Respond To Survey Feedback Quickly With Triggered Survey Email Alerts

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
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.

Example of a Survey Email Alert

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.

Don't Forget To Introduce Your Online Survey

Friday, June 26, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
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:
This survey aims to better understand how people in your community use community parks.

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:
The information gathered in this survey will help us determine what improvements are made to our local parks.

Depending on the survey method you chose, the introduction may go on the welcome page of your survey or in your email marketing invitation. If you're using email, read these other tips for survey invitations.

Can You Use Twitter As A Customer Feedback Tool?

Friday, June 26, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
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.

Questions From A Customer Survey Template

Friday, June 26, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
It's been awhile since we've provided any customer survey templates or example customer satisfaction survey questions. Here are some sample survey questions from an online customer satisfaction questionnaire:

Example survey question: What is your overall satisfaction with COMPANY NAME?

Example Survey Question: How often do you use COMPANY AND/OR PRODUCT NAME?

Example survey question: How satisfied are you with PRODUCT NAME in the follow categories:

Example survey question: Would you recommend Gadget A to your friend or affiliate?

Now, you can't see behind the scene's of this survey so I want to point out what I've spent a lot of time talking about this week: using data you already have in conjunction with pipe logic to personalize the respondent experience. Every place Gadget A appears in the survey is intended to be pipe logic from a question I already know the answer to: what product do you use? In my opinion, it makes your organization look much smarter to the respondent because each question doesn't say something to the effect of "our products and/or services."

Improve Product Surveys Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Thursday, June 25, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
I was looking through a customer survey template the other day and the first question was "Which of these products do you use?" The options were Product A, Product B, Product X and Product Y. Umm, hello? The point of a customer questionnaire is that you're surveying customers, which means you should already know what product survey respondents bought. Now if you're a B2C organization that distributes products through retail stores, this statement might be a little unfair since a consumer can go into any Target and purchase your product. But for now, let's assume you don't have this channel for product distribution.

Why are you making your business survey longer instead of shorter? You already know the answer, put this information in the contact record. Since you have the data, I would even recommend including the question, hiding it and importing the answers to this question for respondents before sending out any email marketing soliciting survey responses. This way, you can utilized online survey tool features like Pipe Logic. Using Pipe Logic allows you to personalize the respondent experience and keep them more engaged. More engaged respondents are less likely to abandon your survey, aka increase your response rates.

What other common questions could you eliminate during customer research studies because you already have the data somewhere in your organization?

How Do You Gather Product Enhancement Requests?

Thursday, June 25, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Like customer service feedback, product surveys 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.

Survey Tip: Don't Just Clone Your Online Survey And Go - Improve It

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Copy Your Online SurveyTo 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.

Use One Of Your Surveys As A Template

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 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?

Learn From Other People's Surveying Mistakes

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
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 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.

Save Time With Response Libraries When You Create Surveys

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Response LibraryWhen it comes to survey creation and design, creating questions with meaningful responses can be quite a challenge. After all, the validity of your data has a lot to do with the questionnaire itself. That's why it can be a big help to have a library of common responses in your survey tool!

Cvent Web Survey Software users automatically get access to our question and response libraries. Recently, Sarah, over at our Meetings & Events blog, was working on a client survey. She thought the response library was a huge time saver. It also ensured she was using the same responses (where appropriate, of course) for multiple questions. Having consistency throughout your survey makes it easier for respondents to complete your feedback form.

When creating a question, utilizing the response library is a simple, few click process. Survey admins have the ability to select the type of response they're looking for and then select the correct response under the category.

Cvent Online Survey Tool Has 8 Response Default Categories

Sample Survey Question for Demographic Information This is the perfect example of a survey question where a response library can save you a lot of time. Without the response library, I would have spent a good chunk of time entering in each state. Fortunately, Cvent's online survey application did all the work for me!

Cvent users also have the opportunity to create their own library of questions they use frequently. Chances are you have other responsibilities besides building surveys so as an online survey tool, we strive to cut down on the time you spend creating a questionnaire so you can spend more of your day on other tasks.

Want to learn more about how our web based survey software can save you time on your next survey project? Sign up for one of our online webinars.

