Customer Survey

Within the survey research process, a "Thank You" note is something that is sent a few days to a week after a questionnaire is sent out to your clients. This mailing expresses appreciation for responding and indicates that, if the client survey has not yet been completed, it is hoped it will be soon.

The postcard or email survey "thank you" note is not written in order to overcome respondent doubts or fears about taking the survey, rather, it is meant to jog memories and help re-arrange priorities, bringing your potentially forgotten survey back to the top of potential respondent's "To-Do" pile.

If timely and appropriately worded, the postcard "Thank you" note can arrive just in time to make an appeal that engenders a sense of importance about survey participation, without crossing the line into sounding impatient.

When possible, attempt to have your "Thank you" note be as different as possible from your original survey invitation request for participation letter. The goal is to create a stand-out piece of paper or electronic mail that contrasts with others, creating new stimuli for your potential respondent.

Utilizing these survey tips in conjunction with adding a "Thank You" note to your survey project outline are just some of the ways you can ensure your products are recognized as standing out from the crowd, especially in this all-too-hectic world.

Completing a study is just the first step in the market research process. A good researcher knows there is plenty of work left to be done analyzing survey data and taking action on survey results.

Stay in touch with the client and schedule presentations of the research. If you have a client contact assigned to the project, go over the preliminary survey data to see what key findings they feel are the most important to share. Create presentations around these key findings. You can also create separate market survey reports for different groups within the same company.

For example, if you have just completed a large product survey that includes feedback on customer satisfaction, the client may want a presentation simply on customer feedback for their customer service team.

A good researcher also has an eye for finding problems. If you notice an area for improvement in the course of your market research analysis, propose a solution to that problem for the client. Take this market research survey example, customers complain about being on hold too long when calling customer service. You could propose several ideas from hiring more staff to setting time goals for staff to talk to customers.

Even though the client may not agree with your solution ideas, ignoring problems you identify through the research is a bad idea. The client is paying you to compile and analyze research data, and they will likely appreciate all your efforts even if the information does not fit in with their current business plan.

One of the great things about Cvent Web Surveys software application is that it is constantly getting “better.” I, for one, am not aware of another survey software company that can state with confidence that 80% of all product enhancements come directly from the requests of current clients. Cvent, however, has certain processes in place so that every time a client expresses interest in seeing a new feature added to the online survey application, this request is quickly relayed to our technical team.

For those of you who were clients before our most recent product release in August 2009, you definitely noticed at least one big change in your account the first time you logged in after the release. As soon as you logged into your Cvent Web Surveys account, you saw that your surveys were no longer organized into folders on the Survey Selection page. Instead, they are now displayed in “views.”

Now, you may wonder why I chose to write my blog post this week on the transition from folders to survey views. It may seem like a pretty dry topic. I wanted to write on this particular survey subject because I get so many calls from clients asking how to create a new survey view that pull the appropriate surveys into view. If you have a lot of surveys created in your account, then this is a pretty important thing to know how to do, so that you don’t have to sort through all of your company’s surveys just to find the few that you are personally working on!

When you are ready to create a new survey view and filter the appropriate surveys into this view, you need to remember 3 simple steps:

1) Create a survey custom field. You can create survey custom fields under the Administration tab, on the same page that you create contact custom fields. Survey custom fields are primarily used to classify the surveys in your account and pull them into the appropriate views on the Survey Selection page. So, for example, if your marketing department and human resources department are running surveys, you may want to create 2 separate survey views, one for each department. The first step to do this would be to create a survey custom field for department.

2) Create a new view on the Survey Selection page. You can create a new survey view by choosing “add new view” from the Display drop-down menu. When you add the new view, you will need to name it and also specify certain options (i.e. whether you would like the view to be private or public). Finally, at the bottom of the page, you should apply an advanced filter based on the survey custom field you just created for department. For example, if you are adding the survey view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should choose “department” as the field, “equals” as the operator, and “marketing” as the value.


