Customer Service Questionnaire

Technology is bound to have its hiccups. The more we rely on the internet and computers, the more risk we take in ensuring the safety of our data. Therefore, when we encounter an error that threatens to undo our work or jeopardize the progress we so diligently worked to preserve, the only natural reaction is to PANIC. It must be a bug! It must be an error I made during the survey creation process!

These are familiar phrases and the proverbial panicked tone resonates with us here on the Cvent Web Surveys Client Services team. We've been there too. We've created online surveys, sent email invitations to our CEO and senior management team, and been immediately met with email inquiries asking why they were getting an error message or why they could not access the survey.

The first thing we do: Breathe. Take a deep breath and calm yourself before you jump into the survey application to see where you went wrong. Because, and this may go against everything we learn in customer service, sometimes it is a survey respondent error. If 200 people in your survey sample, or even 20, have completed the web survey questionnaire sans issues, the latter is most likely the culprit. There are a few common problems that can initiate on the respondents side:

1. Using a browser that does not support the Cvent's Web Survey software tool. AOL, for example, will allow survey respondents to begin the survey, but respondents often run into trouble trying to respond to survey questions. So when getting emails from your sample list about an error, ask what browser they are using. The most effective browser to use with our online survey software application is Internet Explorer. Other browsers, such as Mozilla or Safari, still work but that's why it's important to test your survey before launching.

2. Cookies. They are delicious, they seem to draw you to them and, once consumed, will follow you forever, hence the lucrative personal fitness industry. Computer cookies act much in the same manner. They are small tags that are placed on your computer once you visit a website. They are great because they allow the website to recognize you if, and when, you return. They will keep your information stored while browsing through the website, even if you click to another page within it. They are dangers in that, similarly to that of a chocolate chip cookie, they follow you.

A permanent cookie will be stored on your computer unless manually deleted. They are responsible for that eerie sidebar advertising that coincidentally relates 100% to the site you just visited or the email clicked. So, what is the moral of this analogy? Ask your respondent to clear those cookies; they can sometimes have a way of interfering with the survey.Here are directions to clear a cookie in Internet Explorer (other browsers have similar steps):
It seems hard to remember sometimes that not all the errors respondents see are your fault. Don't assume they are and panic. Instead, take a deep breath and ask some questions. You may find it's just user error.

Yesterday, Seth Godin shared an interesting post with us, Win the fight, lose the customer. Seth reminds us we can't prove we're right and acknowledge the customer is upset at the same time.

Seth has a point. When it comes to customer service, you shouldn't be trying to show an unhappy customer why they're wrong. It's only going to cause more frustration and unhappiness. Take this real-life customer service example:


So instead of trying to prove a customer wrong, a better approach is to try to understand what happened to cause the customer to be unhappy in the first place. Listen and understand the problem instead of listening for buzz words and jumping to conclusions - or trying to show them why they're wrong. Think to yourself, was there a miscommunication between the organization and customer? Was the customer met with a problem the product couldn't solve? Don't just scrape the surface. Often times what customers are complaining about is a symptom of a bigger problem.

Then, of course, it's always a good practice to put a survey program in place to see how your customer service team is doing. Conducting customer service surveys periodically to collect customer feedback will help you continue to make customers a focus and improve training methods.

How do you feel about social media and business? What about your executives, marketing, human resources and customer service departments? A recent study published through eMarketer found more than eight in 10 management, marketing and HR executives said benefits of social media include relationship and brand building. According to eMarketer, execs also view social media as a good tool for recruitment and customer service. 46% of survey respondents believe social media enhances employee morale.

It's great to see opinion survey results showing the attitude towards social media is changing. If you follow this blog, you know I'm a believer in social media and it's ability to provide real value to organizations.

Not all is bright and shiny in eMarketer's survey report, however. Executives still have their fears about social media strategies. More than half of the survey respondents who did not use social media said they didn't know enough. In addition to a lack of understanding, execs worry about confidentiality and security problems, as well as decreased employee productivity. The good news is, I think these concerns will continue to shift in future attitude surveys. In fact, we've already seen a shift since Feburary 2009.