Employee Surveys Can Improve Customer Experience

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Employee Morale Impacts Customer LoyaltyI was reading through Bruce Temkin's 6 Laws of Customer Experience (CxP) yesterday, and I was struck by how well a survey program fits in with his CxP laws. I talk about implementing online survey programs to gather customer feedback all the time, to the point that I sometimes feel like a broken record. Often though, employees are overlooked as an essential part of the customer experience especially if they aren't front-line employees. For that reason, my favorite two laws are numbers four and five:

Unengaged employees don't create engaged customers
Employees do what is measured, incentivised and celebrated

Obviously, conducting client surveys to find their satisfaction levels is important for customer analysis, product enhancements, customer service feedback, etc., but checking in with employee's satisfaction is equally important. Here are a few of the highlights from Bruce:

Great customer experience is not sustainable unless employees buy in to organizational goals
Wowing customers is nearly impossible if you have low employee morale
Employees are less likely to do something if it's hard - make it easy to do the "right" thing
Employee relationships are just as important as customer relationships
Measure employee engagement, this is a great time to use a net promoter (NPS) question to ask employees how likely they are to recommend your organization as a place to work
 
Various types of employee feedback and HR surveys can include questions to evaluate how your organization is doing when it comes to fostering the correct environment for providing amazing customer experiences. A quick online survey can show management if they're doing a good job communicating organizational goals, motivating employees, boosting morale by celebrating their successes, etc.

Employees are an organization's biggest asset; but if employees aren't motivated, don't understand or are just expected to churn through tasks, they could also be your biggest liability when trying to boost customer retention. A good first step to checking in on your customer experience is to check in with your employees through some type of employee satisfaction survey.

If your organization doesn't currently conduct employee surveys or conducts paper based surveys, I'd recommend signing up for one of our online product demos or a free trial of the Cvent Web Survey software.

Progress Bars in Online Surveys: The Good.. The Bad.. The Ugly

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Survey Template: Progress Bar
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).

Are Clients Being Difficult Because You're Not Listening And Getting Customer Feedback?

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
I came across a blog post on Valeria Maltoni's Conversation Agent Blog not too long ago where she outlines the Top 10 Reasons Why Your Customers are Being Difficult. The list includes things like changing the rules, being negative and being the only game in town, but there are four I liked best. They are also, in my opinion, the easiest to rectify:

Not listening to what customers have to say. Customer questionnaires are too structured so that you're leading the conversation, instead of giving them the opportunity to tell you what they want to tell you. Valeria makes the comparison to a trial: Objection! Leading the witness!

Not soliciting feedback. I have to agree with Valeria on this, not asking is worse than not listening. If you're making any changes to their product, ask them first. I've mentioned before it's important to run customer surveys and conduct customer research particularly when it's a decision that is going to impact your customers big time!

Not following up on customer feedback. I've written entire posts about how conducting any type of feedback questionnaire causes customers to set expectations that you will act on your client survey research. This should be a no-brainer, because if you're not going to act on the data you get back, why are you even wasting your time (and customers' time) with a survey?

Not everyone is going to like you. While this one is not directly related to creating an online survey or questionnaire, it's important to keep in mind when reading through feedback. Not everyone is going to like you, and you can't please everyone. Particularly if you're one of those lucky (or unlucky) organizations to be the only game in town.

3 Traps To Catch Bogus Survey And Questionnaire Responses

Friday, June 5, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
People often worry about the integrity of their survey data and how to protect it. While there's no magic solution, here are a few tips to help you identify those respondents who are not thoughtfully answering your survey questionnaire. Chances are you spent a lot of time creating a questionnaire to meet your survey project goals, ensuring the result is quality responses should be at the top of your list. Here are a few things you can do during the survey creation to ensure the integrity of your survey results:

1. Question respondents' qualifications. Some people refer to this as a knowledge trap. The idea is to verify the respondent is the type of professional they claim to be (and you need for your survey). Typically these questions belong towards the top with other qualifying questions. For example, if you're conducting a market research survey targeting educators you may ask a question specific to their field. But you can also use this tactic for product evaluation surveys or customer questionnaires by asking questions related to your product or service that only a client will be able to answer. Here's a sample question for a Cvent user:

Example Customer Survey Question: Knowledge Trap for Client Survey

2. Test respondents' logic. These types of questions are intended to catch Christmas Tree-ers and straight liners (those who give the same response to every question to speed things along). For this type of trap, you ask the same question multiple ways. Here are a example survey questions utilizing a logic trap:

Example Survey Questions: Logic Test for Product Evaluation Survey

Depending on how you use logic traps, it may be necessary to space them out. You wouldn't want to have my sample survey questions appear one right after another. It will irritate respondents because you're asking them the same thing twice and wasting their time. Don't be overly obvious, like I was, about it. When you're looking at your results, if someone said it was very likely they would buy the product in the first question but said it was very unlikely they would buy the product in the second, you probably have a problem.

