Customer Questionnaire

Cvent provides you simple survey tips as best practices that you can follow while working on your electronic survey project to ensure that the project is flawless. Mentioned below are some survey form best practice tips that will help you achieve this.

Anonymous Survey: If you are creating an anonymous survey, please carefully consider the fact that you will not be able to link the responses that you collect to any of the respondents on your targeted list. As soon as a respondent clicks on a link in your online survey email, that person is removed from your targeted list and all of his or her contact information is removed as well. When you run survey reports for an anonymous survey form, the respondents will be identified by unique response numbers that are not linked to any respondent contact information. Respondent contact information is removed from the response for a particular anonymous survey, however it remains in your Cvent address book.

Removing Identity Confirmation Page: You can also create a collect respondent contact information survey and hide the identity confirmation page from your respondents so that the survey appears anonymous to your online survey respondents. However, for this functionality to work in your electronic survey, respondents must access the survey via a link in an email survey invitation. If the respondents are coming through the generic website link, they must go through the identity confirmation page, as there is no way to know who is responding.

Brand your company: As a valued Cvent Customer, we have activated the custom header feature in your account for a custom online survey design. Please take advantage of your ability to customize the headers on your welcome page and survey body pages to include your own images, banners and logos.

Be clear about privacy protections: People are more comfortable sharing information on the internet if they know how it will be used. The welcome page or the first page of the survey is the place to include information about how you will be using people's survey responses. Are they anonymous? Confidential? Shared with others? A university human subjects statement, if needed, would go here.

Use Page Breaks: We recommend putting a maximum of 5-6 questions on each survey page in order to keep the page lengths short. Not only does keeping each page short help reduce the likelihood that a respondent will time out, but adding page breaks helps you to collect partial responses. Anytime a respondent clicks on a "Next" button, the responses entered previous to that button are saved. This ensures that any respondents who exit the online web survey before hitting the "Finish" button will be able to go back in and answer the remainder of the questions to complete the survey.

Progress Indicator Bar: Use a progress indicator bar to allow your respondents to see where they are in the survey and to inform them when they have completed the survey.

Survey Logic: Where possible, drill down for more information. The logic in the Cvent Web Surveys system makes this very easy to do. If someone selects a negative answer choice, add a sub question to probe them for details. Use branch logic to create paths within your survey that are only applicable to one group of respondents. Pipe logic allows you to personalize your survey by pulling an answer from a previous question into the question text of a follow-up question. Lastly, advanced survey question logic can be used to make a question visible to a respondent when specific criteria are met. These criteria can be based on respondent contact information, custom contact fields, or questions in the survey. When you are applying advanced logic, you can also turn on link logic, so that respondents only see certain answer options for one question, depending on how they responded to a previous question in the survey.

Have your respondents market your survey: Activate the survey invitation forwarding feature to allow your online survey respondents send an email invitation to friends or colleagues at the completion of the survey. The contact information collected will be automatically added to your address book for future surveys.

From Name in the emails: Always use a recognizable From Name in your emails as this drives your respondents to open the email. This is very important because without opening the email, your respondents will not be able to take the survey.

Use Multiple Email Campaigns: Send targeted email marketing messages to your audience in order to help increase survey response rates. Within one survey, you can send out different messages to different groups of people by segmenting your invitee list. This functionality allows you to specify the From Name, From Email Address, Subject Line of the email, and body of the email. Take advantage of this functionality and manipulate these variables in order to increase the open rate of your survey emails and your response rates.

We often get asked, "What is a good survey design?" All of these survey best practice tips are components to keep in mind when designing a questionnaire to ensure quality survey data. Watch out for more tips coming soon...

Does your customer survey have "survivor bias"? I'm betting it does. Why? Because when most survey designers create business questionnaires or client satisfaction surveys we only collect feedback from individuals who are still customers. What about lost business? Why aren't those customers who left asked to complete your client feedback form? You better believe they have feedback.

In her post at the Dimensional Research blog, Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Avoid "Survivor Bias", Diane Hagglund defines "Survivor Bias" as drawing conclusions only from data that is available or convenient and thus systematically biasing your results. AKA biasing your survey sample by only asking "happy" customers. They may not be over the moon about your product, but they're at least happy enough with your offering if they're still paying you.

I agree with Diane on this one, it's pretty ridiculous to allow this bias to creep into your customer market research. It's easily avoided considering you should have all the customer data you need to send them the same client survey template. Make sure you're measuring client satisfaction among customers who left you for a competitor as well as those who simply decided not to renew the service (and didn't go with anyone else).

