allowing you to save both time and money!

“Well, you see… I just don’t have the time.” A frustrating excuse heard every day all over the world, because everyone knows that you can and will make the time for anything important enough. Obviously time is valuable, but you choose to spend your time as you see it benefiting you most, or as you see yourself enjoying it most.

I hear the “time excuse” almost every day from our survey clients, especially when it pertains to uploading contacts into the Cvent Address Book and sending emails through our email survey tool. “But, we’re just really busy over here at XYZ Company, and we have an internal database where we store all of our contacts. I think I’m just going to use the website link to distribute my survey.” At this point, I usually make one last attempt to showcase the benefits of emailing through Cvent, and then I give up.

I’m not going to give up this time though. Because I do recognize the many benefits of sending emails through Cvent, my goal in this post is to convince you that you should make the time to take the necessary steps to do this. I will make my argument in two simple points below. As you read through it, hopefully I will change some of your minds, especially those of you who are constantly “too busy.”

1) One word: Pre-Population. People are selfish. If they feel like an email has been personally written to them, they are much more likely to read it and respond than if they realize it is a mass email that has gone out to 50,000 recipients. If you upload your contacts into the Cvent Address Book and send your survey invitations through Cvent, you can pre-populate various contact fields in the email. For example, instead of opening with “Dear Valued Employee,” you can send personalized email surve invitations that say “Dear Suzie.” This makes people feel good and will thus increase your survey response rates!

2) I bet you didn’t know taking the time to upload your contacts into Cvent's online survey management software application will ultimately save you time in the future! As you know, you can display whichever contact fields you like in the Contact Profile for any given survey. If your respondents are accessing the survey from a Cvent email, this information will be pre-populated for them. However, they can update it if something changes. For example, if one of your contacts get a promotion (and their title changes), when they update this in the Contact Profile for one of your surveys, this change will be reflected in your Address Book as well!

As you can see, sending your survey emails through the Cvent survey application will increase your survey response rates, and it will also ultimately save you time. If that doesn’t convince you this is the best way to distribute your surveys, I don’t know what will!

“Knowledge is power.” Again, a statement that I frequently heard from my parents and teachers growing up. When I was 10, I was probably told this because I was complaining about doing my fifth grade homework. These days, I still say this silently to myself from time to time. This is because knowledge is power not only to the fifth grader who is trying to get A’s in school, but also to anyone trying to make a profit in the business world.

There is no way around it; Cvent Web Surveys software provides you with business knowledge. By surveying your client pool, you will learn about their likes and dislikes, and you can thus enhance your products or services to meet the needs of those who matter. The web survey application also provides you with another kind of knowledge though, through the recent addition of click tracking reports.

Whereas the actual act of surveying customers allows you to learn more about them “from the horse’s mouth”, click tracking reports give you insight into which links people are clicking on in your survey emails, which can be extremely beneficial as well. For example, if you send your monthly e-newsletters out through the Cvent online survey platform (as many of our clients do), then you can run click tracking reports to view which links to outside websites your recipients are clicking on. Who is clicking on which links? Which URLs are the most popular?

Cvent email marketing click tracking reports include graphs that are easy to read and interpret. You can export them into Microsoft Word, Excel, or PDF. Most importantly, however, click tracking reports teach you how to place information and links in your emails. If you use emails to market your organization at all, then click tracking reports will help you leverage your ability to format those emails in order to generate the maximum possible business (and money!) for you.

No matter what kind of business you are in, you are looking to make a profit. Money may not be everything, but to those of us in the professional world, it certainly counts for a lot. We are all always looking for new ways to increase our revenue and decrease our expenses, and those of us who are smart know that time wasted is the greatest expense of all.

I am not saying this just because Cvent writes me a paycheck twice a month, but rather I am saying it because I know that it’s true: Cvent Web Surveys software is a time-saver. Our clients may pay us to license our online survey application, but in the end, the time they save thanks to the web surveys tool allows them to profit in the long run.

One of our primary goals here on the Cvent Web Surveys Client Services team is to educate clients on the best ways to use the Cvent survey tool in order to save time (and money!). In my opinion, there are a couple of features in particular with which you should familiarize yourself if you want to maximize the time that you save using our system:


If you make use of all 5 of the features listed above, not only will you get out of the office earlier, but you will also bring more money in for your company or organization. Always remember that “time is money,” and familiarize yourself with the Cvent Web Surveys tool so that we can help you save both.

We on the Cvent Web Surveys Client Services team always encourages clients to customize the headers for their online surveys. By adding your organization’s logo to the header of your survey, you are essentially branding your organization for free!

Although some clients do choose to add customized headers to their survey design templates, many do not carefully consider the best option for HOW to add their header images. When add your header image to your survey, you have two options:


There are numerous advantages to using the HTML Editor to add your header image, as opposed to the alternative option. My top 5 reasons for why you should use the HTML Editor as opposed to the alternative option are as follows:


As you can see, using the HTML Editor to add your header to your custom survey does indeed have its perks. In general, please take advantage of the HTML Editor throughout Cvent’s Web Surveys tool! As soon as you start working in the HTML Editor, you will undoubtedly agree that it's online survey software made easy. I bet it wont take long for you to start singing its praises as well.