Customer Satisfaction

Before you start writing any survey you need to define clear project goals. I mean it. Before you place pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard to design a questionnaire, clearly defined project goals is a must. With out goals, your survey project is going to be worthless. Well, not quite worthless, you'll get some facts out of it, but they wont mean anything. They'll be single pieces in a 1,000 piece puzzle. To make sense, puzzle pieces need to fit together to form the whole picture, and survey data is like that as well. Each piece fits together to give you the whole picture.

Defining your goals for the project will help guide you when creating the survey, whether it's a customer satisfaction or client survey, staff opinion questionnaire, market research, or course evaluation. Once you begin writing questions and designing the questionnaire, if cannot answer the question "what will I do with this data?" then the question does not belong in your project. By defining a goal at the beginning, the survey writer is forced to eliminate unnecessary questions - hence keeping the survey short.

This rule applies for both qualitative and quantitative research. Read my past post to learn more about the six steps in the market research process.