Internet Survey

Respond To Survey Feedback Quickly With Triggered Survey Email Alerts

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Survey email alerts, also commonly referred to as triggered email alerts, are a must-have feature for online survey software. Why? So you can respond to customer or employee feedback from HR questionnaires to product evaluation to customer service surveys. Yesterday, I wrote a post on tips for listening to feedback. Timeliness in closing the feedback loop should be a priority for organizations looking to improve how they respond and implement changes in reaction to comments.

A common form for feedback collection is web based surveys. So it should be no surprise when I say you need to have email alerts triggered to quickly respond to customer questionnaire or employee survey responses. Not every survey needs triggered alerts and you don't always need them for every respondent, so Cvent's Web Survey tool gives you three options for survey email alerts:

1. Alerts at the question level. If a client responds to a customer satisfaction survey saying they are very dissatisfied with your product or states they are unlikely to renew their contract, it may be appropriate to set a task for their account manager to follow up. Follow up as soon as possible. I find the sooner you can follow up with someone, show them that you're listening and want to resolve any issues, the easier it will be to win them back. The longer a customer has to think about a problem and stew about the pain it's caused, the bigger deal it's going to be later - possibly a deal breaker.

2. Alerts based on survey score. Many people use online surveys as a lead generation tool, for many of those users scoring leads to help the sales team prioritize follow up is important. In cases like this, you may decide you want to receive an email alert when someone scores over a specified number on the survey to ensure the team is following up with the hottest leads. The same idea could be used for educational surveys where you may want to know when a professor receives below a certain score on teacher evaluations completed by students.

3. Alerts for a completed survey response. There will be cases where you want to know when someone completes your survey and how they responded. Be careful with this, when you have a large survey sample, you don't want to be receiving emails every minute to let you know someone completed the survey.

With Cvent, surveyors have the opportunity to send the survey alert to five people and include a custom message in the alert. If you're using survey question level alerts, you can have different alerts be sent to different people as well. Meaning, if you want your customer care team to know when someone gives good feedback on a call they had, but the sales team to know when someone is unlikely to renew, you can set the alerts up that way.

Sign up for a product demonstration to learn more about Cvent Web Survey software features.

Are You A Good Listener? 4 Tips To Better Listen To Customer Feedback

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Are you an good listener? Hearing and understanding what's being said in a conversation isn't rocket science, most people can do it. However, not everyone can hear a complaint or feedback and understand how it applies to their organization or how to implement a solution. However, before those two steps, you have to be willing to accept maybe the customer feedback is right - and what you've previously believed is wrong. Here's an example of what I mean:

There are a lot of people who complain about big companies' customer support queue because you have to enter in all your information, get routed though their system, wait on hold for hours (yes, I've waited on hold for hours) only to finally get to someone and have to repeat all the information. I know a lot of people complain, because when I've mentioned it to the customer service rep, she acknowledges she hears that a lot. Then when you search online, other people are voicing the same concern. So who's right? Since it's an on going issue, I would speculate it's a case where the big company thinks it knows better than consumers.

Over at Esteban Kolsky's A Passion For Customer Service blog, he gave his three secrets for effective listening:

1. There are two sides to the conversation. Esteban points out that not everyone provides feedback because they want to be listened to or be answered. Sometimes submitting a complaint just makes you feel better and releases some of the frustration you have with an organization's customer service. He suggests that you still listen to this feedback, but don't prioritize it above those customers who call for a specific action or change.

2. Focus on what's being said, not how. The channel someone chooses to give customer feedback shouldn't matter. Hopefully, you're trying to gather employee, client and customer service feedback through various channels - web surveys, Twitter, blogs, other social media, customer service calls, etc. Accept the methods customers and clients choose to provide feedback. To improve you need to be where they are and not always expect them to come to you.

3. Respond and act on feedback. We've talked about this topic before on this blog. Asking and accepting feedback sets expectations that you're going to follow up. It is tough. Like I said in the beginning, you need to be humble enough to admit you could do it better and the customer may know how you could do it better. Esteban points out that customer engagement increases dramatically when organizations "close the loop" and implement changes based on feedback.

