Feedback

Communication is a very important part of conducting a survey online. How to inform the invitees about the survey, how to make sure they read the email survey invitation and respond to the survey. This totally depends upon what kind of email is sent to the invitee so they respond to your call to action (aka answer the survey). Here are a few online survey tips that will be helpful when you create survey invitation emails.

Send your invitations out automatically: After you have tested the email invitation, you are ready to send it out in bulk to all of your invitees. We recommend you switch the How to Send option on the Edit Settings page to the Send By Date.

Making No responses or Visited respondents take the survey: send reminder emails. Some people will take your survey right away. You will get increased responses, however, if you send follow-up email reminders with the survey link included. We recommend sending a minimum of two reminder emails depending on how long your survey will be running. Be sure to use our Partial Response reminders in addition to the No Response reminders.

Use HTML emails instead of plain text emails. To send an HTML email, go to the email you are sending out and then click on the HTML Email tab. Click on the Edit button, and you can create your HTML email, adding any images you want to include and formatting the text to emphasize your main points. Make sure to click on the Save and Update Plain Text Email button, so that your HTML email message and your plain text email message both convey the same information.

Feedback: Seek advice & suggestions from your respondents. If you are new to conducting surveys or have surveyed the same people for years, ask them what they like and do not like about participating in your surveys. Add a question or two to ask why they take the surveys and what would improve the questionnaires.

Thank your respondents. At the end of the survey, be courteous and thank your respondents for taking time out of their busy schedule to complete the survey. Also, if the survey is a collect respondent contact information survey, turn on the completion email and thank your respondents for their time in an email as well.

Back when the economy was flourishing and consumer spending was at an all-time high, many businesses were content with customers that were merely satisfied, not truly engaged.  Today, money is much tighter across the board, and these same businesses are realizing the importance of building strong and healthy relationships with existing customers AND employees.  Research shows that an organization's health directly correlates to how well they engage these two groups.

So how do you ensure your business is retaining clients and not losing them to competitors?  Perhaps the most important facet is providing exceptional customer service, and this level of service stems from employees who are passionate about their job role and their company.  They know that employee opinions are valued when management makes decisions. They are loyal, often times reccomending their organization when asked about their job.

Because these employees are guiding the customer experience, it is critical to keep them engaged.  Passionate and dedicated employees make for passionate and dedicated customers who are willing to purchase more and promote your business.  Companies who have such an engaged workforce are constantly collecting and analyzing employee feedback about their day to day experiences on the job.

In addition to collecting feedback from employees, it is extremely important to gain customer insights about their thoughts and experiences.  This information can help you make important business decisions, but can also help you to win back the favor of clients who may have had a recent negative experience.  Keeping a pulse on your client base to ensure high customer retention is simple and easy through the use of survey forms.

The most important thing to remember is that it is not the data alone that will help you to retain your clients and employees.  Being able to synthesize the information and make the appropriate adjustments is the key to improving employee morale and client satisfaction.

We all have that momentary feeling in the pit of our stomachs when we launch a survey form online that there could be a mistake we missed somewhere. It never seems to go away no matter how many campaigns I launch. Fortunately, I found this 12 question survey checklist to help ease that dreaded feeling a little bit.


If you say No to any of these questions, you need to go back and look at the survey created for this project again. once you can answer Yes to all twelve questions, your survey campaign should be in pretty good shape. Still feeling a little uneasy? Here are some more tips for what to look for in Test Mode as one final check.

Measuring customer satisfaction is nothing new, neither is benchmarking that data and tracking improvements. It's typically easy to find dissatisfied customers. When you're looking for customer feedback, dissatisfied customers often come out of the wood work to let you know you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Sometimes understanding why those customers are unhappy can be a challenge.

If you have a well designed survey form with strongly written questions, answering Why suddenly becomes a lot easier. Here's my best suggestion: Read the comments. Comments are often where you're going to find the most customer insights. You'll also be able to see trends emerge as you read through. Training, missing features, poor support, issues with the sales process, they'll all begin to emerge. If you have dissatisfied customers, they usually will let you know how you can fix it and transform them to happy customers.