3) Now that you have created the survey custom field and added the new view, all you need to do is pull the appropriate surveys into the view you just created! When you added the new view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should have gotten a message, “no surveys match your criteria.” This is because you have not yet applied the survey custom field at the survey-level! To do this, simply go into an individual marketing survey, and click on  Settings on the top navigation bar. On the General Information page, you should click on the Custom Survey Fields tab. Here you can apply the “marketing” label to the individual survey, so that it will show up in the “Marketing Surveys” view.


Hopefully this post will be helpful to those of you who are struggling with the transition from folders to survey views. Believe me, survey views are completely customizable and will help you organize online surveys in your Cvent Web Surveys software account.

I found an interesting poll today about colors preferred by men and women, and it provoked some questions about what are the best colors to use when you create polls or design survey questionnaires. Here's the breakdown from the poll shared in a Lyris Whitepaper:


Why does it matter? Because colors are also a form of non-verbal communication. So whether you're creating an online questionnaire to collect feedback or using an email survey tool to craft email marketing messages for survey invitations, you should care how colors affect those reading your email or completing your customer survey forms.

Colors can cause physical reactions. For example, too much red has been show to increase blood pressure. As you design survey templates, keep in mind how color meanings can affect survey respondents.

Cool colors: Cool colors typically have a calming effect. Keep in mind that cool colors can appear smaller than warm colors and visually recede on the page.

	Blue - As you might have guessed, blue is calming. Almost everyone likes some shade of blue, whether it's a strong and steadfast blue or a light, friendly blue. In fact, in 2008 Pantone selected Blue Iris as the color of the year. As a result of the calming effect blue has, it can make time seem to pass more quickly and help you sleep. However, too much blue can cause the calming effect to go to the extreme and cause you to have the blues. Beyond just being calming, blue can convey richness and sometimes superiority (deep royal blue) or it can convey trust and truthfulness (combining light and dark blue). See how using blues could improve your response rate if it helps people trust you?
	Green - Like blue, green has some calming effects and can make time seem like it's moving quicker, but it also signifies growth, renewal, health and the environment. Like with blue, green has it's own extreme as well, green can mean jealousy or envy and inexperience. With a hint of warmth and coolness, green can create balance, harmony and stability.
	Purple - Over the ages, purple has come to be synonymous with royalty. Since purple comes from red (warm) and blue (cool) it has intriguing qualities of both. Typically deep and bright purples suggest riches, while lighter purples are more romantic and delicate. Keep in mind though, while purple can be noble and spiritual, too much purple can cause moodiness - the same as with too much blue.
	Turquoise - As a blend of blue and green, turquoise can have a soft, feminine qualities or a more sophisticated feel with the darker teals.

Look for parts two and three later this week for warm and neutral color meanings.

When performing a market research study for clients in certain marketplaces, it is important to remember the competition. If, for example, you were doing a customer market research survey for a fast-food restaurant, Burger One, you would want to gauge survey respondents’ feelings about the competition as well as your client.

You might ask restaurant customer satisfaction questions like:


If respondents frequent Burger One and four other fast-food restaurants, that gives you insight into the survey data provided. If respondents only frequent Burger One, that is helpful to know as well. Take this example of how survey results can be applied to the restaurant's over all marketing strategy:


On the other side of this equation is what Burger One's loyal customer base thinks. If customers who only eat fast-food at Burger One express no interest in the new sandwich, it may not be the best possible sandwich to launch. However, if respondents who frequent competitors more often than Burger One express high levels of interest in the new sandwich, it could spell an opportunity for Burger One to gain new business.

It’s best to analyze market research from all angles when launching a new product – there are multiple factors at play.

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

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

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

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

As market researchers, we are all aware of the many ways data can be gathered for a study. There is the online survey, telephone survey, in-person interview, direct mail questionnaire, email survey, focus groups and more.

