Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

Yesterday, I shared the first 5 tips from the Meetings & Convention article, Survey Science: How to craft more effective attendee evaluations. No one can deny the importance of measuring customer satisfaction, so why wouldn't you want to conduct a post-event survey to measure attendee satisfaction? Particularly if it's an annual conference, meeting or tradeshow. If you want attendees to keep coming to your events, you need to make sure you're gathering feedback on what worked well, what didn't, what should be included next year.

In continuing with the fifteen survey best practices shared in the article, here are the next five:

6. Be careful with demographic survey questions. This tip comes from our very own Eric Eden, VP of Marketing here at Cvent. Survey respondents don't always like to share all their demographic information on surveys. If you already have the information from registration, match it up later. Otherwise, if demographic information is a must for your survey analysis then make sure to put them at the end of the survey.

7. Ask intensity questions. You don't want to just ask yes-or-no questions. You want to know the degree with which the survey respondent agrees or disagrees with your statement. For example, don't ask if you should include public speaking skills at your next training conference, instead ask how valuable the attendees would find a session on public speaking. Asking these types of questions in the pre-event survey can help you prioritize the agenda. If you get a lot of weak interest for one session, you may want to include the session that got fewer, but more passionate, votes instead.

8. Offer a midpoint. As I've mentioned in the past, there are passionate arguments among market researchers about how many points should be on your scale. This article suggests going with an odd number scale because it has a true midpoint.

9. Questionnaire design should be balanced. This is another suggestion by Eric I fully agree with. Survey design is a definite skill. Some people try to write a lot of open-ended questions when they're working on designing survey questionnaires because they think they get better data. This is a mistake. You want to have a mix of close-ended questions (multiple select, single select, rank questions) and open-ended questions. The best surveys will include more closed-ended questions. They provide you with better data and are much easier when it comes to the survey data analysis.

10. Introduce the survey. We've gone over this many times. It's important to introduce your questionnaire. In the introduction you want to explain what the survey is about and why you're conducting it. By providing survey respondents with this information, you're likely to see a higher response rate. Introductions get "buy in" from the survey sample, they see that the data collection is important and are more likely to complete your survey.

Do you have anything to add to these conference and seminar survey tips? What questions have you asked in pre-conference surveys to  help you plan the event?

A recent article in Meetings & Conventions Magazine caught my attention this month: Survey Science, How to Craft more Effective Attendee Evaluations. Meeting planners are usually not survey experts, their expertise lay in planning and executing events, not crafting flawless survey research questionnaires. However, in the last year the value of meetings and events have been called into question after bad press surrounding some organizations' meeting practices. With meeting and event planners having to increasingly prove the values of meetings and measuring meeting results, being able to create event surveys to gather attendee feedback has become even more important.

While we've discussed several of these survey best practices in the past in reference to sample staff survey questions or customer feedback forms it never hurts to review them again. Here are the first five online survey tips from the article:

1. Set survey goals first. This shouldn't be a big surprise. On Friday I wrote about how to create a customer survey, and setting customer satisfaction survey objectives was the first step there too. If you don't figure out what your objectives are in the beginning, writing meaningful survey questions will be a lot harder later on. For example, if the survey objective is to figure out how to improve the event next year, only ask questions about things you can change for future events. It doesn't make sense to evaluate the location if you've already booked the same venue for next year; if you haven't booked next year's location, asking about the venue makes sense.

2. Write survey questions that are clear and ask what you really want to ask. Articulating a question to really collect the feedback you're looking for can be quite a challenge. Take these sample conference survey questions, if the planner wants to identify which sessions would be best to add to next year's lineup (assuming attendees must pay to attend the sessions):

If you've been paying attention to survey best practices, you'll know the third one is the wording you want. Why? Because it's the only one that explains the attendees will have to pay for the sessions. It's not a matter of which sessions sound interesting, it's a matter of which sessions present enough value to be worth the cost.

3. Find out why they're dissatisfied. It's not enough to know that an attendee was dissatisfied with the registration process. Planners should provide attendees with the chance to explain why they are dissatisfied - maybe it was a technical problem or there wasn't enough event staff to mitigate issues.

