Web Surveys 101

Hi, I'm Sherrie Mersdorf! I am currently the marketing operations team lead at Cvent. I work very closely with the Cvent Web Survey and Feedback Management solution to make sure we're sharing tips and creating resources that help organizations achieve their feedback goals. Personally, I believe improving customer service and customer relationships can only be achieved through great company culture and on-going employee retention and satisfaction programs. Learn more about me on Google+

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Cvent or any other organization or individual.

Recently, Forbes published Jeff Bezos's Top 10 Leadership Lessons. I was pleasantly surprised that half of them were focused on customers. The other five still losely related back to customers (of course, they're your business afterall), but these were straight to the gut: 

#2 Obsess over Customers

Early on Bezos brought an empty chair into meetings so lieutenants would be forced to think about the crucial participant who wasn’t in the room: the customer. Now that ­surrogate’s role is played by...

Last Friday, National Tell a Story Day, inspired this month's Throwback Thrusday because survey reports and analysis is just that: Telling a Good (Compelling) Story.

Whenever you tell a story, you have to start by setting the stage. The same is true with research reports whether you're working on customer analysis or training program evaluations. Let's revisit the five questions that must be answered in the executive summary.

Money can't buy happiness, or so we've been told. Michael Norton calls the bluff in this TED Talk saying if you believe this, you're spending wrong. If you don't have time right now to watch this video, I'll give you the secret to buying happiness: Be Prosocial. Spend the money on someone else. It doesn't even need to be something large; it can be trivial gifts such as a cup of coffee. Michael's research found the amount spent doesn't matter as much as the act itself.

As I was watching Michael...

April is International Customer Loyalty Month! It should go without saying that April should not be the only month you give customer loyalty focus. There are huge business benefits to creating loyal customers. However, Customer Loyalty Month should serve as a reminder to review your customer programs and evaluate your KPIs for customer loyalty measurement.

To motivate you this month, and into the rest of the year, I wanted to share 25 great quotes for customer-centric organizations! 
(If you were...

I’m very excited to share some new findings on the customer feedback management space that were just uncovered by an Aberdeen Group research study!

Cvent has sponsored a new study from Aberdeen, titled “Customer Feedback Management: Leveraging Voice of the Customer to Amplify Business Results,” that identifies how “Best-in-Class” companies gather, manage and use customer feedback data in order to accomplish improvements in key measures.

Based on Aberdeen’s research of over 270 organizations that...

Do you remember the world pre-internet? Remember how we used to do business? At the Inc. 500 | 500 Conference last year, Gary Vaynerchuk made a bold statement that really caught my attention when I watched a clip from his speach: Our grandparents are more prepared to be successful in the next decade than we are, because business was built in the old days was built on "small town rules" and the internet is taking us back to those rules. It's about building relationships and personalizing...

Tips for increasing survey response rates are always popular—everyone wants to increase their participation! There's a variety of methods that will help reach your response goals. Changes to your email marketing is one of the easiest ways to give your response rates a boost! Let's throw back to a post written in 2009 surrounding email marketing best practices. 

Just like the 2009 Mountain Dew Throwback campaign, I'm bringing back the sentiments from this post: