Cvent Survey

The hardest part of any survey project is creating a solid questionnaire. If you create a good survey and plan the analysis, interpreting the data should be a walk in the park. Here are five easy steps on how to analyze survey data:

1. Take a birds-eye-view. A good first step of interpreting survey data is to take an overall look at the data and responses. Consider these questions:

• How many people completed the survey?
• What was the response rate?
• What was the average amount of time respondents spend completing the questionnaire?
• How well do the respondents represent the survey target group?

Answering these questions at the beginning should help you understand how reliable your data is and evaluate how potential biases could be skewing survey results.

2. Look at the responses to your key survey questions. If the goal of the survey was to evaluate customer satisfaction and identify possible product enhancements, a key survey question may be what percentage of respondents said they were unsatisfied and what percentage were extremely satisfied. What kinds of enhancements could improve the customer experience and increase the satisfaction with the product?

3. Cross-tabulate demographic characteristics with responses to key questions. By cross-tabulating the responses by demographic characteristics such as age, gender, experience levels will help you which features may be more important to key groups. Cross-tabulating helps marketing executives further identify target markets.

4. Look at the open ended questions. We've given you tips to help analyze open ended questions in the past. Using open ended questions in any type of market research or customer survey should help you identify the language your target market is using. Sometimes marketers think customers understand the messaging they choose, while the customers are describing the problem and the ideal solution in a completely different way. Open ended questions can help identify some of these disparities so the marketing department can create messaging to speak your customer's language.

5. Create a "to do" list and take action. We've mentioned before that conducting surveys, whether they're online questionnaires or paper feedback forms, create expectations. Be sure to act on the survey results.

Giving the survey analysis techniques as much thought as the survey creation is critical if you want to be able to really improve your organizations value adds. Some people believe that the analysis process beings only after the web based survey has been launched and responses have been collected. Unfortunately, this approach will hurt your survey results. You should consider the types of customer analysis you want to do while developing a questionnaire. The question type you chose when creating an online survey will limit the analysis. So while the above steps have to do with interpreting the data, you need to think about the process in the beginning as well.