4. Keep it short. General survey best practices suggest keeping your online survey as short as possible. The best methods for making sure you're keeping it short is to only ask questions that have a direct link to your seminar survey objectives. The second method is to make sure you're using survey question logic, such as branch and skip logic. This allows you to keep the survey relevant to the respondent and only ask questions that make sense. We hinted at this in a recent post where we talked about using one survey to gather event feedback for all the sessions at your event.

5. Think about the survey's organization. When designing questionnaires it's important to keep the flow of the survey in mind. Start with general questions and work your way to the more specific questions. The survey should only focus on one topic at a time. In the example of multiple event sessions, it doesn't make sense to mix up the session questions. Instead, ask all the questions you have about one session, then move on to the next session.

In the next few days, I'll share the other 10 survey tips from the Meetings & Conventions article. As a meeting or event planner, how have you found pre- and post-event surveys helpful in planning events?

Have a question? We're here to help! Here at Cvent we're always trying to help people improve their survey projects. Whether you're trying to write new employee feedback survey questions, create a customer service performance reviews or simply get a better understanding of how our online survey research software and enterprise feedback management solution works, we're happy to answer your questions!

To make it easy to get all your survey questions answered, we've added a chat to our blog. Someone will be happy to answer your questions during normal business hours (9am - 6pm ET). So go ahead, click to chat and ask our experts your questions about employee feedback software, data collection methods, customer survey questions, or any other survey questionnaire related question!

Online surveys offer many advantages over traditional quantitative research methods (such as phone and mail surveys), like cost efficiency, user-friendly survey design software, and getting results in electronic format.  One concern with using an online survey mode is that it can sometimes produce lower response rates than other modes. With some planning and careful consideration, however, you can get response rates equal to (or higher than) traditional methods.  One of the main ways you can raise response rates is by increasing your survey’s legitimacy to your audience.  Make respondents feel like they should complete your survey because it is important in some regard.  To do this, implement the following guidelines:

Be professional throughout the entire communication process.  Choose your survey sample wisely, and make sure the survey is relevant to them.  Let them know why you’re asking for their time, and that you really appreciate their opinions.  Tell them what the results will be used for, and that you can send a summary if they wish to see one.  Use appropriate language, and avoid wording things too casually unless the sample’s demographics call for it.  Send them thank you notes.

Personalize the survey for each respondent.  This includes sending personalized email survey invitation, such as referring to them by name instead of "Dear Valued Customer," if you have access to that information.  If you already have demographic data about your respondents elsewhere, do not ask them for it in the survey (link to it later on).

Use a custom survey banner.  Survey respondents like to know who the survey is from, what it concerns, and that it is from a legitimate organization for a legitimate reason.  Adding your logo or letterhead to the survey template design makes it easy to remind them who you are.  This is also basically a free form of branding.

Anything you can do to keep your survey in the research and scientific realms will help increase legitimacy.  Respondents are more likely to complete a survey offered in this manner than when paired with a sales pitch.  If possible, partner with another organization, such as a local research office, college or nonprofit organization.

Many people ask the question How do I create a customer survey? The basic steps are the same no matter what type of client survey you're writing: customer satisfaction, global market research, product development surveys, etc.

Step 1: Sit down and figure out what the goal of the survey is. Are you trying to identify upsell opportunities? Want to discover features missing from your current product? Figuring out if it's a good idea to take your marketing overseas and attack a global market? In the very beginning of the survey planning process, you should know what it is you want to get out of the consumer survey. If you don't have a firm customer satisfaction survey objectives in the beginning, while you go through the other steps such as writing survey questions or selecting the best survey software, you're going to stray from the path. If you stray from the path, you may find the final survey results are not as helpful as you had hoped.

Step 2: Decide on a research methodology. Your goals should help you on this step as well. You need to first decide if you're planning to do qualitative or quantitative research. From there narrow the scope further, if you want to do qualitative research are you interested in focus groups, advisory boards, one-on-one interviews? With quantitative research you may decide on comment cards, feedback forms and surveys. Is your survey method going to be online, telephone-based or paper questionnaires?

Step 3: Survey Design. I'm making the assumption since you're reading a survey blog about how to create customer surveys, you're not interested in the other market research methods right now so I'm going to focus on the process of building customer surveys. Once you've gotten through the first two steps, you're ready to start writing survey questions (Finally! I bet you thought this would be the first step!). Customer satisfaction survey design can be the biggest challenge. Luckily, there is survey designing software to help you step through this. Survey software tools often have templates and question libraries to help you write good survey questions.

Step 4: Data collection. Okay, you've picked your customer survey methodology, created a client survey and you're ready to field your survey (or use the data collection tool in your survey application to collect responses). Exactly what you do in this step will depend on what type of survey you decided to collected: telephone, paper, online. One way to get survey responses is to use email marketing tools to send personalized email surveys. You can also share the link on your website, social media sites, invoices, etc.

Step 5: Analyze customer feedback. Analyzing survey data is one of people's least favorite parts of the surveying process. We have some tips for how to analyze survey data here. Don't be afraid of this step. You need to conduct the survey customer analysis to achieve your goal. It's what you set out to do, so keep your chin up. You're only a step away from the final product (and once you choose survey analysis methods you should be almost finished).

Step 6: Share the survey findings. This is what you set out to do. Get answers to your customer questions. Take the customer feedback analysis you completed in the last step and format it. You're creating a survey report you can share within your organization (and maybe with others outside of your organization). If you need tips for creating survey reports or an example survey report, you can read more about them here.

Step 6.1: Take action. This is still part of step 6, but it's important enough it should be broken out. In your customer analysis survey report, you should have shared your recommendations for moving forward. Make sure you make recommendations and there is an agreement about moving forward based on the customer survey findings. If you don't plan to take action in Step 1, then you should save yourself the time of conducting the customer research in the first place.

Any other survey research design tips? How have you used these steps to create a customer survey that improved processes in your organization?

Although question order effects are believed to be stronger for interviews than for online research surveys, it is still important to take a look at your market survey format and how the questions are ordered throughout your survey questionnaire.  By following the general guidelines listed below, you can reduce possible order effects and response bias from your customer survey samples.

Start broad, then get more specific.  Ask your customers or respondents general questions about your organization and the concepts you are interested in first, then get down to the more detailed questions you want them to answer (such as those about individual products, specific preferences and how to improve customer service).

Ideally, you’d like to find out if the order of your questions can induce biases before you send it to your entire survey population.  Use online survey software that allows you to randomize parts of your online survey, and compare the results with those from predefined orders.  This is an excellent way to pretest your survey questionnaire for possible order effects.

Devote some time and effort to making your survey “flow.”  You want the overall survey instrument to be cohesive, not disjointed or seemingly all over the place.  A big part of allowing for a logical flow throughout a survey comes from writing smooth transitions.  Let your respondents know that you want them to change gears.

Ask demographic questions at the end of your survey.

If you are asking sensitive questions (about topics like income, personal behaviors, etc.) try to place these toward the latter parts of your survey as well.  That way you get at least partial completions in the event that respondents change their mind and exit your survey before full completion.

Sabre, a travel-reservations-technology company, recently conducted a survey of 90 global airlines and a whopping 86% said that efforts aimed at maintaining and growing customer loyalty had the most positive impact on their business. The survey also found that 58% of airlines are increasing fees on checked bags and peak travel times, among others, to help their bottom line.

See the disconnect? No? Well, JD Power reported in June that customer satisfaction with airlines has dropped - for the third straight year. JD Power cites increased fees and decreased services as a prime reason for the drop and also notes that the low-cost carriers - Southwest, JetBlue, and Virgin America - have significantly higher satisfaction. They also tend to have far fewer fees.

Everyone knows that airlines are struggling right now, but I bet your business has seen better times as well. Would you ever simultaneously think that customer satisfaction is the most important driver for your business... and then do exactly the thing that depresses that satisfaction the most? The industry has conducted some great research, but the belief that they can somehow do the opposite of what that satisfaction research suggests and still satisfaction in the long term seems tenuous.