I think it's important to question the feedback as well. I don't mean this in the sense that you should question the credibility of the source or decide the person isn't qualified to provide feedback. But you should ask why they feel this way. While they may be complaining about something small, it may be a much bigger issue. In this case, acting on their request just at face value wont be solving the problem at all.

What To Look For When You Move Your Online Survey To Test Mode

Friday, June 26, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Yes, you must move your online survey into test mode before launching it. Okay - this isn't a mandatory system requirement if you use the Cvent Web Surveys software application. However, always moving your online questionnaire to test mode before launching, or publishing, it for data collection. I always suggest triple and quadrupedal checking the questionnaire yourself then having coworkers or outside people look over it. When you're looking over your online survey in test mode, here are a few things to check:

Spell Check - Check for grammar and spelling errors. It seems obviously, but you might be amazed the things that slip threw.

Questionnaire Flow - Are your questions ordered in a way that makes sense? Read more about question flow in this post.

Question Wording - Are your questions unbiased? Do you have any double barreled or leading questions in your survey? Make sure you don't use any terms that may not be understood by your respondents. In other words, avoid jargon.

Consistent Scales - Double check that all your scales are consistent particularly among related questions. Keeping a consistent scale makes it easier for respondents to answer questions. For example, if you always order questions 1-5 with 1 being the worst and 5 being the greatest, don't suddenly reverse the scale and make it a 7 point scale.

Required Questions - Do you require too many questions? Keep in mind some of these disadvantages of requiring questions. Are the questions that determine skip and branch paths required? If you're using any type of logic in your survey, you need to require the questions that are needed for the logic to work correctly.

Skip Patterns - Are these working correctly? Make sure if someone says "No" they are not in college they do not see the survey question "Where do you go to college?"

Did you miss anything? This is a good time to think through your survey goals and ensure you didn't omit a question that you'll need when completing your survey analysis. This is certainly one of the places where having others look over the online questionnaire is really helpful.

After you make sure your survey is as close to perfect as you're going to get, and you've checked off the above items, go ahead and launch your survey and begin collecting responses. You will want to consider piloting your survey to a small sample of your actual invite list. It's recommended you don't send it to anymore than 10% of the complete list. If the responses make sense to you and are close to what you expected, go ahead and invite the other 90% of your survey sample to complete the survey.

Tips For Reminder Survey Invitations

Friday, June 26, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Send Email Invitation Reminders For Online Surveys

Boosting survey response rates is a major concern for a lot of surveyors. With the help of online survey tools, increasing response rates is easier than with paper survey methods. Why? Because it's easier to know who responded to an online email invitation than a mailer, so you know who to send a second (or third) invite reminder to; and it's cheaper than mailing additional surveys. I'm sure everyone agrees that online surveys are cheaper than paper surveys, so let's not spend too much time dwelling on the cost. While I cannot speak for all web survey software applications, Cvent automatically will remove respondents from your reminder email. There is no need to match up your invitation list to your respondent list. In Cvent Web Surveys, this is even true for anonymous surveys. This is very important; nothing annoys me more than when I get a second, third or fourth survey invitation for an online questionnaire I completed after the first email. I want to stress here that the respondent remains anonymous to the surveying organization, even though the Cvent survey management software knows who began the survey.

The number one tip I have for sending multiple email survey invitations is to not send the same email each time. While I've mentioned in the past that different people may open each reminder, and that's part of the reason why reminder emails are important, some of those people are going to be the same. If the email didn't work the first time, why do you think it will work the second. Resist the urge here to include language that rushes or pressures the email recipient. You don't want to make the respondent feel as if they're being coerced into completing their survey, they will not provide honest feedback.

Second tip of the day for reminder emails is the subject line. If you split tested the subject line in the original invite, which one worked better? Why do you think it worked better? Take what you learned from the first invite and apply it to the second. Some people argue not to include "Reminder" anywhere in the subject line for reminders, but I think that's a call that's up to you.

Last reminder for this post is your emails should have some consistency. Don't go over board making them look and read different from the first email. Keep the same email template, from name and from email address. You want them to remember you've asked them before and your graphical layout will help jog their memory.

Don't Forget To Introduce Your Online Survey

Friday, June 26, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

When you're creating an online survey and working on the questionnaire design, don't forget to include an introduction to your survey. This applies to all survey types: product surveys, customer feedback forms, employee questionnaires, customer service surveys, quantitative market research studies, etc.

