Customer Service Survey

Rarely are we asked the question, What is a survey? Typically questions follow the path of, Why do I need a survey program? What am I going to get out of conducting online web surveys to collect customer feedback? Or How do I get started measuring employee satisfaction with online questionnaire templates?

However, sometimes it's good to define market research and what it means, and answer the rarely asked question, What is a survey?

Market Research Definition (mahr-kit-ree-surch)
The gathering and studying of data relating to consumer preferences, purchasing power, etc., especially prior to introducing a product on the market.

Survey Definition (ser-vey)
Collect quantitative information about items in a population. Surveys of human populations and institutions are common in political polling and government, health, social science and marketing research.

Chances are though, you're still wondering about those other questions. These posts may help you answer those ever burning questions about why you should create and design surveys.

This week I've shared what different colors mean and how they can effect people. The neutral color group is the last of the three groups, cool and warm colors being the other two.

Neutral Colors are good background colors because they unify diverse color palettes. When neutral colors are paired with warm or cool colors, they allow the focus to be on the other color (whether it's warm or cool). They also serve to tone down the intensity of the other color. As I've mentioned in the other two posts, neutral colors do have attributes of warm and cool colors. Blacks, browns, tans, golds and beige are considered warm. Cool neutral colors include white, ivory, silver and gray. As you might guess though, these attributes are much more subtle than those of reds (the hottest color) and blue (the coolest).

	Black - As we've discussed with other colors, black can have contradicting meanings. While black is conservative, conventional and serious it can also be sophisticated, mysterious and sexy. Black, like many of the neutral colors, match almost every color. The colors black doesn't match well with is other very dark colors.
	White - White represents purity, cleanliness and innocence. Like black, white goes well with most colors. Keep in mind that too much bright white can cause some people headaches and be a bit "blinding." For the most part, the colors paired with white, no matter the proportions, are often the ones that pass on meanings in your survey design.
	Gray - This is a neutral color, but it also has cool elements and rarely evokes strong emotions. Dark, charcoal grays show strength and mystery, similar to black. Gray is a sophisticated color, without the negative connotations of black. Grays are good background colors because they're so neutral. You can swap a light gray for white, or a darker gray for black.
	Silver - Silver can be cool like a gray, but it can also be livelier than a gray. Silver is often associated with being sleek and modern and imparts an ornate feel. Silver is a cool metal and lack the warm that gold has. When you use silver, it can give an earthy, natural, or sleek and elegant feel.
	Brown - Earthy. Wholesome. Dependable. Brown is a warm color that can be associated with all of these things, as well as being considered steadfast, simple and friendly. Not sure that brown represents dependability? What about UPS? They've built their whole brand around brown's dependability. Browns, taupes, beiges and creams all are excellent background colors because they make the other colors appear richer and brighter.
	Beige - Like a chameleon, beige takes on the attributes of the colors that accompanies it. However, on it's own, beige is a calm background color. The reason beige can behave like a warm or cool color is because it has the warmth of a brown and the coolness of white.

If you're using the Cvent Web Surveys software application, you'll notice all our pre-created survey templates take into account how colors interact with each other. So next time you're working on a world class customer service survey or creating web polls, check out the graphical survey templates in your online survey account.

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.

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.

What's in your business research toolbox? Surveys are one of the most popular business research methods. With the popularity and wide spread availability of the internet, online survey suites have made it easy to create online polls to survey company employees, develop help desk surveys to identify ideas for improving customer service or conduct market intelligence surveys to gain a better understanding of your business environment.

You may be thinking, Why do I need to invest in an enterprise survey solution to conduct business research or surveys? It's a fair question, but if you go with a survey research tool without enterprise survey software features you're going to have a hard time limiting user permissions, separating your customer service survey templates from your work performance evaluation forms from your market survey samples, or managing your contact database from one system.

All businesses should have a survey program in place for various forms of research. Sometimes people think surveys limit their fact finding abilities, and they may not be able to identify underlying problems. My question is, then why are you only using quantitative surveys? Surveys aren't the only business research method you have in your toolbox. There are still focus groups, employee ideas, social media conversations and good ol' fashioned internet searches.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

People argue for and against using progress bars in online surveys all the time. Personally, I think the length of the survey determines whether a progress bar is a good idea. I should point out here, length of the survey means total questions, not just the longest possible path a respondent may take. Sometimes when people use skip, branch and other advanced logic they forget the total number of questions matters when it comes to the progress bar.