But not all airlines are chasing short term revenues as the expense of long term customer loyalty and profits. The New York Times is reporting that some are urging regulation to stop airlines from charging "holiday surcharges" that do not appear as part of the fare, but are added to the price of your ticket later in the purchase process. Who is urging this regulation? Not consumer groups (well, they probably are as well!), but none other than Virgin Group founder and Chairman Richard Branson. Branson says the "fees are not a good idea" and is worried that airlines risk alienating travelers if they add to many after-fare fees. 

It is good to see that not everyone in the industry is blind to the data - and my personal customer experiences say that Branson is right on the money. I know that I am now far, far less likely to even consider flying on the legacy carriers these days. Why fly United if I'm going to be nickled-and-dimed when I can fly Southwest, JetBlue, or Branson's Virgin America? 

Surveying customers and your target market is only worthwhile if you actually listen to the results and act on them. As the former CEO of Southwest Airlines (a Cvent Web Surveys client!), Herb Kelleher said: "We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things". Survey your market, your customers, and your employees and use the date to enact change. Don't ignore it and hope for the best!

Every organization should ask themselves What is good customer service? and create their own definition for good customer service based on the answer they come up with. Giving customers the opportunity to provide feedback on their customer experience is one way to improve customer service quality, but only if the customer feedback gets back to the employees. Lots of organizations use customer service surveys to measure customer experiences and customer loyalty. What separates the organizations with mediocre customer service from the organizations with excellent customer service is sharing the feedback from the customer loyalty surveys with the employees. Seems pretty straight forward, right?

I suggest you take it a step further, however. While sharing the aggregate results of customer feedback surveys with front-line employees is important, you can use these customer surveys as assessments of employee performance or staff evaluations. If you're not already using customer surveys to support this type of employee performance feedback, here are some steps from the CRMBuyer to make this type of process possible:

• Move from random survey sampling to an attempted census. Random survey samples are great when you're just trying to get an overall sense of customer satisfaction rates. However, if you're trying to collect feedback to figure out how to improve employee performance, a random sample is unlikely to provide enough data for each employee. Like with all other types of surveys, not everyone you send personalized survey invitations to will participate, but you will likely get enough responses to support the employee assessments.

• Develop new employee reports. To improve workforce performance, organizations can't continue to provide infrequent high-level survey reports. Instead, employees should get to see weekly reports. Using standardized reports that compare the employee to the overall average and to their colleagues as a group have the most impact.

• Develop new management reports. Like with how employees see the customer feedback reports needs to change with this strategy, management reports do too. Managers should be able to see responses by employees so they can take appropriate action. Managers will have different opinions on how much information should be shared with their staff; some will want to share every customer comment from the employee performance evaluation form, others wont want to share individual survey results.

• Develop HR guidelines for the use of these employee reports. The HR department should be deeply involved in the creation of these HR employee appraisal forms and employee survey reports. If an employee constantly receives negative customer feedback, the organization may choose to terminate their employment so it helps to keep HR in the loop. However, that shouldn't be the goal of this type of customer survey program. The survey feedback should be used to improve employee job performance and mentor them. With the help of customer service assessment surveys and employee performance review forms organizations can figure out how to improve customer service quality.

I was recently asked to complete a restaurant customer satisfaction survey. Only two questions into the restaurant questionnaire I was asked the following restaurant survey sample question:


None of these answers fit my situation. I simply just don't eat out that often. So to me, none of these answers fit. I suppose technically, after thinking about it for awhile, I could have answered that I think it's too expensive or the value isn't good enough. However, because of the question before this one, to me this restaurant customer satisfaction survey question is asking why don't I eat there over other restaurants more frequently. So in reading the options, I'm thinking the survey builder want to know why I don't visit their restaurant over other restaurants more frequently.

Morale of the story? Survey respondents will not always read your restaurant, market research, employee or retail survey the way you planned. Everyone makes different associations and is influenced by question flow or answer choices. Make sure that if you're going to give a long list of options, you include all the possible answer choices. This question could have been improved simply by not requiring it.

Generating new customers is much more difficult than retaining current customers. Businesses can stay afloat in a time of recession by leaning on those current customers - the downfall: they must do everything in their power to keep them as customers. One of the most effective ways businesses have successfully had good customer retention programs is by surveying customers.