In the past, I told you that as part of any customer satisfaction survey you should be categorizing customers to better focus your energy and bring in more revenue for your organization. As part of that categorization, consider grouping customers into buckets based on why they're unhappy. From there you can create action items for how to improve the overall satisfaction of your customer base. If it's not clear why a customer is unhappy, reach out to them to find out more. If you want to make things better and understand where you went wrong, chances are your customers are going to be happy to help - so let them.

Just last week I shared how expensive conducting paper surveys can be, particularly if it's a survey project run every quarter for benchmarking or trending analysis. But cost isn't the only benefit online survey questionnaires can have over the old fashion mail questionnaire. Here are a few other things to consider next time you're debating between an instant survey online and it's paper-based equivalent:

• Speed: Creating surveys online offers instant distribution via web links posted on your website and email survey invitations. When you make surveys online, you can see the responses begin rolling in immediately - not trickle in a week or two after you first put them in the mail. Don't discount how much quicker you can analyze survey data either, since response are collected online, there's no manual data entry.

• Efficiency: This benefit goes right along with speed. It's more efficient to design a survey online and collect feedback using the internet. It's also easier to copy, or clone, your surveys for repeat deployment. 

• More Thorough Responses: By utilizing survey technologies like email survey invitations, and survey reminders for both non-respondents and partial respondents, you can collect more thorough responses and improve the accuracy and validity of your survey data.

• Randomization of Answers: We shared our thoughts on the benefits of randomizing answer earlier today. To get caught up, read this post on when you should randomize answers. But in summary, randomizing answers helps decrease certain types of survey bias and makes your survey results more reliable.

• Improved experience: Paper surveys limit you in providing a less than excellent survey respondent experience. Remember, every interaction with a customer impact the overall customer experience - this includes completing surveys! Designing surveys online gives you the ability to use survey question logic such as skip, branch, link logic or other types of  advanced logic that improves the overall experience. Instead of having to write survey questions like, If yes, when was the last time you purchased Agent ABC? Instead, that question only shows when the respondent indicates they have purchased Agent ABC. Couple these types of question logic with pipe logic that makes the survey even more engaging (remember, more relevant and engaging the survey is, the higher he response rate will be).

Unfortunately for the mail survey, they just don't have these types of functionality. Luckily for all online survey builders out there, you can simply select a survey designing software (like the Cvent Web Surveys application), and start improving your survey programs while cutting costs.

Sometimes we forget we can't be everything to everyone all the time. It's just not possible. It wouldn't make sense for a shoe designer to start creating hard hats just because a customer wrote on a comment card in response to a retail survey that she wished the designer also made hard hats because the her husband worked in construction. It seems obvious to most people, going into the hard hat market would be a bad call on the shoe designer's part. So why don't organizations have the same clarity when it comes to their business?

It can be hard to say no to customers, particularly when they have good ideas. But just because an idea is a good one, it doesn't necessarily mean it's right for your business model. Take the example many organizations have to face in their life time: where do they belong? Is it in the high end of the market, the mid-market or the bottom feeders? Most people when you ask them don't want to admit to being a bottom feeder, but there's a market need there that can be very profitable. The organization that can fulfill that need is very rarely, if ever, the same organization that can fill the need at the high end of the market. This just points out, again, that we can't ever be everything to everyone. I remember my marketing classes in college always told us you could only be two of the three things: good, fast or cheap. You can never be all three. Good and fast is expensive; fast and cheap is inferior; good and cheap is slow. It's because we can't be everything to everyone.

So how do you figure out what you should be? Your organization's mission should be a start, but missions can change and transform over time. One place you can start is to ask your employees, survey staff to see what they think the organization is and where they should be going. Employees have stellar ideas, but this may sound like a trick question so make sure to follow these tips for employee opinion surveys.

You should also ask for customer feedback. Your customers will help point you in the direction you should be heading. Sure you'll have the one off cases like with the shoe designer who's customer wants her to create hard hats for construction works, but chances are, no one else will respond that way on her customer questionnaire. And then, at the end of the day, you should be armed with the information you need to support your decision. As you're reading through survey comments, you'll notice that everyone doesn't want you to be everything.

With the emergence of widespread internet usage and powerful online survey software, the web has become the survey method of choice for many project managers and market research professionals.  Utilizing an online web survey design allows for levels of efficiency unheard of in traditional mail questionnaire projects, but it also poses new challenges for business survey researchers.  One of the questions that is asked often is, Is my customer feedback sample and/or survey data skewed because I used an online survey?

The answer could be either no, yes, or maybe, depending upon your specific research issues and target demographics.  The demographic that use the internet (and newer technologies in general) the most are younger people.  Those who are new to online technologies, or those who are not tech-savvy, might be intimidated or confused by a web survey form or an email survey invitation from an unknown sender, which can decrease your rates of nonresponse.  Also, you can run into the issue of coverage error for those who do not have internet access, which is more common among lower-income and less-educated individuals.

But overall, the reliability and validity of online survey results can be on par with or better than other modes, especially if you know your target audience well, including their rates of internet usage.  According to a September 2009 survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 77% of all adults - and 93% of those ages 18-29 - use the internet “at least occasionally.”  Less than half of those aged 65 and older use the internet or send and receive email, however.

So while there are drawbacks to online questionnaire designs of which you should be mindful (as there are with any survey modes, such as interviewer bias, etc.), the efficiency and reduced costs are more than enough rationale for most to employ online data collection techniques, either exclusively or as part of a multi-mode survey design.  Knowing and understanding your target audience is the best way to be sure that your chosen mode will produce quality data.

While this entry is tailored to online survey best practices, these tips can also be applied to other market research methods.


For any survey type whether you're surveying customers, collecting employee feedback or conducting a product market research study, exercise caution and good sense in order to get results that are applicable and trustworthy.

As is the case with any research method, there are advantages and disadvantages to using an online web survey to collect data about customers, employees or the public-at-large.  For example, online surveys offer you the ability to gather vast amounts of data from many respondents at the same time, get your data back in an electronic form, see real-time results and automate analysis/reporting tasks... and you can do all of this affordably.  You can even use a relatively small research survey sample to accurately estimate the opinions of your larger population (for survey research in general).

But in some cases, it is best to use a “mixed-methods” approach to your research project.  This means you combine the online survey method with another kind of investigation, such as interviews or focus groups, in order to produce more well-rounded data and conclusions.  Here are some examples of when a mixed-methods approach is likely better than an online survey form by itself:

We all know the holidays are getting closer, which means office pot lucks are about to become all the rage. What will you be bringing? How is your office going to make sure that not everyone plans to bring the same thing? How do you determine the winner of this year's Tastiest Dish Awards?

Competitions involving food are definitely a favorite around this time of year. However, if you have a big office, it can be a pain to collect everyone's votes. As I mentioned at Halloween, building polls to quickly identify the winner of your office Halloween Costume contest can be applied to the Best Dish Award too. Simply log into your web site voting poll software, make a poll to gather employee opinions on who should win this year's Best Dish Awards. Have different categories, such as best presentation, tastiest appetizer, most unique recipe? Add in images of the dishes to help jog people's memories and create one web poll using your poll maker.

Don't think that an online poll survey software tool can only play it's part at the end of the pot luck event, you can send a pre-event survey to find out who plans to bring what. If too many people are planning to bring dessert, a typical favorite, the online poll generator can easily run a survey report to identify categories with too many volunteers. You can easily create a survey contact group to email those volunteers and ask them if they can bring something else.

Holidays are a time to celebrate with family and friends, and eat delicious food. Unfortunately, we often make such office traditions a little more painful than they need to be by forgetting we can use a polling system or survey software tool we already have. Since Cvent Web Surveys doesn't limit the number of responses you can have, it wouldn't make sense to suffer through paper ballots when it can be done for you! Ready to create a poll for your next staff opinion survey? Get started with a free trial.