Survey reports from a global survey conducted by a security software company in February showed 50%-60% of companies surveyed blocked social networking sites, and 62.8% of managers polled thought employees shared too much on social networks. Between the February and July survey results, we've already seen a shift. Not a huge shift, but there is a shift happening. Instead of simply ruling out social media, execs are beginning to admit there may be value they just don't know enough about it.

If you're a social media expert, I'm thinking you have your work cut out for you. There is a continued need for information about social media and their potential value to be explained to executives.

Most of us have experienced at least one customer support call that has made us grind our teeth and lowered our overall feeling of customer satisfaction. A lot of the time the extra wait time, the transfers, the holds have to do with the misuse of technology. It may be a matter of the systems your support team are using need an update, or perhaps your team is not fully trained and are misusing the systems. Either way, it's time you start looking into the issue. You'll find positive customer experiences are much more valuable than the costs associated with upgrades and additional training.

Here are a few questions you should be looking to answer:


You can keep track of these metrics various ways, using 360 survey software, with spreadsheets or the old fashion paper-and-pencil method. It doesn't matter how you track them, as long as you're identifying hold ups causing customer and client satisfaction ratings to fall - and then taking action to improve their experiences.

I came across 10 Tips for Impeccable Customer Service at Customer Service Manager. Thanks to Bill Hogg for sharing these insights, I've added some of my own comments and customer service tips along the way as well:

1. Figure out how to prevent the problem from happening again. It's not productive to just field a customer call solve their immediate, on the surface problem, then do it again and again. Something caused the problem to arise in the first place, it should be part

2. Treat customers like a human being. Ever have a call where you felt you were interrupting the support rep's day? Big no-no. Each customer should be treated with dignity and more importantly, expect them to act like responsible adults. It's amazing how when you expect someone to act a certain way, they usually do.

3. Go beyond the minimum. Taking a few extra moments to go a little further and improve the overall customer experience is going to have big payoff. Customers wont dread calling you, or even purchasing your product again because of dreaded support issues. The word of mouth you'll get wont hurt too much either.

4. Don't play the blame game. A sure fire way to get your unhappy customer even more fired up is to play the blame game. Instead of pointing the finger and blaming the customer, circumstances, vendors or anything else, simply take the steps to fix it.

5. Don't take it personal. Customers are angry at the situation, not specifically at you. When customer service reps begin to take it personally more anger gets added to the conversation and everyone loses. The problem is very unlikely to be fixed, the customer is going to hang up angry and the rep will probably answer the next call still angry. Causing a vicious cycle to start.

6. Listen. A common mistake is to hear a few buzz words and assume you know what the customer's problem is. That's not always how it works. People use different terminology when explaining things, really listen to what's going on.

7. Don't make promises you can't keep. One of the most important things sales people learn is to "under promise and over deliver." This is true for customer service departments as well. I'm not saying don't promise an excellent customer experience, but don't make promises you wont be able to keep either. Sometimes this can be a tough one, you get caught up in the call, you're trying to go the extra mile, you let the customer talk you into something the organization can't do. Remember the customer is reasonable and don't over promise.

8. Make customers a priority. It's important in every customer interaction everyone in your organization (sales, client support, etc.) allows the customer or client to feel as if they're a priority. Don't do four other things while talking to a customer. Believe me, they can tell the difference.

9. Deal with problems immediately. Putting off investigating customer complaints isn't going to make the problem go away. The only chance you have is the customer will forget - but even more likely they will get frustrated with you. And frustrated customers share their frustration with friends, family, colleagues and random people they meet in the grocery store. Why subject your organization to that kind of negative word of mouth, when you can just investigate the cause and come up with a solution.

10. Follow up. It's important to call or email customers back after the problem has been resolved, or if it's been awhile and you're still working on it. calling after a customer should have received a big order will certainly not cause a loss in any goodwill either. This is not an upsell opportunity. This is a chance for you to just see how things are going, make sure the customer is happy, show customer experience is important to you. You may even get some great customer feedback out of the interaction.

People under estimate how quality customer service can increase customer loyalty, boost customer retention program ROI and impact the bottom line. Think about it, how many good customer service experiences have you had lately?

A new revision to the UK's Market Research Society code of conduct that takes effect December 1st bans the use of client goods or services as incentives.

