Cvent Survey Blog

If your clients are unsatisfied, do you know why? Customer retention should be a huge focus for any organization, if for no other reason than that acquiring new customers is five times more expensive than keeping a current customer.

As many HR executives and relationship managers know, employee satisfaction has a direct link to customer satisfaction. An employee who is satisfied with his or her job and work environment is more likely to work to keep customers satisfied. So, when it comes to increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, take care of your biggest asset: your employees.

Consider conducting an employee satisfaction survey. Just the act of running a survey has been shown to boost employee satisfaction. It lets employees know that management is listening and considering their concerns.

If they have valid concerns about overtime expectations or incentive plans or a range of other issues, just running an employee survey won’t solve those issues. It will, however, allow you to to identify issues affecting various parts of the organization and take steps to improve the culture and environment.

Unlike what some organizations have come to believe, each department does not live in a vacuum. If your marketing department is unhappy, it will affect your sales and client services teams. If your technology department is unhappy, it will affect your accounting and marketing departments. If your customer service employees are unhappy, look out! You may have a hard time renewing current customers and winning new clients.

Instincts tell us that poor customer satisfaction is linked to problems with your product offering or customer service, but it could have wider implications. Before investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in R&D to improve your offering, consider implementing a survey program to help identify the true cause of your customer retention problems.

You may have heard about Facebook introducing a targeted polling system to its ad model, presented during a demonstration at the World Economic Forum. Rumor was that Facebook would begin to sell user data to market researchers later in the year. The social networking site tried to squash the suspicion and denied that polling would become part of their advertising options.

Facebook is, however, testing a new Engagement Ad that will allow advertisers to gather feedback through the added ability to pose questions to users. Facebook is expected to eventually launch a surveying function for organizations to tap into users' opinions and gain immediate feedback on product and services. While Facebook has not yet introduced a polling feature for researchers, you can see such an idea already in action at LinkedIn. This social networking site now has a feature that allows users to poll targeted groups.

What does all this mean? As a market researcher looking for customer feedback, social networks allow you to reach consumers willing to share their opinions and talk openly about brands. In addition to email marketing, consumer marketers should be considering social networks as method to get survey responses.

Seth Godin recently shared some tips for crafting better online surveys. All of them certainly ring true to us survey experts. In fact, we've touched on a number of his suggestions throughout our blog, including avoiding leading questions and respecting your survey respondents' time.

One piece of advice that we found particularly interesting was his reasoning for keeping survey length short. He says, "Every question you ask is expensive. (Expensive in terms of loyalty and goodwill.)" It's such a to-the-point summary of all the reasons we've described for why you need to consider survey questions and length if you want to connect to your audience and get a response.

Visit Seth Godin's blog to read the complete "Five tips for better online surveys."

Wachovia Corp. has placed first among large banks when it comes to bank customer service, according the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Wells Fargo, though scoring below the industry average, improved significantly in the eyes of consumers this year as well.

In its 15th year, the ACSI uses a 100-point scale to gauge customer's reactions to services, prices, products and more. The Index measures satisfaction in a number of industries, including finance, retail and insurance.

According to an article in the Charlotte Observer, Laura Schulte, who leads the Wells and Wachovia combined eastern community banking unit, noted that both banks survey about 60,000 customers each month to get a feel for customer satisfaction. Perhaps this could be one explanation for their high rankings.

Have you surveyed your customers lately? Where would your company rank on the Index?

With many survey companies offering web based survey tools, it's easier than ever to gather customer feedback. But are you going about it in the right way?

Often times organizations who solicit customer feedback with web surveys fail to gather true, honest opinions by using questionnaires that back respondents into a corner or don't afford them the opportunity to voice their opinion. A common mistake with a lot of customer satisfaction surveys is asking too many irrelevant questions. For example, did you really need to know the last time a customer visited your website if they are discussing a purchase from the store?