When you begin writing customer survey questions to create client questionnaires or update your annual template for a client satisfaction survey make sure you think about your former customers. If you don't know who they are, this is a good time to find out. Thank goodness for internet research software and customer insight solutions to make the act of surveying clients a little easier.

When working with a client who has already built a strong customer base, market researchers are often called upon to create surveys to aid with customer retention programs.

Customer retention surveys are a bit different than a new product or service launch survey because the survey respondent sample must consist of product users. There are several things you need to ask this group so your client can formulate the best customer retention strategies, including:


The recommendation sample customer questionnaire question is important. Often, this can be a company’s bread-and-butter when it comes to retaining customers and gaining new ones. If a good amount of current customers would recommend the product to a friend, that speaks volumes about the quality.

It is also wise to include some open-ended questions. Find out why people use the product, and would continue to do so. If they wouldn’t recommend the product, or use it again, it is important to know why. Your client can use the information to persuade customers on the fence, and keep current customers coming back.

Before creating a poll online for your client survey, sit down and gauge initial opinions and move forward from there. If there were original product launch studies done, it may be helpful to revisit those results as well, just for comparison purposes. Approach the questionnaire research with care and the resulting data analysis will provide information to create customer retention techniques and marketing strategies.

In April, we added a Cvent Web Surveys software feature to allow survey creators to import responses from outside sources. Last month, we added a new feature that will save you a lot of time creating client questionnaire, or product feedback surveys or employee 360 feedback forms. Whether your data collection methods are telephone surveys or paper questionnaires, importing question as a batch instead of manually entering them began saving users time before getting to the meaty task of analyzing survey data.

Whether you're migrating to our survey software system from another online survey tool or making the jump from paper questionnaires and paper survey design software to online surveys, being able to import your questions in a batch rather than creating survey questions one at a time is a huge time saver. You certainly don't need me to tell you cutting a few minutes here and there leaves you more time to do other tasks.

Using various survey question types in your survey is important, we've mentioned it as a survey best practice before, and you can import all 19 different question types using a single spreadsheet.

When you begin creating your next survey, you'll see an additional button at the top of the design survey questions section. If you click Import Questions, a 5 step survey creation wizard will walk you through the steps of importing your questions, including mapping the fields in your spreadsheet to the fields in Cvent.


After completing the wizard, all your questions will be added to the end of your online survey questionnaire. If you're just creating a simple survey, you're done. If it's a more complex online survey questionnaire, you can go through and apply any survey question logic and page breaks to improve the survey respondent experience.

Have a question about how to improve your next online survey using our new features? Contact our client services team via email at customercare@cvent.com or by phone at 866-318-4357.

I came across an interesting conversation today where someone was objecting to conducting a customer satisfaction survey because they were concerned the customer questionnaire would only reveal negative customer feedback. This is definitely the wrong attitude. If you think online survey results will only contain negative feedback, it's even more important you select a feedback management tool or survey designing software TODAY and create a customer satisfaction survey tomorrow. Then start fixing the problems that are resulting in all the negative feedback.

Fortunately, the person who thought they would only receive negative feedback will probably be proven wrong. Unless your organization has some serious issues you've been turning a blind eye to for awhile, no survey - customer or employee survey - is going to result in all negative feedback. If everyone hated your company, then you would have no customers and/or no employees. So relax.

The misnomer here is that only unhappy people complete survey questionnaires. This is not true. Happy customers complete them too. Even people who don't have strong opinions either way complete surveys. I honestly cannot say it enough: conducting business surveys to measure customer satisfaction or employee loyalty is essential to all organizations.

Don't be afraid of negative feedback. It's actually a good thing because it forces you to make improvements. Your organization isn't perfect, and there is always more room for growth. Sign up for a free trial today and begin collecting feedback from customers and employees.

As I've mentioned plenty of times before, a critical step in the survey research process is taking the time to analyze data (check out these tips on how to analyze survey data) and presenting your survey findings. If you're like most people, the thought of having to create a survey report makes you cringe - perhaps even hide out under your desk until you think everyone has forgotten about the survey research project. Shame on you if you're under your desk! Why did you even bother spending all that time on the market research or employee questionnaire or customer satisfaction marketing survey in the first place if you didn't want to share the findings?

I do understand, despite my sarcasm. Creating a survey report can be daunting. After all, where do you even start? In past posts, I've mentioned how great Cvent presentations and reports are for post data collection survey analysis and report creation. It's awesome that our online survey software can do a lot of the heavy lifting with the graphical representation of your survey, but you still need to structure the report and provide recommendations.