3. Bring respondent attention back.
Sometimes when you're completing a survey or questionnaire online you begin to go on auto-pilot only reading the part of the question or just skipping to the responses - particularly if the survey is long. A way to combat this tendency is to add some attention traps to your questionnaire design. An easy way to do this is to throw an unrelated attribute into a ranking scale. It forces the respondent to stop think for a second about what the question is asking and refocus. Here's an example:

Example Survey Question: Attention Logic In Ranking Questions

Instead of throwing out a respondent because they fail one of these tests, I would suggest simply throwing out that specific answer. In other words, purge data at the question level not the respondent level. If they fail every test and their completion time is way off, perhaps their response is impacting the integrity of your results. After all, the goal of every survey, questionnaire or feedback form should be to answer a question and use the survey report to make decisions.

Avoid Jargon In Marketing Messages - Including Marketing and Customer Surveys

Friday, May 29, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Searching through the Twittersphere this morning, I came across this tweet:

At the "social media for scientists" meetup. Survey says that most people are not familiar with the term "web 2.0" (Thanks for the inspiration @chapados.)
 
My first thought was, are you kidding? How can people not know the term "Web 2.0" when people are beginning to talk about Web 3.0? Then after a moment, I thought, "duh! Of course most people aren't familiar with it."

It's important to remember just because you're familiar with a term, it does not mean your customers or prospects are. They're too busy going about their own lives and jobs to keep up with all the jargon in your industry. I'm implying here that Web 2.0 is jargon. I'm sure if someone conducted a survey on how many people were familiar with the pieces that make up Web 2.0 there might have been different survey results. If you don't spend your day in the Web 2.0 world, you may never come across the term. The same is true for your customers. Just because they use your services or software does not mean they know all the jargon around it or the industry.

Here's the question - what terms is your organization using that customers and prospects don't understand? If you're creating a marketing or customer survey, try to get someone outside or new to your industry to read through it. Chances are, if they don't know what you're talking about, your respondents wont either.

New to Twitter? Check out Sarah's post on the Twitter basics on Cvent's Meetings & Events blog.

Slow Online Survey Software Increases Survey Abandonment

Friday, May 29, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
How speedy is your online survey software? It may seem like a silly question with an obvious answer, and before yesterday I would have agreed. But once again, someone's web based survey has surprised me. I received an email questionnaire invitation from an ecommerce site asking me to complete a survey about my reading habits. In the invite, they told me it would only take 15 minutes of my time (good best practice, here are some other email marketing tips). I had 15 minutes to spare for a 25% discount off my next book purchase.

Unfortunately, the email should have read "15 minutes per page load." I could not believe how slow the online survey software they purchased was. I'm not exaggerating when I say one page took over thirty minutes to load. Are you kidding me? I thought perhaps it was just a momentary glitch or maybe my connection, but I tried it later that night on a different connection - it was just as bad. If it wasn't for the hopes that I was close to the end of the survey (I was promised it would only take 15 minutes), I would have abandoned the survey, but I find it so hard to give up when the finish could just be one page away!

No matter whether you're using customer survey software, HR survey software, product registration software, an email marketing tool or some other type of survey management software, speed should be a factor when selecting a solution. And while I'm at it, I'm going to suggest unscheduled downtime be a factor as well. If you have someone volunteering to take your survey, the last thing you want to happen is the software to go down in the middle of collecting their feedback. Here at Cvent, we're pretty proud of the fact that we've had no unscheduled downtime in the last ten years.

Cvent's online survey tool has a lot more to offer than no unscheduled downtime. Learn more about Cvent Web Survey software by registering for one of our best practice webinars - or if you'd prefer, we also offer weekly product demos.

URLs Matter With Online Surveys

Thursday, May 28, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
MR Heretic recently posted about Phishy Survey URLs. The main point is how having a weird looking URL for your online survey could lower your response rate and destroy the customer trust your organization has worked so hard to gain. Why? If your organization is including IP addresses in your web survey link, consumers will think it looks like phishing and decide against clicking the link. By not clicking the link in your email marketing survey invitation, customers are opting out of your online market research or customer survey.

My recommendation: use a customer survey software or email survey tool that allows you to brand your own survey URL without any IT staff or programming knowledge. Cvent's Web Survey Software gives each survey it's own unique URL automatically, but you can take that a step forward and include your organization's name in the URL as well.