Telephone surveys often yield decent response rates but can be difficult to conduct. A lot of people simply don’t want to be bothered on the phone and spend time answering poll questions. But phone surveys are great because you can ask all the questions and get clarification on any answers that don’t quite have the information you are looking for. The opportunity for that is of course not present in an online, email or direct mail survey.

A telephone survey is not going to work for every study, however. There are some products that won’t match up well. For example, a survey about a medical product is likely not one that anyone will want to discuss over the phone with a stranger.

For a consumer survey with a lot of feedback answers using numbered responses, an email questionnaire might be best as it could grow tedious and leave too much margin for error.

If it works, you can also combine survey methods and gather data both ways. When creating the surveys be sure to incorporate the differences into the call script and email. If it is necessary to have pre-screening questions for the phone interview, make them as concise as possible. Combining data collection methods is helpful and can achieve a more well-rounded result, but be careful about choosing the best method for your purposes.

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

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


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

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

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

Increasing survey response rates is a major goal of most survey builders and market researchers. There's an art and a science to increasing campaign response rates whether it's an email marketing campaign or an online market research study. I wanted to share some of my tips for how to increase survey response rates:

• Make the email survey invitation from names easy to recognize. You can do this by including an individual's name within the organization that's well known (such as the CEO or if it's a client survey, the name of their sales rep). You can also use the organization's name, or both. For example, I'm subscribed to a few MarketingProf's newsletters. When they send out emails they include the same person's name and their organizations name so it looks like this: Anne, MarketingProfs. I recognize it everytime, and since I enjoy their newsletter, I made sure to open the email.

• Keep subject line's compelling, but short. The subject line and the From Name are the two most critical pieces to get your email opened. Try to keep your subject lines to 35 characters or less. You don't need to put the entire email in the subject line, but you do need to include enough information to make the recipients open the survey email.

• Create an attractive survey invitation. Studies have shown that well done HTML email messages get better response rates than plain text emails. With HTML you have the opportunity to include images, change font sizes, bold text, etc. Take advantage of this chance. It's one more way to get people to click through to your survey!

• Send personalized survey invitations. Personalizing your emails, even something as simple as including the recipient's name in the greeting, will return a higher response than a generic message. It creates a personal touch, and makes the recipient feel like someone took the time to send them a personal message (even though your email survey tool did it for you).

• Introduce the survey. Let the participants know why they should participate in your survey. If they don't understand why their opinion is important to your survey findings, why would they want to take the time to fill it out?

• How long will the survey take? Not setting expectations in the beginning for survey length leads to low response rates and high abandonment rates. Not what you want to see. If you don't let people know how long it will take to fill out your online survey, they're going to assume you're hiding something about how long it is. Tell them it will take X minutes or the survey is only Y questions long. Definitely be honest, if you lie here, you're going to hurt your future chances of getting those respondents to complete your next online survey questionnaire.

• Remind your survey sample that their responses will be kept confidential. This is particularly important for surveys about uncomfortable topics. For example, you created a poll for a public opinion survey to see how your population feels about an emotional topic such as abortion. If you don't keep the information confidential, you probably will not get honest feedback. Same thing goes with employee questionnaires, they should always be kept confidential and anonymous. Not keeping responses confidential will definitely hurt your response rate, as well as the validity of the data.

• Offer an incentive. Offering incentives is a proven method for increasing survey response rates. But this method doesn't work if you don't let people know about it up front. Put it in your email, put it on the welcome page of the survey, then make sure to follow up. Again, if you drop the ball here, the chances of that survey respondent completing your online survey form in the future is drastically reduced.

• Always say Thank You! Remember when your mom always made you write thank you notes when you got presents or cards from people for holidays and birthdays? It was because people like to feel their effort is noticed and appreciated. Same idea here, it's nice to just get a short note thanking them for their time. After all, survey respondents are doing you a favor.