After you finish analyzing survey results, here's a quick guide to what should be included in your survey report:


Even with these survey tips for creating survey reports, you may still not have the extra time to allocate to building reports and presentations. If this is your situation, let our Survey Professional Services Group help. Our talented team created countless custom, professional reports for our clients to share with their management teams and decision makers. Contact us to learn more about our Professional Services.

I'm Conducting A Customer Survey - When Should I Send It? A common question for surveyors conducting customer satisfaction or client surveys is when they should send out their questionnaire? There's no perfect answer for this.

You want to give the customer enough time to process the engagement - but not too much time they forget about it. Think about yourself, and ask some of your friends or colleagues, do you remember an experience you had 6 months ago with an organization? What about last month? You'll probably find few people remember the engagement from 6 months ago while lots of people remember the one they had last month. If you're getting ready to conduct a customer survey, best practices suggest just inviting customers who have made a purchase or a customer service request in the last few months (I would recommend you stay within the last 3 months or a quarter). The type of customer questionnaire will determine whether you want people who have talked to a sales rep, made a purchase or made customer help requests.

Survey email alerts, also commonly referred to as triggered email alerts, are a must-have feature for online survey software. Why? So you can respond to customer or employee feedback from HR questionnaires to product evaluation to customer service surveys. Yesterday, I wrote a post on tips for listening to feedback. Timeliness in closing the feedback loop should be a priority for organizations looking to improve how they respond and implement changes in reaction to comments.


A common form for feedback collection is web based surveys. So it should be no surprise when I say you need to have email alerts triggered to quickly respond to customer questionnaire or employee survey responses. Not every survey needs triggered alerts and you don't always need them for every respondent, so Cvent's Web Survey tool gives you three options for survey email alerts:

1. Alerts at the question level. If a client responds to a customer satisfaction survey saying they are very dissatisfied with your product or states they are unlikely to renew their contract, it may be appropriate to set a task for their account manager to follow up. Follow up as soon as possible. I find the sooner you can follow up with someone, show them that you're listening and want to resolve any issues, the easier it will be to win them back. The longer a customer has to think about a problem and stew about the pain it's caused, the bigger deal it's going to be later - possibly a deal breaker.

2. Alerts based on survey score. Many people use online surveys as a lead generation tool, for many of those users scoring leads to help the sales team prioritize follow up is important. In cases like this, you may decide you want to receive an email alert when someone scores over a specified number on the survey to ensure the team is following up with the hottest leads. The same idea could be used for educational surveys where you may want to know when a professor receives below a certain score on teacher evaluations completed by students.

3. Alerts for a completed survey response. There will be cases where you want to know when someone completes your survey and how they responded. Be careful with this, when you have a large survey sample, you don't want to be receiving emails every minute to let you know someone completed the survey.

With Cvent, surveyors have the opportunity to send the survey alert to five people and include a custom message in the alert. If you're using survey question level alerts, you can have different alerts be sent to different people as well. Meaning, if you want your customer care team to know when someone gives good feedback on a call they had, but the sales team to know when someone is unlikely to renew, you can set the alerts up that way.

Sign up for a product demonstration to learn more about Cvent Web Survey software features.

Although the Twitter talk has slowed down some, there's still a lot of buzz around how organizations should use Twitter as a resource for customer service, customer feedback, lead generation, etc.

How are you using Twitter?

I think Twitter is a great way to collect customer feedback. I'm still unsure about using Twitter for customer service, because if you do it wrong - it could really hurt your organization's reputation. Make sure you evaluate whether or not it even makes sense for your product. But the most important thing organizations need to understand when it comes to social media is that the conversation is going on - whether you're a part of it or not. It doesn't matter if you have customer survey software and conduct customer questionnaires online or off. The internet has made sharing information with peers so easy, of course it's going to happen and you need to monitor it. Ignoring potential feedback because it's not within your chosen method (ex. surveys online or feedback forms within your restaurant or store) would be silly. With that in mind, don't ever try to control the conversation, customers will not appreciate it and will likely kick you out of the conversation.

So how do you manage feedback and not let it spiral out of control? (See this post about Motrin Moms or #AmazonFail on Twitter for examples.) That's a great question, and I'm not sure anyone has a one size fits all solution. Social media doesn't have a one size fits all solution, each organization needs to figure out their own strategy. For how you deal with feedback, it's the same. You need to set your own rules for what requires action and what does not. My recommendation is if your share of the conversation is small it may be beneficial to take part in as much of the conversation as possible. This means when someone says something both good and bad about your organization. But do not over react to bad feedback. If you get bad feedback, maybe there's a process you need to look at and fix or it's just that someone doesn't like you. If you get bad feedback that you think is unfair, try to follow up in a non-defensive way to understand the problem so you can fix it. Chances are if you solve the problem, you'll receive praise for it, not more hate. Social Media users tend to share the good feedback as well as the bad, which flips the belief that significantly more bad news is shared than good. There's still an imbalance, but it's getting leveler.