The idea behind the ban is client incentives that these incentives could be interpreted as promoting the client's ideals too much. However, Keven Connolly, Simpson Carpenter's director of major studies, thinks the ban "is more severe than it needs to be" particularly when it comes to customer satisfaction surveys. I tend to agree with this view. The new MRS ban could have a serious effect on survey participation. It's already an ongoing challenge for market research, marketing and customer service departments to find enough survey respondents and collect data to base business decisions.

With the new ban, retailers will no longer be able to provide coupons or vouchers for completing satisfaction surveys. Nor will organizations be able to enter survey respondents in a drawing to win their products or services after completing a survey.

You can see the rest of the MRS revisions to the code of conduct on their website.

How much money are you losing each year due to poor customer experience? A new study on customer experience and consumer behavior found Australia, New Zealand and India suffer combined losses of $5.6 Billion (USD) in revenue because of organizations' failure to meet customer expectations.

No matter what kind of survey questionnaire you're working on, whether it's an employee satisfaction survey, product market research, a customer service questionnaire, a job performance review template or a customer satisfaction survey, having some basic knowledge of statistics and related terms is helpful.

If you're using survey analysis tools, chances are all the statistical calculations will be done for you, you only need to select the survey analysis methods. It's still important to know what the terms mean that are describing the data. Here's a quick "crash course" in basic statistics and what the terms mean:

Mean: Typically "mean" is used as a synonym for "average." While this is not exactly accurate, it's good enough for a high level understanding. To get the population mean, or the expected value of a random variable, take the sum of the results and divide it by the number of results.

Median: Separates the top half from the bottom half of the sample. The median is the exact middle number of your responses. To figure out the median, you order the finite list of responses from the lowest value to the highest value and select the middle value. If there is not a unique middle value, take the mean on either side of where the median would be (ie. in the list a < b < c < d the median would be the mean of b and c). The reason you would use the median over the mean is if there are outliers in the population that don't matter. Outliers will skew your mean in the direction of the outlier. However, using the median prevents the average from being skewed.

Mode: The mode is the response or variable in a data set that occurs most frequently (i.e. in the list a, a, b, a, b, c, c, d the mode would be a because it occurs the most). While the mean and median might be very similar for a data set, the mode may be very different depending on the data set's distribution.

Variance: Describes how spread out the distribution of a data set is.

Standard Deviation: Describes the probability of the data set's distribution. A low standard deviation means the the data points tend to be close to, or the same as, the mean. A high standard deviation indicates the data is spread out.

Do you listen to customer complaints? Who do the come from? If I had to guess, I would say they're probably coming from the user. In the B2B world, the user is not always the same person that signed the agreement and purchased your product or service. 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?

Both groups will have a different perspective. Those who hold the purse strings are often going to focus on results: is your offering saving them money; is it producing measurable results; is it solving the problem? On the other hand, while the end user may share some of these concerns, they're more likely to be focused on the usability: is it hard to use; do I need a lot of help from product support; is customer service responsive and helpful; is it making my job easier?

Organizations should seek customer feedback through user surveys, particularly if they do not have a way to pass feedback through the organization from sales and customer service to product development to management. Even though the purchaser may be happy and seeing high ROI from your offering, the user may bang their head against the wall to make it achieve those results. Soon as a competitor enters the market, the user is likely to push for a change.

Depending on your survey goals, a customer feedback survey form may look very similar to a user survey, including similar goals. The key is who your survey respondents are. That's information you should have in your customer database. Collecting names, emails and additional contact information is sometimes the biggest hurdle for survey programs. From there, writing survey questions and building questionnaires in online survey software tools should all be downhill.

As a leading online survey software company, we are always answering questions about survey best practices. Even scaled questions, or interval question types, come with a lot of questions:


When you're designing your survey questions, steer clear of using negative numbers in scales. Research has shown that people do not like to give negative ratings when completing surveys. This means, if you use a negative scale, you're adding bias to your survey data. You're going to push people more towards the neutral point or higher on the scale. When you're creating the question, it doesn't seem like using negative numbers in your likert type question would have an impact because each point still has the same arbitrary value. However, there's a psychological effect.

