Web Surveys 101

Yesterday, I shared Step 1 of our three step workout plan for achieving business agility and crushing your compition in 2012. After internalizing and formulating a plan to start a feedback regime, it's time to talk about what you do with the data after you collect it and how you start benchmarking to prove the ROI of your feedback program.

Step 2 : Benchmark don't Bench press

As soon as you start collecting feedback from everywhere seemingly possible (social media, surveys, inbound support inquries, internal transactional data), you may find yourself simply trying to keep your head above water in the ocean of data. Insights come from data, but it's not always the most obvious. The question of what to do next is the biggest hurdle between success and failure of a feedback initiative. Often, organizations find out much too late they weren't collecting the right data, they asked the wrong questions, focused on the wrong metrics or the insights never reached decision makers. Use these five tips to move in the right direction of being able to benchmark your current satisfaction metrics and avoid the vanity metrics trap:

• Establish clear objectives.
  
  When you go the gym, you have a goal of some kind, whether it's to drop those pesky holiday pounds, lower your cholesteral or just be healthy. Same idea should apply when you're working towards business agility. Without your goals, it will be hard to prove to management you're gaining value from your Voice of the Customer, employee feedback, training assessment or other feedback program.
• Equip project lead with the right skills and equipment.
  
  Whether you go to the gym or workout at home, chances are you have equipment to help you accomplish your goals. Likewise, you may attend a class or watch a video to learn how to use the equipment or do the workout effectively. Make sure your team has the skills and equipment they need to collect feedback and analyze the data. 
• Enforce quality control.
  
  If you continually do a yoga pose wrong or lift weights using poor form, you're likely to injure yourself. You need quality control to ensure that doesn't happen. Same applies to business agility. If you collect bad data, you're likely to do more harm than good. Ensure you follow best practices when writing and designing surveys. (If you need to sharpen your knoweldge of survey design best practices, let me know below and I'll be more than happy to provide a few resources!)
• Search for the real story.
  
  Avoid the temptation to just share the end results. It may make your customer support team feel good to receive an average satisfaction score of 4.6 (out of 5), just like I'm sure the people doing testimonials about how they lost 100 lbs on this weight loss program or that feel good, but it doesn't mean much to anyone else. You need to know the whole story for it to have a real impact. Your C-suite should be asking WHY? and How can we do better? Just as you should be asking How did that person lose 100 lbs? and Would the program work for me too? By setting clear goals and avoiding vanity metrics, it will be much easier to tell a compelling story because you have the guidence of what matters without the extra fluff.
• Executive endorcement.
  
  Whenever you start a new workout or weightloss plan, support from your social network (friends, family, etc) can play a major roll in your success. I recently watched a TEDTalk about the hidden influence of social networks on obesity. The researchers did a study of the likelihood someone would be obese based on their network. They found a coorelation because your network matters. Same thing works for a plan to improve business aglity. You need support from your executive team or you wont get the resources or support you need to be successful. Insights wont be internalized across the enterprise, and all your hard work will likely be a wasted effort until you ultimately throw in the towel and look on enviously as other organizations identify new revenue and opprotunites.

It's day 5 of 2012, are you still sticking to your New Years Resolution to work out every day? If you're working on Step 1 (or now Step 2), I think that counts as still keeping your resolution! I'll share the last step of this work out plan, Condition the Organization to Act on Feedback, tomorrow. Of course like any resolution, intentions don't much matter if you don't keep it up. This makes the last step critical making this workout part of your organization's habit so it continues all year long.