What are your other sample employee opinion survey examples?

Every year it seems like the holidays get earlier and earlier. This year I noticed stores had holiday decorations out before Halloween costumes! While I can attest to retail stores being ready for the holiday shopping season, it makes me wonder, are you?

Online web surveys are just one more way you have the ability to engage with your consumer email lists. Customer surveys should be no brainers. But how can an online survey form apply to holiday marketing strategies? Well that depends, are you setting survey objectives that will impact your marketing strategies?

Here's what I mean: I receive countless retail marketing emails everyday. Most of which I opted in to, however, no one ever asks me about my shopping habits or preferences. These companies could easily put together a retail survey using an online survey application and find out more about who I am as a customer, what I prefer, how frequently I shop in their stores or how frequently I visit their website. From the responses they get back, they can then customize their marketing messages based on how I shop with them. If I only shop online, it may make sense to group these customers together and do a special online promotion. All the customers who only shop in the stores would receive a different promotional offer because they shop differently than I do.

This concept goes back to one I've shared previously: profiling customers to better understand your organization. The holidays are closing in quickly, but it's not too late to build an online survey and collect customer feedback instantly.

How have you designed online survey questionnaires in the past to impact your marketing strategies?

Too often companies make the common mistake of surveying customers after it’s too late. Many will use customer satisfaction surveys to gauge how they did last month or last quarter. In truly proactive, customer-focused organizations customer feedback is used on a daily basis to increase revenue and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty when the timing is critical for the customer.

Most customer feedback collected is of immediate importance to them and requires immediate attention. Waiting until a survey closes to attend to customer needs is a recipe for disaster. This could include missing out on hot leads for new business, up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, or worse not reaching out to identify the dissatisfaction from an irate customer.


Your customer is seeing how much you really care about their business. Why should they waste their time taking a web survey form to help you improve, if there is clearly no actions being taken to apply the feedback you’ve received? Why is a customer going to work with a firm that they feel is wasting their time? Now the customer is not only feeling as if you aren’t concerned about their needs and opinions, you’ve pushed them to look at your competitors. The goal is to take this opportunity to show the customer how much you truly care about their needs.

Having a system in place to streamline and automate your produce with real time alerts will allow you to serve you customers in a more timely fashion, keeping them happy and better yet loyal.

I’ve talked extensively in the past about using Facebook for market research. But there are other Web 2.0 sites that you can use effectively as well.

For example, Twitter is growing more and more. You can search on Twitter for keywords or competing products to see how often they are mentioned, and what people are saying. This is a quick and simple method of gathering background info.

There are many sites where people mark things they like or dislike, like digg and del.icio.us. Everything on digg is submitted by users and then ranked by users. After a story has enough “diggs” it is listed on the front page. You can search for your client and see what types of stories are making their way to the site and get an idea of what kind of buzz is surrounding them. Del.icio.us allows users to tag and bookmark their favorite pages, and then allows all users to access rankings. You can find out how many people have bookmarked your client and competitors.

Of course, both these groups are by their nature narrower than most studies require. Results for each page are primarily involving only regular users of the site. You should broaden your search to find other respondents so your data is more accurate.

Web 2.0 sites are great places to find information and do background research. They also tend to be good places to find electronic survey respondents, as users are web savvy and opinionated. But as I mentioned, be sure not to make your respondent range too narrow.

Marketing departments love client testimonials and customer quotes. They're great to share with the sales team when prospects need referrals, they're helpful to put in powerpoint presentations, and can be a critical piece of any marketing website. Getting those sound bites from clients can be a challenge, however. As you can imagine, the challenge only gets bigger if your organization sells consumer products. Admittedly, the growth of social media has made finding people who are saying good things about your product, services or organization has gotten a little bit easier. But, it could be easier still.