By using the net promoter score (NPS) question type, a company can survey customers using a 0-10 point scale with 0 indicating the extreme negative and 10 extreme positive. There are three categories: promoters, passives and detractors. Promoters are those who rate a 9 or 10. Passives are those who rate a 7 or 8. Detractors are those who rate the organization a 6 and below. The total NPS score is determined by subtracting percent of detractors from percent of promoters- with 50 and above considered a good score. The NPS survey question asked is: How likely is it that you would recommend this product to a friend or colleague?

With promoters, there are two main types: high-profit and low-profit.

High-profit promoters are those individuals who buy the most, most loyal, and essentially make up the company’s revenue stream.   But low- profit promoters are loyal customers who are restricted from purchasing as much as they like (typically due to budget). In the end, high-promoters are essential to company’s profit because if you believe the 80-20 rule (80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers), then you certainly want to survey to find out who those high-promoters are in order to keep them happy.

Like with promoters, there are the high-profit and low-profit detractors.

Customers who are high-profit detractors are still very important, because they are still high dollar clients. Companies must give them a lot of attention as these are the people who your competition will want to steal. Low- profit detractors are those you cannot please within reason. However, while you may lose these as customers, it’s important to maintain professional relationships as well a good company image. You don't want to give your detractors any additional reasons to say anything negative to other potential customers. 

Something to keep in mind: dissatisfied customers will eventually tell 9 other people about their problem with satisfied customers will tell 5-6 others about their positive experience. Having customers that are willing to promote you are the biggest indication of a high customer satisfaction.

In the past, if one of your customers had a bad customer experience with your product or service, it certainly wasn’t good for you business but in most cases the potential impact was limited to an extremely small audience. Today, the reality is much different thanks to Web 2.0 applications including Yelp, Facebook and of course, Twitter. These websites, and others like them, expand the reach of a single customer’s opinion, effectively giving them an oversize soapbox to espouse their opinion on your product, service or employees. If these cries are ignored, or more cries of the same creep up, you have a problem. The customer complaints will gather momentum and begin to spiral, that is if you're not doing anything about it. Monitoring and measuring customer experiences and satisfaction ratings is definitely one step business can take so they don't have an explosion of bad buzz.

In order to protect themselves against these unilateral attacks, businesses need a robust partner to help them improve customer relationships. Cvent’s web based survey software and enterprise feedback management solution can be one of these invaluable protectors. Cvent’s real-time email alerts leverage the effectiveness of conducting surveys. Take the following sample customer satisfaction survey question, “How satisfied are you with our latest product upgrade?” you can have an email sent to your Director of Client Services whenever somebody responds that they are unhappy or dissatisfied.

By proactively reaching out to clients, you are able to simultaneously improve relationships with customers and protect the value of your corporate brand. Even better than simply helping everybody breathe easier, these types of customer satisfaction initiatives can fatten the organization's "wallet," as research indicates increasing customer loyalty and customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 75%!

Survey writers from various industries conduct surveys using the Cvent Web Surveys software tool. One of the most common industries is customer service, where the survey creator is trying to make sure their customers are happy with their products and services. Customer service surveys are used to ensure the quality standards of customers satisfaction.

When the Cvent clients conduct a customer satisfaction survey, they wait for the survey responses to be completed before running reports to see how respondents feel about their offerings. What about the respondents who were dissatisfied with the product or service and want to be contacted immediately?

Email alerts are one of the most useful features that survey designers can use to identify and then take action, where appropriate, when respondents say they are unsatisfied with the service or product. Email alerts provide the option for the person creating the survey to set alerts on questions, this can be a question where the survey respondents are asked about their satisfaction level with the organization's offering.

Take this example customer satisfaction question: "How satisfied are you with the quality of the product?” If emails alerts were set up, an email will go out to the specified people letting them know a customer selected the survey question option of “Dissatisfied."