Think about these three scenarios:

Scenario 1: Your cable provider sends you an email survey invitation to complete their customer satisfaction survey. You click through to the survey. At this point, you have no idea how many questions you're in for (unless the email invitation told you), but most likely you were given an estimate of how long the survey should take. You begin answering the survey, because of your responses, you're taken down a specific question path. You begin to wonder how much is left in the survey and notice there's a progress bar! This survey is rather complex on the backend and has several paths and over 120 questions, but any given respondent can only travel down a path of 20-30 questions. If your path was the first path, it will look like you have a lot more pages to go through before the end. At this point you're close to done, but unfortunately, the progress bar makes you think you have many, many more questions left. You bail. You don't have time to complete their long feedback form and will think twice about participating in one of their "short" surveys in the future.

Scenario 2: Your cable provider sends you an email asking you to complete their customer service questionnaire. You click through to the survey, answer several questions and notice the progress bar at the top has hardly moved at all. You begin to think, "uuuuuugh this was a mistake!" Then suddenly the progress bar shows you're almost done. Because you're curious, you go back and change your answers to see what other questions the cable provider is asking customers (after all you may want to add your two cents). Suddenly, without meaning to you've messed up their data by not respondent honestly.

Scenario 3: Your cable provider sends you an email invitation to complete their market research survey. You click through to the survey. You answer several questions begin to wonder if the survey will be over soon, but you keep going. A few questions later, you've finished the survey in the amount of time the cable provider's email marketing said you would. Even though it was a little annoying to complete the survey, it was a good experience, and hopefully it will improve your service! Furthermore, they kept their promise on the time and haven't lost your trust.

If you're conducting a business survey, whether it's an employee feedback questionnaire, course evaluation or client survey, which of the above scenarios would you like your respondents to experience? I'm hoping you're thinking to yourself "Scenario 3, of course!" I certainly want my respondents to finish (not abandon) my survey and give me honest feedback (not change their answers to see what else I'm asking).

That said, progress bars wont discourage people from finishing a short survey with honest answers. As part of your survey design, you should consider whether a progress bar will add to the respondent experience or take away from it (and your results).

Anyone who knows me knows how much I value customer service. One bad experience impacts my future purchasing decisions. I'm not the only person who places value in customer service. Unfortunately for organizations, many of your customers are just like me. However, many senior managers, marketing, sales, customer service employees don't enter their jobs remembering what it's like to be a customer. Everyone is a customer, yet we all forget that's true when designing programs and interacting with our own customers. Finding out if you're doing a good job in the customer satisfaction and experience arena is simple, if you continually ask yourself:

How do your customers feel about your service?

In the past, I told you the first sign of something being wrong is the sound of customers leaving. If you don't ask them how you're doing, you're never going to find out. You may find customers think your customer service team is excellent or you may find customers dread anything going wrong and having to contact your organization. Either way, you can't improve something if you don't know and understand what your customers need. Begin developing a customer service survey program today and gather customer service feedback tomorrow.

Many organizations have broken customer feedback programs. Organizations gather lots of information and feedback from customers: they conduct surveys; they engage through social media; people call or email customer service. Then organizations take all this data, plops it into presentations and fails to do anything with the results. More importantly, different departments never even bother to connect the information they have. So customer feedback survey reports don't even include the full picture.

Do you think this is broken? I do.

Organization who are good at listening to customers gather feedback from all over: blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, sales people, customer service representatives, emails, online surveys, etc. There's no one place an organization can go to get a simple solution for listen or conducting customer analysis. They need to get better at listening and act on the feedback. It's no longer big companies versus an individual. The internet has allowed customers to talk to each other, spread good (and bad) stories about an organization in minutes.

There are tools that can help organizations listen. I would recommend starting with a customer survey program that includes customer service surveys and monitoring inbound feedback.

I recently came across a speech Seth Godin gave in 2006 about how things are "Broken" and his reasons for it. While it may be three years old, I think his points are still relevant.


Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.
What are your tips for improving Customer Feedback Programs?

Final unrelated thought, if you're conducting any type of survey with incentives, think about Seth's advice on prepaid credit and debit cards.

Customers have higher standards for organizations than 20 years ago. Why? We want more. We live in a world where we want (and can usually get) everything instantly, one could argue both a blessing and a curse of the internet. As a result, customer service has become a critical part of any organization. Do you remember your last experience where you didn't feel satisfied with the resolution? I can name a handful without blinking.