Check out a few tips for creating a customer satisfaction survey when you want to know if a customer or client would recommend your organization:

• Start off by asking respondents if they would recommend your organization, product or service based on their most recent experience; make "Yes," "No," and "I don't know" possible answers;

• Use advanced logic to find out more about why they picked the previous answer, providing either a pre-determined list of reasons or a comment box;

• Ask the respondent to describe how he or she would recommend (or recommend against) your organization, product or service; this will help you understand a lot about your offering and where customers see value;

• Finally, ask how you could improve. Respondents have a different frame of reference than you do—their ideas may be so-so, or they may be the most innovative you've ever heard.

Of course, you may need to use additional logic to ask other appropriate questions, but the main idea is to keep it short and always allow respondents to answer “I don’t know.” If you force them to pick an answer, you skew your own data and ultimately learn very little. Use a short, relevant question approach to gain valuable information without frustrating respondents with long surveys and questions for which they have no opinion.

We've stressed the importance of careful consideration when it comes using to open-ended questions in your surveys, as analyzing their responses can be a real hassle. If we didn't warn you early enough against the post-collection headache of open-ended questions, or you decided open-ended questions were the way to go but now you have more responses than you can wrap your head around, here's how to analyze survey data quickly to summarize responses without spending days on the project. We know you may be shocked that it's possible to analyze your pages and pages of comments before lunchtime, but believe us—it is.

1. Start by downloading your survey responses from your online tool to Excel. (If you're still using paper surveys, you'll have to first manually enter all your data in the spreadsheet.)

2. Add a column to the Excel spreadsheet and use the random function. This function will randomly generate numbers for each record; copy the column and paste special to preserve the values.

3. Sort the column of your random numbers and select the first 50 to 60 rows to perform your analysis. Using a random sample ensures your sample of 50 will be representative of the whole group.

4. Go through the first 10 to 15 responses and develop categories for the responses. If you're doing a customer satisfaction questionnaire or user satisfaction survey and asked why they would recommend a particular service, perhaps your categories would be "Good support," "Ease of use," "Time saving," "Integration issues" and "Cost."

5. Quickly go through your last 35 to 50 responses and assign categories. If you don't know which category it belongs to, skip it and keep going!

6. Finally, sort by category and quality check your work. Each group should be able to stand together. As you read the groups again, you may find you can combine categories or create new categories. You'll usually be able to place the ones you skipped into a category.

Congratulations! You've preformed all the coding needed to proceed to make recommendations on the data.

And for those had to take the extra step of transferring data from paper to Excel, use the time we saved you with this trick to sign up for an online webinar to learn more about Cvent's online survey tools.

Email marketing spending will increase from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $2.1 billion in 2012, according to JupiterResearch's new report "US E-Mail Marketing Forecast." Over half of this spending will be dedicated to retention email by 2012.

The report also forecasts that spam volumes will increase, but spam messages reaching consumers will remain flat, thanks to the work of Internet Service Providers' anti-spam tactics. This means email marketers will need to work harder to remain relevant in their campaigns. Looking for more targeted email strategies, marketers will, says JupiterResearch, rely more on enhanced email features and strategic services.

Are you concerned about the success of your email marketing campaigns, or worried that your online surveys won't yield the data you need? Cvent's Professional Services Group is here to help, offering assistance with everything from creating survey questions to analyzing your data and creating reports. Contact Cvent today to learn more.

In today's economy, we have a lot of clients concerned with Return on Investment (ROI). They ask, What's the ROI for a web survey, and how is it different from that of traditional survey methods of phone and paper? In fact, web surveys generate a much higher ROI than traditional surveying for a number of reasons.

First of all, traditional surveys require several hard costs to distribute a survey, such as postage and printing costs. Creating and conducting a survey by paper or phone also costs you in terms of human labor.

Analysis of traditional surveys demands another set of costs, most notably the time and manpower required to manually enter responses and create reports. Plus, completed paper surveys and phone calls cannot be saved, which means you face these costs all over again for your next survey.