The purpose is just that, to introduce your survey. An introduction should include some basic parts:

1. Who? Quickly tell the respondent who you are. While they will probably figure it out based on your graphical template, it doesn't hurt to tell them a little bit about what you do.

2. What? Give a brief explanation of what topics you'll be asking about. You don't have to give away everything here, a very high level explanation will do. Here's an example:

This survey aims to better understand how people in your community use community parks.

3. Why? Explain how the respondent will ultimately benefit from the survey and how you plan to use the results. To continue with the example from above:

The information gathered in this survey will help us determine what improvements are made to our local parks.

Depending on the survey method you chose, the introduction may go on the welcome page of your survey or in your email marketing invitation. If you're using email, read these other tips for survey invitations.

Can You Use Twitter As A Customer Feedback Tool?

Friday, June 26, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Although the Twitter talk has slowed down some, there's still a lot of buzz around how organizations should use Twitter as a resource for customer service, customer feedback, lead generation, etc.

How are you using Twitter?

I think Twitter is a great way to collect customer feedback. I'm still unsure about using Twitter for customer service, because if you do it wrong - it could really hurt your organization's reputation. Make sure you evaluate whether or not it even makes sense for your product. But the most important thing organizations need to understand when it comes to social media is that the conversation is going on - whether you're a part of it or not. It doesn't matter if you have customer survey software and conduct customer questionnaires online or off. The internet has made sharing information with peers so easy, of course it's going to happen and you need to monitor it. Ignoring potential feedback because it's not within your chosen method (ex. surveys online or feedback forms within your restaurant or store) would be silly. With that in mind, don't ever try to control the conversation, customers will not appreciate it and will likely kick you out of the conversation.

So how do you manage feedback and not let it spiral out of control? (See this post about Motrin Moms or #AmazonFail on Twitter for examples.) That's a great question, and I'm not sure anyone has a one size fits all solution. Social media doesn't have a one size fits all solution, each organization needs to figure out their own strategy. For how you deal with feedback, it's the same. You need to set your own rules for what requires action and what does not. My recommendation is if your share of the conversation is small it may be beneficial to take part in as much of the conversation as possible. This means when someone says something both good and bad about your organization. But do not over react to bad feedback. If you get bad feedback, maybe there's a process you need to look at and fix or it's just that someone doesn't like you. If you get bad feedback that you think is unfair, try to follow up in a non-defensive way to understand the problem so you can fix it. Chances are if you solve the problem, you'll receive praise for it, not more hate. Social Media users tend to share the good feedback as well as the bad, which flips the belief that significantly more bad news is shared than good. There's still an imbalance, but it's getting leveler.

My point: Twitter, and other social media platforms, are a great source for customer feedback for customer service feedback to product feedback to any other type of feedback. These resources should be included in your tool box.

Online Survey Tip: Import Known Data To Improve Respondent Experience

Thursday, June 25, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Did you know you could import survey answers into Cvent? It's true. It's as simple as importing a list of contacts. The tough part, in my opinion, is understanding why you would use it. Here are two basic scenarios I think of when thinking of importing answers to an online survey:

Scenario 1: I conducted some type of business survey offline or out of the web survey software and need to load the answers into the survey for analysis or future needs.

Scenario 2: I have information about my respondents prior to their responses. For example, I'm conducting an employee feedback survey surrounding staff opinions. It's important to me to know which department the employee works in so I can ask appropriate questions, route them down the correct question path using branch logic with my survey questions and analyze responses based on department. However, I already know which department they're in - I don't need to ask. In addition to slightly shortening my questionnaire, I ensure the respondents cannot lie on this question and skew my survey findings.

While Scenario 1 has value if you're using an offline survey method or multiple methods for data collection, Scenario 2 packs more of a punch. If you're using Cvent for your online survey project, here's one way to go about achieving Scenario 2. First, create an online survey just as you normally would. Include all your skip, branch and pipe logic during your survey question creation. Second, hide the question about which department an employee works in. Third, import survey responds into your employee survey.

Developing and designing a survey can definitely be a challenge. That's why we offer web survey services through Cvent's Professional Services Group. We can help you identify cases such as this scenario through a survey review and consultation, that can personalize the respondent experience while improving the quality of your survey results. Learn more about what online survey services our team can offer for your next online survey project.