Getting clients to respond to your survey is critical for any survey project's success. There are enough obstacles standing between you and the desired completed online survey submission - don't ruin it by using a phishy looking URL.

Choose Customer Survey Software With Robust Customer Databases

Friday, May 22, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Have you ever been asked to take a customer survey and a few questions in told you don't match the survey criteria? It's pretty frustrating. I've told the organization, "sure, I'll spend a few minutes giving you feedback for your customer research project." Then, I'm rejected and kicked out of the online survey. Usually, I'm kicked out after answering questions they should already have on file. Seems silly they even wasted any email marketing on me. These organizations need to step up their game and invest in quality customer survey software (I would recommend Cvent, obviously).

If your online survey tool is a good one, you have the ability to import critical information into the contact database. We've mentioned before how important having a robust contact database is for segmenting purposes, but the value definitely goes beyond that. I could argue this is a matter of poor email survey segmentation, but sometimes it's important to turn the problem a few degrees and see it from a new side.

Perhaps you don't have some information on a customer you'll need later, you can quickly survey customers to gauge product satisfaction and gather other customer information. You can create any number of custom contact fields in the Cvent contact database, beyond the basic address, phone, email information.

It may be important to your survey projects to be able to run cross-tabulation survey reports based on which tier customer someone is. If all tier 1's feel a certain way, and all tier 2's feel differently, maybe there's a problem that needs to be addressed. While my opening example was a matter of poor segmentation, this one isn't. It's a matter of needing quality data for strong customer analysis - without having to ask the extra questions. You should only ever ask a customer a basic question once. Remember: the likelihood of abandonment increases with each additional question asked. I would argue it skyrockets when additional questions are questions the organization should have (somewhere).

This is another basic case of respecting your customers' time. If you constantly tell them they aren't qualified to complete your customer feedback survey, they're going to stop volunteering to take it - then how will you conduct market research and customer analysis?

Step One In Survey Research: Set Goals

Monday, May 18, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Surveys Without Goals Are Like Loose Puzzle PiecesBefore you start writing any survey you need to define clear project goals. I mean it. Before you place pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard to design a questionnaire, clearly defined project goals is a must. With out goals, your survey project is going to be worthless. Well, not quite worthless, you'll get some facts out of it, but they wont mean anything. They'll be single pieces in a 1,000 piece puzzle. To make sense, puzzle pieces need to fit together to form the whole picture, and survey data is like that as well. Each piece fits together to give you the whole picture.

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

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

Survey in Real Life: Is It Easy For You To Gather Customer Feedback?

Monday, May 18, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
DinnerwareSometimes I feel like I'm always wearing my marketing hat. I watch TV and comment on commercials and their cohesion with the brand. I receive a sales and marketing email and critic the message. I go to a website and wonder how it could be more user friendly. I go on Twitter looking for help after a company offers terrible phone support and am irritated at their lack of presence in the social media realm. I'm always wearing my marketing hat. If you're like me, you probably are always wearing your hat too, whether it's marketing, customer service, HR, sales, the list goes on.

I went to Red Robin Friday night for dinner. We were seated in the first booth by the front - right by the kitchen which gave us great access to fresh bottomless fries. It was already loud and hard to hear the conversation with my table partners, but that's to be expected on a busy night, right? Then, out of no where, the manager starts blowing up balloons right next to us! We could no longer hear ourselves think, let alone have a conversation. I began looking for their feedback form on the table. I told you - I am always wearing my marketing hat. I wanted to give feedback because maybe they never thought blowing up balloons could be such an interruption (I'm always willing to give business the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise).

No customer feedback form on the table. I go to Red Robin a lot, and on occasion I've filled out the customer survey they leave on the table. I have always appreciated how easy it is to tell them they've done a good or bad job. Their feedback form was always easy to leave comments on - not just answer scale questions about my customer satisfaction. But there was no feedback form.

I began thinking, do organizations make it easy for customer to provide feedback?

At the end of the meal, the check came with an invitation to complete a customer satisfaction survey online. While I am a big supporter of using online survey tools to collect feedback, I was a little disappointed in their questionnaire. There was no real place for me to add additional comments like on the feedback form on the table, how were they ever going to hear my plea? So my point is two fold: 1. make it easy for customer to give you feedback on their experience and your service or product; 2. make sure you don't limit their responses on a client survey so the organization cannot see the whole picture. When your organization makes the switch from paper surveys to web based surveys, make sure you don't lose a critical part of your current process.

Is Your Customer Feedback Program Broken?

Thursday, April 30, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
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.