Think of it this way: you're taking a customer satisfaction survey asking for customer service feedback. You were less than satisfied with the experience, but you're rating the person who helped you and know that it will reflect on them. Chances are you're not going to want to assign a negative number to them so you'll give them the lowest non-negative score (Average). It's not reflective of how you really feel, but you don't feel they did a negative job.

The scale values seem like a little thing, but they can have a big impact on your online web survey. Each step in survey building is important to think about right down to the flow of your survey questions.

Looking for more online survey best practices? Sign up for one of our 30 minute best practice webinars and start improving your web based surveys.

Customer feedback management can be a challenge for any organization, both large and small. Someone passed on an article by Kalena Jordan in SiteProNews, How Twitter Is Teaching Businesses the Lost Are of Conversation, that I thought had some good insights. While Twitter gets lots of positive buzz, there is still large numbers of internet users who are unsure of Twitter - both individual users and businesses.

Conversation is powerful, and as Jordan points out, one of the most persuasive business tools. According to recent stats from Nielsen, Twitter is the fastest growing community online and the largest user group are 35-49 year olds (there's a good chance these are also your decision makers). The article argues that as we move from web 2.0 to web 3.0, conversation is taking over the thrown as king, displacing the cry Content is King! Some big brands such as Amazon, Starbucks, Home Depot, Jetblue, Kodak, etc. - if conversations weren't important, these brands would not be investing in this business channel. But as I've said before, customers are having conversations with or without your participation. If you're not part of it, you're missing out on valuable customer insights.

Jodan polled her followers asking the question:

But what kind of business tool is Twitter? It goes far beyond customer service or customer feedback. Here are some basic suggestions for how an organization can implement Twitter into their marketing mix:

The first step to using Twitter to really get the most out of potential customer market research strategies and customer feedback efforts, you need to be willing to open a dialogue. Unlike other forms of marketing communication, Twitter is a two way conversation that you need to be ready to invest time into customer relationships. The toughest part, in my opinion, is the mind shift it requires. Twitter cannot be all about You, You, You. There needs to be a level of transparency and selflessness.

Are your survey scales balanced? Typically when you think of survey questions using a scale, you think of each point holding the same amount of weight with the same number of options on either side of the middle point.


However, sometimes people don't stick to this surveying rule of thumb and lean towards using unbalanced scales. Here are a couple cons to using unbalanced scales and reasons why you should use balanced scales:

• Unbalanced survey scales create bias data: Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Unsatisfied. What about people who are Very unsatisfied? It makes the data look better than it may actually be.

• Unbalanced scales can be frustrating for the survey respondent. If someone is very unsatisfied, they want to mark they are very unsatisfied in your customer survey. Not allowing them to tell you how they feel could make them just abandon the survey all together.

• Balanced scales give the surveyor more analysis options than unbalanced scales. While this is a topic for a seperate post, many people will apply numbered interval scales to balanced scales for the purpose of completing their survey analysis. Interval scales give a wider range of analysis potential over ordinal survey question types.

That said, unbalanced scales can be useful when you know there will be an overwhelming response in a specific direction. A good example is customer services feedback surveys or employee surveys about benefits. Take these sample survey question:


I urge you to seriously think about why you want to use an unbalanced scale. If used inappropriately, they could quickly bias your data.

If you're beginning to plan your next survey project, I encourage you to attend our webinar on best practices for conducting web surveys. Then when the time comes, our professional survey services team would be happy to consult with you on your questionnaire design to flush out any question issues like this one.

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.

Are you an good listener? Hearing and understanding what's being said in a conversation isn't rocket science, most people can do it. However, not everyone can hear a complaint or feedback and understand how it applies to their organization or how to implement a solution. However, before those two steps, you have to be willing to accept maybe the customer feedback is right - and what you've previously believed is wrong. Here's an example of what I mean:


Over at Esteban Kolsky's A Passion For Customer Service blog, he gave his three secrets for effective listening. Here are his customer service tips:

1. There are two sides to the conversation. Esteban points out that not everyone provides feedback because they want to be listened to or be answered. Sometimes submitting a complaint just makes you feel better and releases some of the frustration you have with an organization's customer service. He suggests that you still listen to this feedback, but don't prioritize it above those customers who call for a specific action or change.