Imagine a world where you had a plethora of client sound bites and quotes to share with the outside world. A marketers dream. No more tracking down sales reps to talk to their clients and mangle their words. Everything is already done for you. Well, if you're conducting client satisfaction surveys or consumer surveys, you should be gathering those sound bites already. You can even consider using website polls and website usability surveys to get those sound bites. Depending on the online questionnaire design, you may still need to contact the customer to get permission to use their quote, but the hard part is still done. You have the quote.

Question remains, how do you pull these customer quotes out of your survey web form? You make sure to add an additional comment box. Customers who love you will typically share those sentiments in the additional comments area, particularly if there are not other open ended questions in the survey for them to share why they like an organization.

Still wondering why your marketing department needs sound bites? Opinions for others is one of the driving forces behind purchasing decisions. If you want to learn more about the importance of customer reviews, check out this past post. It's also worth mentioning, this same idea can work for employee surveys and your HR department for recruiting purposes.

The benefits of online and email surveys are numerous. This is not to discount other survey methods but merely to point out the advantages.

1. Cost savings. It is fairly inexpensive to email survey questionnaires, once you have the email addresses of your target audience.

2. Ability to attach pictures or sound files. You can attach or embed necessary files in the online web survey – you cannot show someone a picture over the phone, or send an audio file easily through direct mail.

3. More honest responses. It’s been shown that respondents are more likely to reveal truthful information online than to an in-person interviewer. Think about how much people reveal through personal blogs and web sites, and this makes sense.

4. Limitless possibilities. With certain kinds of survey software, you can control what types of questions survey respondent can access, show additional questions if they answer a certain question in a particular way, and more. This can be done with paper surveys but it’s a bit more cumbersome and requires written directions: If you answered 'No' to the above question, please explain.

5. Fast results. As I discussed yesterday, the results of online surveys are very rapid, which saves researchers time and money.

Technology has come a long way – ten years ago, the majority of surveys were not online, and that has certainly changed. Now market researchers are using this format more often than not for at least one aspect of gathering feedback. Whether you're looking to conduct a product enhancement survey or an internal business survey of employees, web survey forms have their place in your internet research process.

What is a survey design's ideal length? In the past we've told you the typical survey best practice says surveys, whether they're paper or web survey forms, shouldn't be longer than thirty questions. While thirty certainly isn't a huge number, if you tell me you have a thirty question survey you want me to complete, forget it. I'm never going to complete your feedback form. However, if you tell me it's only a 10 question survey, I'm more likely to be on board. That is, unless I start to give you the customer feedback you're looking for and feel like your online questionnaire is longer than 10 questions.

You probably didn't lie to me, at least not if you're read about the dangers of lying about survey length in your email survey messages. It's probably a case of side view mirror syndrome: objects are closer than they appear - or applied to web survey design, questionnaires appear longer than they are.

Not surprising, if your survey form is interesting, the survey respondent is going to perceive it's shorter than it really is. However, the reverse doesn't seem to be true. If your web survey feedback form is boring and on an uninteresting topic, respondents will perceive it's the same length (and too long) whether there are fifteen questions or thirty questions.

It's not just about the actual length of your form when designing a questionnaire online, it's also about the perceived length. Even though your survey is only ten questions long, it may feel a lot longer if your collecting feedback about an uninteresting topic. If your survey questionnaire feels long, you instantly increase your chance of survey respondents abandoning your feedback form.

What is a survey? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word "survey" in this way: "To query (someone) in order to collect data for the analysis of some aspect of a group or area."  These "someones" can also be called your survey sample. Unlike a census, which surveys an entire population, a sample survey gathers information from only a fraction of the individuals within an entire group. Samples are collected in such a way that results from the survey can then be generalized back to the entire population.

Surveys can be conducted in a variety of ways, which can also be termed your survey design. They can be conducted over the phone, through responses written on paper, through in-person interviews, or through online web surveys. Even though the mode in which a survey is conducted can vary, sample members are all asked the same questions in a similar or standard way.