My point: Twitter, and other social media platforms, are a great source for customer feedback for customer service feedback to product feedback to any other type of feedback. These resources should be included in your tool box.

I was looking through a customer survey template the other day and the first question was "Which of these products do you use?" The options were Product A, Product B, Product X and Product Y. Umm, hello? The point of a customer questionnaire is that you're surveying customers, which means you should already know what product survey respondents bought. Now if you're a B2C organization that distributes products through retail stores, this statement might be a little unfair since a consumer can go into any Target and purchase your product. But for now, let's assume you don't have this channel for product distribution.

Why are you making your business survey longer instead of shorter? You already know the answer, put this information in the contact record. Since you have the data, I would even recommend including the question, hiding it and importing the answers to this question for respondents before sending out any email marketing soliciting survey responses. This way, you can utilized online survey tool features like Pipe Logic. Using Pipe Question Logic allows you to personalize the respondent experience and keep them more engaged. Customer survey best practices tell us more engaged respondents are less likely to abandon your survey, aka increase your response rates.

What other common questions could you eliminate during customer research studies because you already have the data somewhere in your organization?

To copy or not to copy? One of the great features of Cvent's web survey software is the clone or copy survey feature. By copying a past survey you can save time, in not only question creation, but also in the actual graphical survey design. If you've never created an online survey - regardless of the survey application - you may not understand what a time saver this can be. Selecting the right color scheme, loading the correct images, making sure everything lines up the way you want in the web survey template can all eat up a chunk of time, and before you know it it's lunch time - or worse, the day is over and all you've done is design the graphical layout of your survey! So having a clone web survey option is - in my book - a must have. We've said before, when it comes to surveys, respondents judge a book by it's cover. And I think they should. In this wonderful world of technology, there's no excuse for having an ugly looking survey, particularly when you could be reinforcing your brand. Furthermore, ugly surveys do not make for a very good survey respondent experience.


However, I want to warn against simply copying a survey and emailing questionnaire invitations out to an email list. Why would you do that? Perhaps, you argue, you want to run the same product survey template in a different state, region, country, etc. or you want to be able to bench mark against last year's customer service feedback or job satisfaction survey. These are fair points but is there other information you realized you needed to improve your product? Was your customer questionnaire perfect? Could you improve your staff opinion survey? Of course you can! Nothing is ever perfect, and when it comes to surveying improving the quality and reliability of your survey data, you should be striving to get the strongest data possible. You're probably planning to use the data you collect to make business decisions, and with that in mind, why would you ever argue for simply copying an existing survey without evaluating the questions you asked last time and if the questionnaire could be improved?

I came across a blog post on Valeria Maltoni's Conversation Agent Blog not too long ago where she outlines the Top 10 Reasons Why Your Customers are Being Difficult. The list includes things like changing the rules, being negative and being the only game in town, but there are four I liked best. They are also, in my opinion, the easiest to rectify:

• Not listening to what customers have to say. Customer questionnaires are too structured so that you're leading the conversation, instead of giving them the opportunity to tell you what they want to tell you. Valeria makes the comparison to a trial: Objection! Leading the witness!

• Not soliciting feedback. I have to agree with Valeria on this, not asking is worse than not listening. If you're making any changes to their product, ask them first. I've mentioned before it's important to run customer surveys and conduct customer research particularly when it's a decision that is going to impact your customers big time!

• Not following up on customer feedback. I've written entire posts about how conducting any type of feedback questionnaire causes customers to set expectations that you will act on your client survey research. This should be a no-brainer, because if you're not going to act on the data you get back, why are you even wasting your time (and customers' time) with a survey?

• Not everyone is going to like you. While this one is not directly related to creating an online survey or questionnaire, it's important to keep in mind when reading through feedback. Not everyone is going to like you, and you can't please everyone. Particularly if you're one of those lucky (or unlucky) organizations to be the only game in town.