Such challenges do not exist with online surveys. Distributing online surveys by email or website links eliminates the costs of printing and postage. An automated process of survey answer collection cuts back on your need for human resources, with the additional benefit of eliminating common manual errors. Finally, one-click reports drastically reduce time spent using survey analysis techniques.

Aside from addressing the challenges presented in traditional surveys, online surveys can also yield higher response rates overall, thanks to features such as automated email reminders. Email reminders have been shown to increase response, sometimes even doubling it.

ROI is an important factor to consider when deciding how to go about a survey campaign. Web surveys can clearly yield a much higher ROI than phone and paper techniques by saving you money and time.

We spend a lot of time talking about why an organization needs to survey, but in all our talk about good survey design we often overlook an important step in your project: secondary data. Secondary data, or data previously collected, can be internal to the organization—from accounting, sales, customer service, marketing, etc.

Secondary data can also be external. Commonly used external data comes from published sources, for example, commercially available data or government census data.

Using secondary data can save both time and money, but it's important to make sure that the secondary data meets certain criteria in order to be applicable to your project. Ask yourself:

• Is the data current? Does it apply to the time frame you're interested in?
• Is the data useful to your survey research?
• Can the data be verified? Is it dependable and accurate?
• What bias is present in the data?
• What were the methodologies used to collect the data? Was the response rate high? Was the sample size large enough? Was the questionnaire design good?

Keep in mind that secondary data is rarely sufficient and often needs to be supplemented with additional data collection. Still, as we're continually asked to do more with less time and resources, utilizing past data can save you and your respondents time in survey response collection.

Increased spam and email phishing attacks and email are a top concern for email marketers in 2009, according to a Goodmail-sponsored survey conducted by JupiterResearch. The survey, conducted among 202 email marketers, found that email and image blocking by ISPs and email applications was the second-most pressing, named by 45 percent of respondents.

Surprisingly, economic conditions are less of a concern to marketers. About 40 percent said they were concerned about slowing consumer spending. Staying relevant with subscribers was a concern for 27 percent of respondents; securing adequate budget for their programs was named by 16 percent; and 11 percent cited increased consumer preference for social and mobile communications as a concern.

In a recent post, we mentioned that the online presence of all age groups, from 12 to 75, is on the rise. Now, a new study is shedding some light on the geographical location of Internet users.

According to eMarketer, Nielsen Online found that the web plays a key role in French life, stating that the digital media universe in France grew 15 percent between January and November 2008, or an increase of 34.85 million to 40.13 million people.

A report by the European Interactive Advertising Association discovered similar trends among the French. Its report found that two-thirds (67 percent) of French respondents said they used the web daily. The European average is 55 percent.

When it comes to using the Internet to make purchases, the French are also above the average. According to TNS Global, about 58 percent of respondents in France buy goods and/or services online. All in all, Germany had the highest percentage of online buyers with 73 percent. TNS did, however, find that when asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how much it would affect their personal lives if their web access failed, the French reported the highest impact score in Europe at 6.9.

If you're in the e-commerce global market or thinking about expanding, surveys such as these can be valuable tools as you assess your business goals for the future. Understanding your existing and target audiences by using web surveys is essential as you begin new campaigns, budget ad dollars and more.

A successful company is only as good as its employees. After all, the efficiency of your entire team—from sales to marketing to technology to human resources—determines your organization's profits and growth. Isn't it, then, more important than ever to make sure your team is productive and happy overall?

Research has shown that motivated and satisfied employees tend to contribute more in terms of organizational productivity and maintaining a commitment to customer satisfaction—both essential characteristics of an organization that will successfully weather the economic storm. So then how do you make sure your employees are, and remain, motivated and satisfied?

Employee satisfaction surveys are great tools for boosting morale within an organization. In fact, it's generally seen that companies that encourage or engage their employees to provide ideas and suggestions have higher employee retention rates and job satisfaction. Give your employees a chance to share insights and suggestions, and you'll have invaluable information that can be acted upon to increase workplace satisfaction and improve business processes.