When someone answers the question and says “Dissatisfied” an email will be sent to the people who were added to the email alert. In some cases, it may be the same person who created the survey, in others, it may be the sales person who owns the territory the respondent is located in or even the customer service manager. The employee or group of employees can quickly get in touch with the customer to inquire more about their experience. Why do organizations want to do this? Because closing the feedback loop can make the respondent feel valued and in some cases move them to the satisfied customer column.

The email alert function doesn't only work on the question level, you can also use email alerts on the survey level and receive an email anytime someone completes the online web questionnaire, or you can set email alerts based on respondent scores. If you're using scoring in your survey questionnaire, you can set alerts to be sent if a respondent falls above or below the specified score. While we used the example of customer satisfaction questionnaires to explain the value of email alerts, they can also be used with employment performance review forms or market survey questions or other types of web survey research.

Earlier this year, I was talking to a potential Cvent customer that was sending out a customer satisfaction survey. For people taking his survey, he offered a promotional gift upon completion.  He said that his response rates were miserable and he couldn't understand why. I looked over his survey, found a few small issues with the content, but nothing too alarming. I then looked at his invitation email. It was full of words like “FREE” and “GIFT”, all in capital letters. There were also dollar signs in the title. This email was begging to be caught in a junk filter.

I took his email, reworded it with words like “complimentary” and “no cost” and got rid of those dollar signs. I then ran it though Cvent’s Spam-O-Meter just to make sure our message was clean of junk words. This prospect then ran his survey again.  He finally got the response rates he was looking for.


This message in this blog… Make sure you run your email survey invitations, reminder emails, and partially completed emails through Cvent’s Spam-O-Meter. You’ve worked too hard and too long putting the perfect survey together for it not to get to your target audience.

A year ago, the Cvent Web Surveys Blog posted it's first post. Over the past year, we've shared many survey best practices with you that can be applied to online surveys and paper questionnaires alike. Here's a list of some of our most popular posts:

• Tips For Providing Survey Incentives: We get asked all the time about incentives and their place in survey research. There are arguements for and against offering survey incentives. This post isn't about those sides. Instead, it focuses on tips for offering survey incentives if that's the path you choose to go down.

• Offering An Additional Comment Section Is An Online Survey Must: Simply asking for customer or employee feedback implies you're ready to make changes, you want to identify problems and fix them. If you fail to offer a "last ditch effort" with and additional comments (optional) question type, you could be making a huge mistake. Depending on your survey design, it may be the only place a survey respondent can give you truly honest, unprompted feedback.

• Survey Question Flow Impacts Survey Findings: Question order is an important part of good survey design. Whether it's a paper survey on customer satisfaction or an online questionnaire to gather employee feedback, how you order your survey questions could impact your survey findings.

• Survey Report Tips: Writing the Executive Summary or Setting the Stage: When writing a survey report, you can't just launch into the survey responses and the data collection results. You need to provide the report reader with some general background information about the survey project including why you ran the survey, what the goals were, what the data collection methods were. Then you can summarize the results and make recommendations.

• Five Steps to Begin Interpreting Online Survey Results: The hardest part of any survey project is creating the questionnaire. If you design a good survey and plan the analysis, interpreting the data should be a walk in the park. Make sure to review these five easy steps for analyzing survey data.

• Analyze Open-Ended Questions Faster with a Quick Trick: We all know using closed questions are easier to analyze. But sometimes they just don't cut it. This post gives you a quick six step process for how to analyze survey data quickly to summarize survey responses without spending days on the survey analysis.

• Difference Between Causation vs. Correlation in Survey Data: To be able to prove causation, you need to be able to rule out all other possible explanations for the connection. This post aims to debunk the myth that correlations found in survey data means that one thing caused the other.

• What To Look For When You Move Your Online Survey To Test Mode: It's definitely an online survey best practice to move your web survey to test mode before sending it out to your survey sample. Make sure to use this 7 step checklist to avoid any online survey pitfalls.

• Market Research Process: 6 Steps to Project Success: When working on survey research projects - be it a customer satisfaction survey or product development survey or a staff performance review form - you should always follow this six step process to make sure you get the maximum return on investment from your survey project.

• Online Survey Question Pitfalls—And How to Avoid Them: This post points out common online survey pitfalls that are in surveys all the time. However, identifying problems with your work performance assessment or customer feedback questions is only half the battle.