People often worry about the integrity of their survey data and how to protect it. While there's no magic solution, here are a few tips to help you identify those respondents who are not thoughtfully answering your survey questionnaire. Chances are you spent a lot of time creating a questionnaire to meet your survey project goals, ensuring the result is quality responses should be at the top of your list. Here are a few things you can do during the survey creation to ensure the integrity of your survey results:

1. Question respondents' qualifications. Some people refer to this as a knowledge trap. The idea is to verify the respondent is the type of professional they claim to be (and you need for your survey). Typically these questions belong towards the top with other qualifying questions. For example, if you're conducting a market research survey targeting educators you may ask a question specific to their field. But you can also use this tactic for product evaluation surveys or customer questionnaires by asking questions related to your product or service that only a client will be able to answer. Here's a sample question for a Cvent user:


2. Test respondents' logic. These types of questions are intended to catch Christmas Tree-ers and straight liners (those who give the same response to every question to speed things along). For this type of trap, you ask the same question multiple ways. Here are a example survey questions utilizing a logic trap:


Depending on how you use logic traps, it may be necessary to space them out. You wouldn't want to have my sample survey questions appear one right after another. It will irritate respondents because you're asking them the same thing twice and wasting their time. Don't be overly obvious, like I was, about it. When you're looking at your results, if someone said it was very likely they would buy the product in the first question but said it was very unlikely they would buy the product in the second, you probably have a problem.

3. Bring respondent attention back. Sometimes when you're completing a survey or questionnaire online you begin to go on auto-pilot only reading the part of the question or just skipping to the responses - particularly if the survey is long. A way to combat this tendency is to add some attention traps to your questionnaire design. An easy way to do this is to throw an unrelated attribute into a ranking scale. It forces the respondent to stop think for a second about what the question is asking and refocus. Here's an example:


Instead of throwing out a respondent because they fail one of these tests, I would suggest simply throwing out that specific answer. In other words, purge data at the question level not the respondent level. If they fail every test and their completion time is way off, perhaps their response is impacting the integrity of your results. After all, the goal of every survey, questionnaire or feedback form should be to answer a question and use the survey report to make decisions.

Half the battle of conducting a survey is gathering the feedback you need.  We recommend using an email survey tool to solicit online survey responses.  Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to increase responses to your customer questionnaire, employee satisfaction feedback form or marketing survey.  With more people moving to email marketing for promotions, sales and other marketing messages, email lists are seeing higher opt-out rates. 

I recently came across a MarketingSherpa survey asking why people unsubscribe from email lists:



With half of respondents citing relevancy or frequency of emails as a reason for unsubscribing, you look closely at your own practices.  Every organization can set their own business rules concerning the frequency of emails and surveys.  To combat the problem allow subscribers to set up their own preferences for how often they want to be contacted and what information they want.  Depending on your organization, some subscribers may want daily or weekly emails, whereas others may only want to hear from you once a quarter.  Giving control back to the subscriber and tailoring your message will boost responses across all your email marketing initiatives - not just your web based surveys.

We hear it time and time again from organizations: Web based surveys are not a good fit for their goals because the people they want feedback from are not Internet users. However, a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project may make you reconsider.

According to the new study as reported by eMarketer, more than 50 percent of respondents ages 65 to 69 are online, while 45 percent of 70- to 74-year-olds are Internet users as well. These statistics represent a significant increase since 2005, when only a quarter of 70- to 75-year-olds were online.

Not surprisingly, online usage by younger age groups remains high. About 93 percent of users age 12 to 17 are online (an increase from 87 percent in 2005), while Internet users make up over 80 percent of respondents in various age groups from 18 to 49.



What does this mean for organizations that want to create questionnaires for customer research surveys, customer service surveys, and other customer or client surveys? Don't shy away from an online survey program because you doubt its ability to solicit enough responses for statistically significant data. Clearly online demographics are changing; now more than ever, the Internet is a key tool for reaching audience members of all ages.

With the help of an online survey tool such as Cvent, organizations can launch Internet surveys and gain the necessary responses through the various online methods (email marketing, advertising, social networks, websites, etc.). Your target market likely has many more people online than you think, and online survey tools can help you grow your database of those people.

Pew Internet & American Life Project researchers expect Internet penetration to level off over time. For now, surveyors should be aware of the trend and embrace the changes, taking note of age groups in their target market that are most likely to be online.

Wondering how to capture more customers on your online retail front? Who isn't? Whether the economy is good or bad, businesses are always looking to turn a prospect into a customer.

Online surveys can help you figure out how to do just that. Take, for example, a 2008 Compete survey of the percent of U.S. online wedding registry users who made an online purchase. The survey found that shoppers to a retailer's website were two to three times more likely to make a purchase for a wedding present than other purposes. Retailers can assume, then, that to drive profit from their online channels they should increase the popularity of their registries.

It's a pretty simple suggestion, but not always the first one that comes to mind when retailers are looking to boost profits. But thanks to market and customer research surveys, the answer was clear. Results such as these are just another example of the kind of data you can easily gather with an online survey.