Improve Product Surveys Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Thursday, June 25, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

I was looking through a customer survey template the other day and the first question was "Which of these products do you use?" The options were Product A, Product B, Product X and Product Y. Umm, hello? The point of a customer questionnaire is that you're surveying customers, which means you should already know what product survey respondents bought. Now if you're a B2C organization that distributes products through retail stores, this statement might be a little unfair since a consumer can go into any Target and purchase your product. But for now, let's assume you don't have this channel for product distribution.

Why are you making your business survey longer instead of shorter? You already know the answer, put this information in the contact record. Since you have the data, I would even recommend including the question, hiding it and importing the answers to this question for respondents before sending out any email marketing soliciting survey responses. This way, you can utilized online survey tool features like Pipe Logic. Using Pipe Logic allows you to personalize the respondent experience and keep them more engaged. More engaged respondents are less likely to abandon your survey, aka increase your response rates.

What other common questions could you eliminate during customer research studies because you already have the data somewhere in your organization?

How Do You Gather Product Enhancement Requests?

Thursday, June 25, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Like customer service feedback, product surveys that target enhancement requests and ideas are critical for organizations - B2B, B2C and B2G alike. So my question is how do you gather product enhancement requests? I have a couple ideas, and I hope you'll share yours as well. Traditional ways may include enhancement request forms your customer care team completes if a customer makes a suggestion during a help session or front-line employees giving feedback to the developers during a meeting. But perhaps conducting a product evaluation survey among product users might be a good place to start. It's difficult to ask people who are not customers to provide feedback on your offering - let alone provide enhancement requests. It's also a pretty safe bet that some of your customers, if not a lot of them, have some great ideas for how you can improve your offering.

If you do go with some type of customer survey, the question maybe be how do you do it and how often. I would argue the survey could be ongoing if you have customer survey software for conducting online surveys. Customer services reps could add a link to the survey in their signature. Any time a customer has an idea or feedback, they know exactly where they can go to give it. If you're a software as a service (SAAS) organization, a link can be placed somewhere behind the log in screen.

There are various ways you can solicit feedback about your offering - the important part is you do it. Your customers are the ones using your product or service. They have the greatest chance of knowing what they need and how you could satisfy a need or pain they have. I tend to think an organization's job is to solve pain - each organization may target a different pain to alleviate, but they all solve some type of pain.

However your organization decides to gather product enhancement ideas is great, but the most important part is that you ask for customers feedback and you act it. How else do you plan to continually improve your offering to stay competitive in the market place?

I would love to hear how you gather product enhancement ideas.

Survey Tip: Don't Just Clone Your Online Survey And Go - Improve It

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

To copy or not to copy? One of the great features of Cvent's web survey software is the clone or copy survey feature. By copying a past survey you can save time, in not only question creation, but also in the actual graphical survey design. If you've never created an online survey - regardless of the survey application - you may not understand what a time saver this can be. Selecting the right color scheme, loading the correct images, making sure everything lines up the way you want in the web survey template can all eat up a chunk of time, and before you know it it's lunch time - or worse, the day is over and all you've done is design the graphical layout of your survey! So having a clone web survey option is - in my book - a must have. We've said before, when it comes to surveys, respondents judge a book by it's cover. And I think they should. In this wonderful world of technology, there's no excuse for having an ugly looking survey, particularly when you could be reinforcing your brand. Furthermore, ugly surveys do not make for a very good survey respondent experience.

However, I want to warn against simply copying a survey and emailing questionnaire invitations out to an email list. Why would you do that? Perhaps, you argue, you want to run the same product survey in a different state, region, country, etc. or you want to be able to bench mark against last year's customer service feedback or job satisfaction survey. These are fair points but is there other information you realized you needed to improve your product? Was your customer questionnaire perfect? Could you improve your staff opinion survey? Of course you can! Nothing is ever perfect, and when it comes to surveying improving the quality and reliability of your survey data, you should be striving to get the strongest data possible. You're probably planning to use the data you collect to make business decisions, and with that in mind, why would you ever argue for simply copying an existing survey without evaluating the questions you asked last time and if the questionnaire could be improved?