There are many ways to design survey questions that allow you to collect more actionable data.  Forced choice survey questions makes survey respondents choose a response option that indicates a definitive opinion.  These questions eliminate Don’t Know and Neutral response options, because they are designed to force respondents to express an opinion or attitude.  Forced choice survey questions are usually written in the form of agree/disagree statements with survey scales, or consist of statements where respondents select the one that describes their opinions closest to their true feelings.

Survey research studies generally indicate that excluding Don’t Know and Neutral options doesn’t necessarily change the proportion of responses leaning toward certain sides of a likert response scale.  So these questions can add value, especially when you want to make business decisions based on customer preferences.  Just be sure to take into account the two suggestions below if you’re considering forced choice questions during the questionnaire design stage.

1) Make sure that your customer survey sample is familiar with the concepts and products you are asking about, and that there isn’t a significant number of them who might honestly hold ambiguous opinions.   If you think a don’t know/neutral option is necessary for your target market, it’s probably best to include one.

2) It is still usually a good idea to include a Not Applicable response choice if there are segments of your survey sample to which the question does not apply (i.e., your e-mail list consists of people other than past customers, respondents haven’t used the type of product or service you’re asking about before, etc.).  Your data collection goal may be to force customers to “take a side,” but not at the expense of producing valid, reliable survey data.

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.

Today we're continuing our count down of our top five posts. Today's theme? You guessed it customer, client and consumer surveys.

• Don't Just Conduct Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Also Collect User Satisfaction Feedback: In this post, we talk about how the purchaser and the user are not always the same person. So when you review your customer feedback procedures and customer survey best practices, make sure you consider who you're surveying: the purchaser, the user or both.

• Customer Service Feedback To Increase Customer Loyalty: Customers have higher standards for organizations than 20 years ago. We all want more, more more! In this post, we talk about the importance of good customer service and how to boost your customer service satisfaction survey scores.

• What's Your Customer Satisfaction Score? This post debunks the myth that customer service is the defining factor in client satisfaction. Customers switch to competitors, become repeat customers, and recommend products and services based on their overall satisfaction experience, not just customer service experiences.

• Classify Customers: Are They Secure, Satisfied/Favorable, Vulnerable Or Dissatisfied? Typically, client survey best practices say there are four distinct customer satisfaction categories: secure, satisfied, vulnerable and dissatisfied. It's important to classify customers into these groups and uncover similarities in each group. Why? Because it will help you identify new revenue opportunities.

• Customer Reviews Matter: 6 Reasons Why: It's common knowledge that customer and consumer reviews have become an important part of the decision making process. As the title suggests, the post takes a deeper look at why reviews are more important than we think they are.

This Friday we are will be celebrating our blogs' first birthday. I can hardly believe it's been almost a year of sharing our Web Survey Best Practices with you. Each day this week we will be counting down our top favorite posts. You might have already guessed, today's theme is employee surveys.

• HR Survey Tips: Weed Out Unqualified Job Candidates: In this post, we talked about how pre employment assessments can be a big time saver for HR. It can be a real struggle for hiring managers to identify the best candidates. It's no secret that asking pre-interview questions or providing job applicants with a pre-interview questionnaire can save you from having to speak with people who are not a fit from the start.

• Employee Surveys Can Help Cut Costs: This post highlights how staff opinion surveys can help you identify areas to cut costs. You may find that the best cost cutting ideas come from the trenches and not senior management. All you need to do is ask.

• Employee Satisfaction Surveys Boost Productivity: This post is about employee morale and satisfaction surveys. Research has shown that motivated and satisfied employees tend to contribute more in terms of organizational productivity and maintaining a commitment to customer satisfaction. So how do you make sure your employees are, and remain, motivated and satisfied?

• When other companies come calling, will your employees remain loyal? This post talks about how you may have high employee retention rates now, but that doesn't mean you have satisfied employees. When the economy picks up again, organizations will begin to grow their workforce and skilled professionals will be in high demand. If your business fails to take care of their employees now, they may not keep those employees once hiring starts again.