You can measure all kinds of stats surrounding your customer service department: number of inbound calls, time spent on hold, call length, etc. You can also gather customer service feedback through surveys to get your customer service score. If you receive a low customer service score, here are some possible reasons:

1. Training. Organizations need to take the time to adequately train their customer service staff. If they aren't trained, they wont be able to give superior customer service because they simply wont have the necessary knowledge. Training should include explaining organizational goals and a basic understanding of all products. Obviously more extensive knowledge is needed for products they support.

2. Indifference. Some staff members just wont care. Customer service requires more than just a skill base, it also requires certain personality traits. Make sure you have a program in place to identify the correct people for your organization.

3. Burn out. It's hard to work in customer service. Reps field complaints and deal with negativity all day. How often are you in a good mood when you call customer service? Probably not very often, usually callers are already frustrated and in a bad mood. Dealing with that same negative caller over and over again will impact anyone's enthusiasm. To try to combat the effects of the complaints and negativity they face, provide recognition and incentives for excellent reps.

It's important to identify what your organization does well and needs to improve when it comes to customer service. After all, customers who receive poor service have a decreased opinion of the brand and the organization. They become much more critical and chances are soon as they have an alternative, they're going to leave. On the other hand, when customers feel they received white glove service, they tend to value the brand over competitors - isn't that the goal of all organizations?

I asked in the beginning if you remembered any bad customer service experiences. Are you still a customer? I know in most cases, I'm not. For most customers, it's not whether there was a problem, but whether it was taken care of quickly and had a satisfactory outcome. By having an excellent customer service team in place, you may find increased customer loyalty and higher customer retention rates. When was the last time you conducted a customer service survey to identify how your customer service department was doing?

Using online surveys to gather business intelligence may not be always be an automatic instinct for your organization. However, customer survey questionnaires are in fact a great way to evaluate your competition and gather insights about the business value propositions your clients rate high.

If you employ surveys to prospects and leads who leave the sales funnel, you can discover even more valuable information about why prospects chose another product or service. Were their features better? Did they they prefer the competition's follow up during the sales process?

When creating a questionnaire for competitive research, it's important to set goals. As with all surveys, whether it's a business survey, customer service questionnaire, employee evaluation or course evaluation survey, you should always "begin at the end." Define what the organization wants to get out of the project. Setting a goal before beginning the questionnaire design will better guide you through the survey creation process.

When it comes to customer service in retail, L.L. Bean is number one, according to the fourth annual NRF Foundation/American Express Customers' Choice survey. Joining L.L.Bean on the top 10 list for best customer service are, from number 2 to number 10: Overstock.com, Zappos.com, Amazon.com, Lands' End, Newegg, JC Penney, QVC, Coldwater Creek, and Nordstrom.

In today's economy, staying committed to excellent customer service can be a challenge, but it's an important one to meet. As Glenda McNeal, senior vice president for Retail and Emerging Industries at American Express Merchant Services, said, "Particularly in a challenging economic environment, retailers who distinguish themselves through service are rewarded with increased customer loyalty and spending."

What do your latest online surveys say about your organization's customer service?

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.

Amazon.com and Netflix both received the number one ranking in customer satisfaction among large online retailers this holiday season, according to an annual survey on the topic. The report, conducted by ForeSee Results and FGI Research, surveyed 9,000 shoppers about the 40 biggest e-commerce sites (based on revenue.)

Amazon received 84 out of 100 possible points; Netflix, the same. QVC ranked second, followed by Apple.com, Barnes& Noble (BN.com), LLBean.com, Newegg.com and Wal-Mart.com, who all shared the third spot. Six sites tied for the bottom spot on the list: CircuitCity.com, Gap.com, HSN.com, Overstock.com, HomeDepot.com, and NiemanMarcus.com.

As we've mentioned in the past, fostering and maintaining positive customer satisfaction is key to maximizing your profits. Do you know how you would rank in customer satisfaction compared to your competitors? You should, and using online survey software, it's never been easier to find out.

We love elections. But as the 2008 presidential election night approaches, it's hard not to feel a bit dismayed.

Understandably, we're statistics geeks at the Cvent Survey blog, and there’s no time like election time for getting access to pools of data about the American public.

