Web Surveys 101

There is a wealth of best practices we should all keep in mind with creating and designing questionnaires. But sometimes, we forget a few while writing satisfaction survey questions. Here are seven common survey mistakes that apply to training evaluation forms, employee engagement surveys, customer questionnaires and most other types of feedback collection.

Poor Planning and Unrealistic Expectations
Before you even begin to write survey questions, it's critical you have a clear direction. Ask yourself questions like, What's the purpose of this questionnaire? What do I want to accomplish as a result of running this survey? You need to have an end goal in mind before you ever publish your web survey form. Make sure you keep an open mind in this process. If your goal is to prove all is well and there are no major problems, you might be in for a surprise (or be wasting your time since you will likely ask leading questions). It's also important to make sure everyone understands what the real expectations are, if management is expecting something completely unrealistic, you're not going to look too good when you give them the survey findings.

However, more than just clearly stating your customer satisfaction survey objectives (or objectives for an academic survey, marketing research questionnaire, etc.), you need to actually plan out the process. When do you want to launch the survey? How long do you want it to be? When do you need to make recommendations to management or the board? I always suggest starting at the end and working backwards down your timeline. For example, if you need to present findings to management in two months, that means you need to have all the data collection finished in 6 weeks to allow two weeks to create your survey report. Then you need a month to collect responses, that means you need to launch your survey in two weeks, is that enough time to write questions, get the necessary internal approval, build the survey and send an email survey invitation to your list? If you don't think through your timeline, you may end up rushing around in a frenzy to get everything done. Rushing through the survey process rarely gives you all the results you need.

No Cross-Department Collaboration
Different people and departments often are responsible for separate projects and programs. So what often happens is the customer service department will conduct a customer service satisfaction survey to everyone who has made a call in the last three months. Then at the same time, the customer insights group will conduct customer research to measure client satisfaction. Because these survey projects are being managed apart from one another, several things can happen:


While this can be a problem in both large and small organizations, smaller organizations often are better about coordinating with internal counterparts. If you do have different departments creating surveys for the same target population, make sure to talk to each other and combine your surveys. If you do need to coordinate, make sure you allow for extra planning time since there is bound to be some disagreements about what questions need to stay and what needs to go.

Too Much Fluff
You don't want to waste your time, or respondents' time, with fluff. However, depending on the type of survey you're working on, fluff could be even more detrimental. For example, employee surveys are your chance to ask the really tough questions. By asking fluffy questions you may actually demotivate your staff instead of motivating them (a common side effect of well planned employee satisfaction surveys). Regardless of your survey audience, fluff surveys may make your feedback participants think you don't care about the real answers and only care about making your organization look good.

Lack of Personalization
People don't like to feel as if they received a mass email marketing message. When you're crafting survey invitations, be sure you personalize them. With a professional survey solution, such as Cvent, it's easy to merge in data you already know about the employee, customer, member, etc. Using little personalized touches will help you connect with respondents, and when potential respondents feel engaged they're more likely to completely your entire survey. In cases of non-response, you can always send a second (or third) personalized email survey invitation. The key to boosting your response rates is to make each person feel as if their opinion is valued. This is especially critical with employee satisfaction surveys. You need to make each person feel as if their feedback is critical to the organization's success.

Don't forget you can personalize the actual survey experience itself, you don't need to stop at the email. You can pipe in a person's name, organization, department or other pieces of critical information to create a unique experience for each person. An engaging, relevant survey will always receive a higher response rate than mass message questionnaire.

Unwillingness to Share Results
In the planning stages you should decide what you are going to do with the results, and how you plan to share the survey data. It's important you communicate these plans with anyone invited to participate in your feedback survey. Sharing results shows transparency, and it also helps keep you be accountable. If the overall consensus is your product is terrible, sharing that information in conjunction with how you're going to fix it will build credibility. It's important you don't always pick and choose the good things to share. If you don't do anything with the survey data, your employees, customers or other survey respondents will get the impression you don't care. If they feel you don't care and don't take their feedback seriously, they're less likely to complete your next survey.

Connecting Anonymous Responses back to the Respondent
If you choose to conduct an anonymous survey, there's probably a good reason for it. So don't betray your respondents privacy by trying to match them back to their answers. This will seriously hurt your credibility and the trust respondents have in your word. Not every survey needs to be anonymous, but sometimes it's critical. For example, employee surveys should almost always be kept anonymous. This gives employees the security they need to be brutally honest. If they need to fear consequences, it's unlikely they'll answer truthfully. This is likely to be the case in consumer surveys too when you're surveying about sensitive topics.

Absence of a Follow Up Plan
Be sure someone is responsible for following up on feedback. Part of the purpose for surveying is to identify areas of improvement, if you don’t make improvement's then what was the point? One method that has worked well for clients in the past is to break responses into "categories." Each category should be owned by someone so when an issue comes up, the survey admin can forward the issue to the correct owner. Take the example of a hotel guest survey, the satisfaction questionnaire is completed and the survey analyst sees there are several complaints about broken appliances. To be sure the issue is fixed, the analyst should pass this information to the person in charge of guest room maintenance. The other critical mistake made when it comes to following up on collected feedback is not collecting enough information to follow up on in the first place. Be sure you build questionnaires that digs deeper to collect all the necessary insights.

Almost every survey campaign has room for improvement, but if you keep these in mind you're already half way there. What other pitfalls have you experienced when running surveys?