Smartphone Users Willing To Switch To iPhone, Survey says

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

An online survey conducted by market researcher Crowd Science between May 19th and June 8 found 40% of smartphone users, who don't currently use have an iPhone, said they would switch to Apple with their next purchase. This is in stark contrast to the 14% of survey respondents not using Blackberry devices who said they wanted to switch to Blackberry.

With RIM recently tooting that 80% of recent customers are consumer or small business users, Blackberry might have a tough time beating out Apple. Blackberry has had such a hold on the enterprise market, there are few people who don't have a Blackberry who wants one. On the flip side, Apple's iPhone is getting new customers from the consumer and business side - particularly with the release of the iPhone 3GS. Blackberry also has to battle the customer retention and loyalty Apple has built, 80% of survey respondents who own an iPhone said they would buy an Apple handset again.

Average Time Line For Online Survey Projects

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

How long does an online survey project take? While it really depends on the project, Diane Hagglund at the Dimensional Research Blog says the typical web survey project takes three weeks. Here's a time line guide:

Week 1: Get project approval, set goals, identify participants, utilize an online survey tool to create the online survey. Basically, week one is the bulk of the market research process.

Week 2: Collect survey responses. This includes sending out your survey invitation with your email survey tool.

Week 3: Close the survey and complete your data analysis. You should have determined what analysis you wanted to do already (in week one) so it should just be execution. Depending on the project, you'll probably need to write some kind of survey report to share the findings with other key stakeholders.

Depending on the purpose of the survey, you may need to add another week or two if you want to create collateral to support marketing and sales efforts.

Diane also gives a rough time line for qualitative market research. If you're interested in reading her blog post, head on over to the Dimensional Research Blog.

Learn From Other People's Surveying Mistakes

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

If surveying is part of your job (HR surveys, marketing surveys, customer feedback surveys, etc.), one of the best things you can do before you creating a survey - especially if you've never done a survey project before - is to learn from others. I always take surveys when I'm asked. I'll admit my draw to taking them is because I'm curious about what they're going to ask, but I also want to see what things they're doing right and what things I should avoid.

Looking at other people's surveys are a great way to get ideas for good survey questions. If you're focus is on customer satisfaction or customer service feedback, it should be easy to put your hands on other organizations' business surveys. After all, we're all someone's customer. This is the same with marketing or product surveys. Every once in awhile, you should fall into someone's sample. However, if you're trying to get sample survey questions for an employee evaluation feedback form, staff opinion survey or other HR survey, the internet might be your best friend.

While it's easy to get question ideas from questionnaires in the same category as the one you're working on, don't discount what you can learn from surveys in other categories. Best practices cross over categories and someone creating a customer service survey can learn a lot from an education survey.

If you're interested in learning more about survey best practices, sign up for Cvent's free webinar.

Offering An Additional Comment Section Is An Online Survey Must

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Have additional comments, concerns, ways for us to improve? Let us know!

Seems super simple to add this example survey question to any type of online survey - right? Yet, it's a frequently forgotten question. I'll admit even I forget the need for this type of question. I'm usually focused on keeping my questionnaire as short as possible by limiting my survey questions to only essential ones.

However, when I'm filling out a survey, I typically look forward to those comment boxes so I can provide additional customer feedback. Particularly when I'm filling out a feedback form measuring customer satisfaction. For example, I was watching a TV episode on abc.com and was having trouble with their media player (I always have trouble with their media player, and they are constantly changing it!) When I finished watching and closed the browser, I received an invitation to complete a customer satisfaction questionnaire. I was expecting one of the customer satisfaction survey questions to be an "Additional Comments" box, since none of the questions centered around my viewing satisfaction. No such luck. I was seriously disappointed. I wanted to give my feedback so hopefully, next time the viewing would be better.

Most people agree to fill out your survey because they believe there's something in it for them. You don't have to offer an incentive to make people think there's something in it for them. Simply asking for customer or employee feedback implies that you're ready to make changes, that you want to identify problems and fix them.