2. Focus on what's being said, not how. The channel someone chooses to give customer feedback shouldn't matter. Hopefully, you're trying to gather employee, client and customer service feedback through various channels - web surveys, Twitter, blogs, other social media, customer service calls, etc. Accept the methods customers and clients choose to provide feedback. To improve you need to be where they are and not always expect them to come to you.

3. Respond and act on feedback. We've talked about this topic before on this blog. Asking and accepting feedback sets expectations that you're going to follow up. It is tough. Like I said in the beginning, you need to be humble enough to admit you could do it better and the customer may know how you could do it better. Esteban points out that customer engagement increases dramatically when organizations "close the loop" and implement changes based on feedback.

I think it's important to question the feedback as well. I don't mean this in the sense that you should question the credibility of the source or decide the person isn't qualified to provide feedback. But you should ask why they feel this way. While they may be complaining about something small, it may be a much bigger issue. In this case, acting on their request just at face value wont be solving the problem at all.

When you're creating an online survey and working on the questionnaire design, don't forget to include an introduction to your survey. This applies to all survey types: product surveys, customer feedback forms, employee questionnaires, customer service surveys, quantitative market research studies, etc.

The purpose is just that, to introduce your survey. An introduction should include some basic parts:

1. Who? Quickly tell the respondent who you are. While they will probably figure it out based on your graphical template, it doesn't hurt to tell them a little bit about what you do.

2. What? Give a brief explanation of what topics you'll be asking about. You don't have to give away everything here, a very high level explanation will do. Here's an example:
3. Why? Explain how the respondent will ultimately benefit from the survey and how you plan to use the results. To continue with the example from above:

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.

Like customer service feedback, product research survey questions that target enhancement requests and ideas are critical for organizations - B2B, B2C and B2G alike. So my question is how do you gather product enhancement requests? I have a couple ideas, and I hope you'll share yours as well. Traditional ways may include enhancement request forms your customer care team completes if a customer makes a suggestion during a help session or front-line employees giving feedback to the developers during a meeting. But perhaps conducting a product evaluation survey among product users might be a good place to start. It's difficult to ask people who are not customers to provide feedback on your offering - let alone provide enhancement requests. It's also a pretty safe bet that some of your customers, if not a lot of them, have some great ideas for how you can improve your offering.

If you do go with some type of customer survey, the question maybe be how do you do it and how often. I would argue the survey could be ongoing if you have customer survey software for conducting online surveys. Customer services reps could add a link to the survey in their signature. Any time a customer has an idea or feedback, they know exactly where they can go to give it. If you're a software as a service (SAAS) organization, a link can be placed somewhere behind the log in screen.

There are various ways you can solicit feedback about your offering - the important part is you do it. Your customers are the ones using your product or service. They have the greatest chance of knowing what they need and how you could satisfy a need or pain they have. I tend to think an organization's job is to solve pain - each organization may target a different pain to alleviate, but they all solve some type of pain.

However your organization decides to gather product enhancement ideas is great, but the most important part is that you ask for customers feedback and you act it. How else do you plan to continually improve your offering to stay competitive in the market place?

I would love to hear how you gather product enhancement ideas.

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?

If surveying is part of your job (HR surveys, marketing surveys, customer feedback surveys, etc.), one of the best things you can do before you creating a survey - especially if you've never done a survey project before - is to learn from others. I always take surveys when I'm asked. I'll admit my draw to taking them is because I'm curious about what they're going to ask, but I also want to see what things they're doing right and what things I should avoid.

Looking at other people's surveys are a great way to get ideas for good survey questions. If you're focus is on customer satisfaction or customer service feedback, it should be easy to put your hands on other organizations' business surveys. After all, we're all someone's customer. This is the same with marketing questionnaires or product surveys. Every once in awhile, you should fall into someone's sample. However, if you're trying to get sample survey questions for an employee evaluation feedback form, staff opinion survey or other HR survey, the internet might be your best friend.

While it's easy to get question ideas from questionnaires in the same category as the one you're working on, don't discount what you can learn from surveys in other categories. Best practices cross over categories and someone creating a customer service survey can learn a lot from an education survey.

If you're interested in learning more about survey best practices, sign up for Cvent's free webinar.