Employee feedback and satisfaction are critical to the success of any organization. To read more about how to successfully implement a survey program that will positively impact your culture and bottom line profits, read Cvent's new white paper on employee satisfaction.

In a struggling economy, high customer retention is critical to your organization's success. A surefire way to improve and maintain your customer retention is to offer great customer service. After all, keeping customers satisfied with your support services increases loyalty and makes them want to stick around.

Web based surveys are an easy, efficient way to gauge customer satisfaction. User surveys can easily be implemented by sending a quick email survey invitation to customers after each customer service call you receive. You know you're reaching customers who had a need for customer service, so a follow-up survey invitation is a great way to capture their thoughts immediately after receiving assistance.

Customer service satisfaction surveys sound like a fit for your business? Here's the catch: some survey companies only allow respondents to submit questionnaires one time. That means users reaching out to customer support more than once—whether for related or unrelated issues—can only give their input and respond to user satisfaction surveys once. You'll never know if their satisfaction level stays the same or changes, and why.

Recognizing this problem, Cvent's online survey tool allows for multiple responses from the same respondent. You can easily specify if survey respondents can take the survey just once, an unlimited number of times, or a specified number of times.



If your customers don't have a good experience with your customer care department, you can expect to see a drop off in contract renewals and a diminished reputation in your industry. Offering exception customer service is an excellent way to add value to your offering.

Contact Cvent today to find out how you can benefit from our online survey experience with an all-encompassing toolset of survey templates, question libraries, the assistance of a Professional Services Group and more.

The most common question type is the interval question. They appear in almost every questionnaire or survey and are often used in survey templates.

As we briefly touched on in the last post, interval questions can lead to powerful analysis, including:

• Averages and standard deviations
• Correlations and regressions
• Addition and subtraction
• Frequency distributions

Interval scales are usually used to find degrees of agreement, satisfaction, likelihood of an action, etc. It is important to note that each interval should be equally spaced—whether your scale is 1 to 5 or Extremely unsatisfied to Extremely satisfied.

(If your interval spaces are not equal, you have an ordinal scale. To see what analysis ordinal data allows for, check out our last post.)

It is also important to note since interval scales do not have a true zero, you cannot say someone is twice as satisfied as someone else.

Surveyors have preferences regarding how many intervals to use. However, the most common scales are the 1 to 5 and the 1 to 7 scales. Beyond 7 intervals, we believe it becomes difficult to accurately interpret the variation between the intervals.

When designing a survey, it's sometimes difficult to determine which question type is appropriate or what kind of scale would be best. For extra help with question design, Cvent's Professional Services Group is happy to consult and make recommendations on any questionnaire.

If you've kept up with the Cvent Survey blog, you know that there are five key question types when it comes to web surveys. One thought remains: what difference does it make which question type I choose? In fact, it makes a big difference.

Question type determines the analysis you can perform on the data you receive, whether you're working on a training evaluation, satisfaction survey or customer service feedback form.

Consider the following table, which outlines the types of analysis allowed for by different question types:



You'll notice as you move up the table, you can perform more mathematical operations and types of analysis.

It's important to always keep in mind the whole picture of your survey, from start to finish. What types of analysis do you want to do with your data, and what kinds of reports will you need to present after the survey is closed? The answers to these questions should weigh heavily in the design of your survey questions.

Marketers and sales teams need to understand the importance of aligning their definitions of a qualified lead. For much too long, marketing departments have been sheltered away from the sales team in their own respective silos, unable to communicate efficiently. When marketing and sales teams are able to align their lead generation and sales strategy, businesses will be able to increase marketing ROI and sales efficiency.

Most sales organizations are still using an “A, B, C” lead prioritization model. This means the sales staff picks and chooses (usually without a set methodology, but rather on whim or instinct) what leads are the “hottest” to attend to first.