If you fail to offer a "last ditch effort" with and additional comments (optional) question, you could be making a huge mistake. Depending on your survey design, it may be the only place a survey respondent can give you truly honest, unprompted feedback. While you can craft technically perfect questions, they still limit what you can find out from questionnaire respondents. The additional comments section may bring to light something that wasn't even on your radar: new product enhancement requests, process changes that ultimately could boost employee and customer retention, customer service issues, website design flaws, etc.

Including an additional comments section is even more important with online surveys, because with telephone or paper surveys the respondent has the chance to at least tell the interviewer or write in extra answers. It's always possible the extra comments may be discarded, but the respondent can still try to give additional feedback. There's no extra chance with a web based survey. Adding this one extra question wont destroy your response rate or cause your survey to be bad. In fact since it's such a common question type, I would guess if the respondent doesn't have additional comments, they hardly even notice the question.

Increase The Quality Of Your Contact Database With Cvent Web Surveys

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

As a member of the marketing team, who spends a good part of her day working with our database, I'm really glad Cvent Web Survey software offers a self-cleansing feature. If it didn't automatically update contact records when someone changed his or her information when completing an online survey or event registration form, I'm not sure I'd have time to do anything other than constantly update contact records. Whether you're an email marketing person, a direct mail person or a pick up the phone and call person, you should be able to appreciate the importance of data quality in your database. Without it, your contact database becomes outdated pretty quick.

Everytime a contact fills out a survey and changes their contact information, it's automatically changed in your Cvent Web Survey contact database. If you don't have another database or CRM tool outside of Cvent, then you're all set. However, if you do have another database, like your CRM system for example, you're probably going to want to sync these two sources so your CRM system is updated with the most recent information. As a Cvent user you have three options, you can run a report of all updated records in a specified date range (you set the date range) or you can use an API to automatically have the data be transferred. Finally, Cvent integrated with Salesforce.com with our last release. This gives all Salesforce users the ability to sync their Cvent account with their Salesforce account. If you need help getting that set up, I suggest talking to your relationship manger. They would be more than happy to get you going!

Create Engaging Online Surveys By Utilizing Your Graphics Library

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Last week, I talked about our out-of-the-box response library. As you know, we also have a question library, with various question types to help get your next online survey project off on the right foot. Just as I mentioned last week, having question and response libraries can save you a lot of time when creating your survey because you don't have to constantly retype, or possibly refind, past questions to use them again.

More importantly though, Cvent offers surveyors more libraries than just the out-of-the-box question and response library - for example, the option of creating your own question library. In fact, there are several other notable libraries.

Cvent Web Surveys Example of the Graphics Library

One that I think is critical is the graphics library. Unlike with other online survey tools, we allow you to store your graphics in your account and create your own folder architecture to keep them organized. It's a pretty simple process to upload pictures into your graphics library. But what's even better than that, how easy it is to move pictures between folders if you decide to change your organization - simply drag and drop!

The best thing is, if your organization also uses Cvent to manage your events, the graphics can be shared between our products since it's all built on the same platform.

81% Of Surveyors Share Results - Who Do You Share Survey Results With?

Friday, June 19, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

The most important part of any research project is sharing the findings, it doesn't matter whether it's a research report, qualitative research or survey questionnaires. Even in high school and college, a lot of research projects ended with some kind of presentation so each person or group could share what they learned from the assignment. While I don't want to reduce the importance of doing business surveys and market research, the idea is very much the same. If you don't share the results, why did you conduct the research?

At the end of all our webinars and events, we conduct post event surveys. I know this comes a surprise considering we're an online event management and web surveys software provider. Recently, looking at the results of our attendee feedback survey for our Web Survey Best Practices Webinar, I found some interesting results surrounding who survey results are shared with in an organization.

Which of the following groups does your organization
share survey results with? (Please select all that apply)

Over 1,800 attendees have completed our follow up survey since the beginning of the year, but only 130 (approximately 7%) do not share survey results with any of those groups. I'm going to go back later and do a cross tab survey report to see if that 7% currently does surveys. But that's a later post...