Some survey forms focus on opinions and attitudes (e.g. asking your clients how they feel about a new product line), while others focus on factual questions (household income levels, or age of members). Most online survey design contains a combination of both types of questions. A survey design can also vary in length and time it takes the sample to complete. Some may take only a few minutes of a person's time, while others may take hours or even days to complete. 

Surveys should be carried out only for the purposes of gathering data and information on a certain subject. A quality survey can be determined by looking at the way in which it was conducted, and its purpose.

Get started designing your own survey using one of over 50 graphical templates available, or read more blogs on designing surveys.

There are many options available to market researchers when designing a web survey form. I covered this topic a bit last week when I discussed creating online surveys, and included some dos and don’ts.

Conducting a study for the Web offers several opportunities for market researchers that paper questionnaires do not. For example, you can create an instant survey and check on responses frequently for updates. You may even allow the respondents to view the current results when they complete the survey. This works best for one or two-question quick polls rather than longer studies. But knowing they will see the results immediately is frequently a tipping point for respondents who are on the fence about completing your feedback survey form.

This can be helpful in analyzing survey data as well. For example, suppose results for your online survey form vary wildly throughout one week. One day, 10% of respondents use your client’s brand of glass cleaner. The next day, it’s 65%, but then the following day it drops back down to 20%. This could mean something (possibly that you need to check your recipient list) and is good information to track for your client.

The instant results also allow you to add more questions and gain clarification on points you may not have considered prior to launching the survey form. There are dozens of survey web software tools available that can create instant survey results – it’s a method that is worth trying out, but as always, consider your client’s needs before committing to a particular survey method.

Web 2.0 is a term that is frequently tossed around, but there are still many who may not be entirely clear on the definition. The simplest way to boil it down is that Web 1.0 offered little or no opportunities for feedback, while Web 2.0 includes countless ways to “talk back” on the Web. It can include blogs, forums, social media sites, and interactive informational sites like Wikipedia. The users can control the content to an extent on these types of sites, a difference from the static web sites of Web 1.0.

What does this mean for a market researcher? I’ve already discussed methods to use social media for gathering data and survey respondents, but you can use other Web 2.0 sites in a similar manner. It’s a huge topic that I am sure will be revisited again and again.

Web 2.0 sites are good for research purposes. People who would likely make the ideal survey respondents are using these sites to talk back about products. For example, if you were doing a baking survey, the blog Bakerella.com has hundreds of posts and thousands of comments about various recipes and their merits. It is a good start for conducting internet research about the habits of the true baking enthusiast, and could help you in your online questionnaire design.

Despite the opportunities for feedback Web 2.0 offers, it is important to remember that it does not and should not replace more traditional marketing research methods, like electronic surveys, paper questionnaires and other methods. Although respondents are very forthcoming on blogs like Bakerella.com, for a quality study respondents must be properly vetted to ensure they are the correct group.

Just because you find correlation in your data when analyzing survey results does not mean there is causation. I find this is a common mistake in lots of survey reports when someone is new to survey research or conducting data analysis. Take this example:


Some people see this connection as a causation. Customers are satisfied because you contact them frequently to make sure everything is going well. The problem is, it's not a causation. Causation are extremely hard to prove because you cannot control every factor. For example, you may split your territory by industry and your solution suits some industries better than others. Or clients who are really satisfied simply use the product more often so the customer success managers reach out to them more frequently, because they are more likely to have questions. While those who use the product less have less to be satisfied about and may feel they are wasting those budget dollars.

To be able to prove causation, you need to be able to rule out all other possible explanations for the connection. As you can imagine, that's almost impossible to do since we do not control outside factors influencing the survey respondent or even the greater survey sample. Instead, when situations like these occur, we're seeing a correlation between two things. In my customer survey question examples, there's a correlation between how satisfied customers and how often they are contacted.

This principle does not only apply to customer survey research, it also applies to analyzing employee feedback forms, product surveys, market research and any other type of data collection and analysis.