• Employee Surveys Can Improve Customer Experience: This is my favorite post on the list, probably because my precondition to focus on the importance of creating a positive customer experience. One of the best ways to measure client satisfaction and experiences is to measure employee loyalty using employee satisfaction surveys.

Most planners use welcome pages, thank you pages, presentation headers and email survey templates to personalize their online surveys by putting in customized messages and images related to their organization, the purpose of the survey questionnaire and even the survey incentives. But the Cvent Web Surveys software platform allows you to go above and beyond to personalize the way your survey looks (the graphical survey template), how people see their progress (progress indicator bars), whether they see the survey title and question numbers, what buttons are on the survey and even the text of these buttons!

Graphical Template – Choose from over 50 out-of-the-box graphical templates, each with its own unique background, header image, button style and survey question displays. Beyond the out-of-the-box survey template designs for market surveys, customer surveys, employee attitude surveys, or any other type of survey, you have the ability to further customize the layout of your survey by adding customized headers and footers to reflect your organization's brand.

Progress Indicator Bar – Select whether you want a progress indicator bar that shows survey respondents how much of the survey form they've completed. Choose from four different styles – whether you want them to see % of the survey completed or page X of Y, etc.

Survey Title and Question Numbers – Select whether you want respondents to see the Survey Title; also determine whether they should see the Question Numbers. When it comes to showing survey question numbers ask yourself, Do I have a simple survey or a complex survey? If you have a complex survey, you may not want to show question numbers if you're going to use survey question logic to jump respondents through the feedback form.

Previous and Cancel Buttons – You can choose to display one or both of these buttons to respondents at the bottom of every page along with the Next button.

Button Text – Customize the text of each button – Start Survey, Next, Previous, Cancel, Submit. This can be especially useful if the survey acts as a Test, Quiz, Registration Form, etc. Next can be changed to Next Section, Next Level, Advance, etc. and Submit on event surveys can read Yes! I want to Register.

Button Style – Select whether you would like to keep the default button style of the survey design you selected or choose from the 15 additional button styles available.

Surveys are targeted at a wide variety of audiences, from board members and senior managers of organizations, to kids and teenagers using a product. Using the survey application features above, you can truly customize the look and feel of your survey based on your audience!

Have you ever been lost?  Like, really lost?  You are going the wrong way, and you realize you are turned around so you take the next right turn, justifying to yourself that right-hand turns have never led you astray before, why would they now?  Before you know it, you have managed to end up on a one-way street heading out of town. 

This is easy to do when you are moving yourself physically so naturally, a few clicks here and a few clicks there in an online survey platform will get you in into an even worse pickle.  Not to fear!  The ‘failsafe’ method of right-turn then right-turn may have gotten you into areas of the Cvent online web survey system you didn’t even know existed, but there are some survey software navigational tips that will get you back on track!

1. Cvent Web Surveys application reads like a book.  For anyone that intends to register for our Online Survey Creation & Management Training Class, you will hear this expression at least 3 times.  The easiest way to make all your modifications and ensure you have covered all the necessary bases is to go from Left to Right in your navigation and, once you have clicked into a section, from Top to Bottom within the section links.  This order will take you through the intuitive steps of creating and customizing your survey. 

2. Don’t neglect your breadcrumbs!  Hansel and Gretel used them to navigate their way back from a witch’s house made of candy.  Think about it… this feat should surely solidify breadcrumbs' validity.  Breadcrumbs will tell you where you are and how you got there even when you have convinced yourself that somehow you have entered an alternate universe where the survey software has become a black hole, pulling you deeper in with no intention of letting you leave.  You can either refer to the breadcrumbs to backtrack out or you can click directly on one of the breadcrumbs to be immediately re-directed to the respective section.


3. Designate your "go-to-spot."  This is the place in Cvent you feel the most comfortable navigating through.  For me, I prefer the survey overview page.  If you ever feel like you have completely lost your way, click on that tab or section link.  Wherever you are in the web based customer survey tool, and no matter how many hairs might have grayed in the process of getting there, you will instantly be redirected to that safe haven. 

With these tools at your disposal, you will feel like a modern day Columbus.  So keep on trekking, Chris, keep on trekking.