Two days ago, a Suffolk University study revealed that Barack Obama led John McCain by 10 percent in the polls. This statistic by itself might seem very revealing, but in fact, it tells very little unless there is some point of reference that speaks to its significance. This article recognizes this, and goes on to explain that the two presidential candidates were literally tied in the same poll just one month ago. The results indicate the first time this year that Obama had a double-digit lead in Nevada.

As you can see, comparing the same survey data over two points in time can add a whole new dimension of meaning to a single statistic. Nevertheless, if we’re really interested in what’s going on in the election, we should still be left with many unanswered questions. You wouldn’t be content on Super Bowl Sunday knowing only the half-time score, would you?

The fascinating thing about all the data an election poll gathers is that there are so many different ways you can extract meaning. One of the most common ways pollsters and researchers do this is by running cross-tabulation analyses between different data points.

A cross-tabulation analysis, or cross-tab, is a very simple and powerful way to reveal relationships between two or more survey questions. By laying out two questions in a grid, it allows you to easily compare how different respondent groups answer a question, allowing you to spot any patterns or trends.

Let’s take one of the survey questions from the Suffolk poll as an example. Question 17 in the poll data excerpt below asks if the respondent approves or disapproves of the job George W. Bush is currently doing as president. Along the top of the report, you can see other survey questions that were asked to the same respondents for cross-tab purposes:



By means of the cross-tabulation table, we can now make some pretty insightful deductions:



So, 55 percent of those who approve of Bush support McCain, versus only 8 percent of Bush supporters who say they will vote for Obama.

Look at the line below for even stronger supporting data. Nearly 90 percent of Obama supporters disapprove of Bush. Those voting for McCain, on the other hand, are split fairly evenly (55 percent and 40 percent) between those who approve and disapprove of the current president.

This immediately shines a very insightful light upon the voters, allowing us to make informed deductions. Perhaps this shows some cohesiveness and unity among Obama supporters. There’s a lot of ways you can go with this data, but the key here is that by running cross-tabulation reports, you can get to a level of insight in your data that is impossible to glean from simple linear statistics.

Many companies are using cross-tabs to get valuable data points that impact their business. For example:

• Market research surveys that reveal a gender or age group’s propensity toward a certain product.

• Customer service surveys that reveal discrepancies in service quality between different geographical regions.

• Employee job satisfaction surveys that reveal some type of association between the number of overtime hours worked and satisfaction with their salary.

As you can see, the options are endless—the only question remaining is what kind of relationship or insight do you want to know more about?

The person who coined the phrase "Looks don’t matter" probably never tried their hand at surveying. We’ve stated at least a few times in the past that the visual appeal factor has a definite impact on survey response rates. However, there are other very compelling benefits to making your surveys look fabulous.

1. Visual Appeal Reinforces Consumer Awareness

A survey is, in a sense, a marketing piece. If you’re conducting market research on an unreleased product, you want to make sure your respondents keep a positive image of that product in their memory. After all, they may potentially have a need to purchase from you someday in the future. A good-looking marketing piece is a great way to create initial awareness.

Even if this is a post-purchase or customer service survey, a professional-looking design can have a visual impact that reinforces the product’s positive and trustworthy appearance.

2. Visual Appeal Encourages Honest Feedback

Especially when surveying a population of leads, prospects or other online market research audiences, it is important to achieve a level of visual appeal such that it extends your company’s professional brand image. First of all, you do not have a solid business relationship with this audience yet, so it is very important that you earn their trust. With these types of surveys, you may ask for personal information such as phone numbers and addresses; the last thing anyone wants to do is mistakenly sign up on a page and compromise their personal data. Having your survey pages reflect your company site helps combat this problem and encourages respondents not only to complete your survey, but to also give honest and complete feedback.

A good way to do this is to have your survey match the look and feel of your company website. In fact, it’s advisable to customize your headers, footers and other survey sections to match everything from color and style of text to the page layout. A good way to do this is to get the appropriate sections from your own website and drop the code and CSS styles into your own brand survey.

Below is some work we did for a client last year. We examined our client’s web page and then created a survey design that stayed consistent with the corporate home page:

Company Website:



Online Survey Welcome Page:



We were able to match the look and feel of the company’s corporate page by utilizing elements of CSS to match the colors and fonts, then added the same flash animation on the header to really jazz it up.

There's nothing wrong with using graphical templates in surveys, but having the option to completely customize your survey pages and emails helps you get to that next level of survey effectiveness.