Such a process creates a divide between sales and marketing. Marketers want to know why sales hasn’t followed up on their newest “hot” batch of generated leads, while sales wants to know why marketing is providing such poor leads. Without communication, this struggle never ends; proper alignment of lead definition and lead prioritization strategy can fix this problem and result in much more efficient sales processes.

Lead scoring surveys are a great way to establish a common definition. Customer surveys can reveal certain demographic or psychographic characteristics that are shared among a company’s best customers. Once these characteristics are determined, leads can then be scored with these attributes weighted accordingly.

For example, if your company’s most profitable customers, or highest close-rate, comes from the pharmaceutical vertical, then your leads that have similar pharmaceutical traits should be given higher scores than other leads. Attend to the leads that have the highest historical value and your company will ultimately see higher sales and more lead qualification.

To learn more about lead scoring surveys and how marketers are using surveys to generate high quality leads, check out Cvent's new white paper, which discusses how you might be able to implement such a plan in your organization.

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.

Online surveys might seem like a no brainer for marketing departments, and indeed they are a must-have tool. However, the benefits of web surveys are not limited to those working in the marketing and/or sales arena. A human resources department can just as easily gain valuable information from online surveys, as evidenced by a recent survey by Hewitt Associates.

The survey of 150 mid- to large-sized employers explored how companies are responding to the current economic situation in terms of retirement benefits for workers. For example, 51 percent offer automatic enrollment retirement features, but only 25 percent are somewhat or very likely to add it for new hires. Still, only 5 percent of survey respondents are expected to take a more drastic measure of cutting their company match in 2009.

To balance out such cutbacks, the survey found that companies are offering lower-cost tools that will help employees make smart investments. About 77 percent of respondents offer target-date funds, while 49 percent offer automatic rebalancing, which helps employees regularly balance their portfolios with target allocations.

Also interesting to note, employers are cutting financial education programs (dropping from 72 percent last year to 60 percent in 2009). In order to make up for this loss, companies are turning to less expensive means of outreach: 75 percent is using Intranet sites, 60 percent is using email blasts and 49 percent is using webinars.

Overall, Hewitt uncovered a number of details regarding the adoption of retirement programs in the struggling economy, all thanks to its survey. Clearly, the use of online survey tools can provide the information you need to see how your human resources department compares to other companies, how HR policies are changing due the economy, what new policies are being adopted and much more.

Consider the following scenario: When asked during the first quarter, your customers are neutral about you’re offerings, not overly satisfied, not overly dissatisfied. When asked the next quarter, you ask again about customer satisfaction. Getting a negative response may mean you are at risk of losing some customers, while getting a more positive response could indicate you’re doing something right.

Either way, the key here is that you know things aren't "normal"—there was a change in the response and it requires action. If you hadn't known what "normal" was, you would have never realized there was an issue, positive or negative.

In a rapidly changing economy, it's more important than ever to set a baseline for your survey feedback. You need to know what normal is before you can judge if you're below or above the curve.

Online surveys are a quick, easy and affordable way to discover and analyze such trends before you make key business decisions. It's important to stay informed so that you make wise changes in your business plan, and not "break" the things that are working.

When you're not in a marketing, customer service or human resource department, it's sometimes hard to see how your organization or department can benefit from using surveys. But trust us, no matter the department or industry your organization is positioned in, surveys can add value.

A good example of this can be found at the University of Florida, where researchers are looking to understand children's emotional and social well-being in order to pinpoint health problems early on. To do this, researchers developed a survey called the Pediatrics Quality of Life Inventory. This survey measures a child's quality of life. Based on an established range of scores, the survey results can be read by doctors much like a blood pressure test.

Obviously the surveys would never replace a doctor's clinical exam. However, they could be useful in identifying how different aspects of a child's life can affect their health.

Once again, you may be thinking that this survey does not relate to you. It's the idea behind it that spans all industries: think outside the box when you want to improve your value offering. Pediatricians who implement the survey in their practices will be bringing additional value to their patients and their families.

Surveys that ask appropriate questions will gather helpful information for any organization. But without asking today, you can't get answers tomorrow.