• Don't over email your contact list. This is very important. You shouldn't be inviting the same people to complete your online surveys every month. It's important to segment your list using whichever survey sampling method that works best for your surveys to avoid email list fatigue. Make sure that you're coordinating with other campaigns as well. Just because you know they're different initiatives you're emailing about, your contact's wont necessarily see it that way. If you begin sending emails too frequently, contacts are going to just delete your email and never open it, opt out or report you as a spammer.

Have a tip that I missed? I'd love to hear it!

A good survey includes both qualitative and quantitative data, but when gathering qualitative data it is important to gather the right kind of answers. Go too open-ended with your question, and you may end up with answers that do not help you with your study at all.

Consumer insights into a new product or service are important to a market research study, and open-ended questions are the way to get them. When conducting consumer surveys, there are several online survey tips you can follow to get the right mix of closed and open-ended question:

1. Determine if it is a question that you cannot ask in any other way. For example, if you were asking consumers how often they purchased a product, it would be difficult to analyze data if that question were left open-ended. Group responses into categories like once a month, twice a month, more than three times a month.

2. If the question must be open-ended, make it narrow. Sounds contradictory, but if you ask too much, you’ll get too much. Don’t ask if they like your product and if they share it with friends in one breath. Ask simple questions like: Why do you purchase the product?

3. Allow expansion on closed-ended questions. If you are unsure about something, leave room for comments on close-ended questions. This is a good compromise that can help you get the responses you need.

These are just a few best practices for survey writing, but it goes without saying that when creating a survey, you need to put as much, if not more, effort into writing the questions as you will analyzing the data.

I got an email today from Smarter Travel announcing the winners of their 2009 Readers' Choice Awards. Notice anything interesting?

I’ve written in the past that it’s best to use probability-based sampling techniques for your employee, market research or consumer survey samples whenever possible.  One of these techniques is called stratified sampling.  It is used when you expect that your population is heterogeneous (different) and that the survey results could vary greatly based upon certain subgroup characteristics.  If you are particularly interested in subgroup analysis within your survey sample, using a stratified sample can increase the accuracy of your results and reduce error estimates.  Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you are interested the television watching habits of American citizens, and you know (from anecdotal evidence or previous theory) that television watching varies widely by gender.  Since you know that males and females have disparate television watching habits, you want to select a sample whose results will accurately reflect the habits and responses for males and females independently.

What you do is first divide the population into mutually exclusive subgroups (or “strata”), and then take a random sample from each of the subgroups.  Using our gender example, you would divide the population into two groups (male and female), then take a random sample from your male and female subgroups, respectively.  You will be able to be more confident in what you say about your results than if you used a simple random sample from the overall population.

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?

“Knowledge is power.” Again, a statement that I frequently heard from my parents and teachers growing up. When I was 10, I was probably told this because I was complaining about doing my fifth grade homework. These days, I still say this silently to myself from time to time. This is because knowledge is power not only to the fifth grader who is trying to get A’s in school, but also to anyone trying to make a profit in the business world.

There is no way around it; Cvent Web Surveys software provides you with business knowledge. By surveying your client pool, you will learn about their likes and dislikes, and you can thus enhance your products or services to meet the needs of those who matter. The web survey application also provides you with another kind of knowledge though, through the recent addition of click tracking reports.

Whereas the actual act of surveying customers allows you to learn more about them “from the horse’s mouth”, click tracking reports give you insight into which links people are clicking on in your survey emails, which can be extremely beneficial as well. For example, if you send your monthly e-newsletters out through the Cvent online survey platform (as many of our clients do), then you can run click tracking reports to view which links to outside websites your recipients are clicking on. Who is clicking on which links? Which URLs are the most popular?

Cvent email marketing click tracking reports include graphs that are easy to read and interpret. You can export them into Microsoft Word, Excel, or PDF. Most importantly, however, click tracking reports teach you how to place information and links in your emails. If you use emails to market your organization at all, then click tracking reports will help you leverage your ability to format those emails in order to generate the maximum possible business (and money!) for you.

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.