For now, I'd like to explore the options a surveyor has to share their research findings with various groups. The answer obviously depends on the online survey software tool you're using. Cvent users have a few options at their disposal:

• Manually pull a report each time someone asks to see the data
• Share your log in so individuals can pull the reports themselves
• Park reports so approved individuals can access the reports when they need them

There are other options, but these are the "best" three. Among them, there's a clear leader. Parking reports is the easiest, fastest and most secure way to share your online survey data. In the past, we've given you an idea of the power of parked reports. But in light of our survey finding, I thought it was appropriate to remind you how easy sharing real time survey reports can be. Did I forget to mention that parking reports does not just give a snap shot of the moment in time you set up the report? Each time someone accesses the report, it generates the most up to date information. This means if I launched my survey, created a parked report and emailed the weblink to my senior management yesterday, when they go to see the results today not only will they see the results from before I created the parked report, they will also see all results that have come in since then. I'm happy and management is happy, and I never had to log back in to pull a report.

How do you currently share your survey data and with whom?

Survey Question Flow Impacts Survey Findings

Thursday, June 18, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Question order is an important part of questionnaire design. Whether it's a paper feedback form on customer satisfaction or an online survey to gather employee feedback, how you order your questions could impact your survey findings. When you create surveys, dont simply list the questions in the order they pop into your head. The ideal survey has a natural flow and the question order makes sense.

Thankfully, most web based survey management software gives surveyors the freedom to rearrange survey questions to achieve the best question order. Unlike when you're creating a survey in an office suite - like Microsoft or Open Office - where the survey creator needs to copy, paste and delete to rearrange questions, online survey tools allows you to move questions with a click of a button.

If you're new at creating questionnaires, here is a commonly used, and accepted, method for ordering questions:

Qualifying questions
Open ended questions
General/Overview questions
Specific questions
Demographic questions
Additional comments question

It's important to start off general and move towards more specific questions. Otherwise, when someone is answering a general question, after answering specific questions, their honest general feelings are likely to get skewed either towards their feelings about the last set of questions or overall. I like to think of this scenario:

Mary is completing an online customer satisfaction survey for her cellphone provider. The questionnaire begins with specific questions about her service and experiences. While Mary is satisfied overall with her wireless company, the survey pointed out some pain points. The last question asked Mary to qualify how satisfied she was overall with their service, because Mary was reminded of past issues ranked them lower than she would have if they'd asked a general question in the beginning.

For me this scenario really brings home the importance of question order. When you sit down to design your next online survey project spend some time thinking about the flow of your survey. I think you'll find it's a lot easier to order survey questions logically than it may seem reading about how to do it. However, if you still find it difficult to create a survey with logical question flow, Cvent offers online survey services through our Professional Services Group that can help you with survey question design.

Save Time With Response Libraries When You Create Surveys

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

When it comes to survey creation and design, creating questions with meaningful responses can be quite a challenge. After all, the validity of your data has a lot to do with the questionnaire itself. That's why it can be a big help to have a library of common responses in your survey tool!

Cvent Web Survey Software users automatically get access to our question and response libraries. Recently, Sarah, over at our Meetings & Events blog, was working on a client survey. She thought the response library was a huge time saver. It also ensured she was using the same responses (where appropriate, of course) for multiple questions. Having consistency throughout your survey makes it easier for respondents to complete your feedback form.

When creating a question, utilizing the response library is a simple, few click process. Survey admins have the ability to select the type of response they're looking for and then select the correct response under the category.

Cvent Online Survey Tool Has 8 Response Default Categories

Sample Survey Question for Demographic Information

This is the perfect example of a survey question where a response library can save you a lot of time. Without the response library, I would have spent a good chunk of time entering in each state. Fortunately, Cvent's online survey application did all the work for me!

Cvent users also have the opportunity to create their own library of questions they use frequently. Chances are you have other responsibilities besides building surveys so as an online survey tool, we strive to cut down on the time you spend creating a questionnaire so you can spend more of your day on other tasks.

Want to learn more about how our web based survey software can save you time on your next survey project? Sign up for one of our online webinars.

Employee Surveys Can Improve Customer Experience

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

I was reading through Bruce Temkin's 6 Laws of Customer Experience (CxP) yesterday, and I was struck by how well a survey program fits in with his CxP laws. I talk about implementing online survey programs to gather customer feedback all the time, to the point that I sometimes feel like a broken record. Often though, employees are overlooked as an essential part of the customer experience especially if they aren't front-line employees. For that reason, my favorite two laws are numbers four and five:

• Unengaged employees don't create engaged customers
• Employees do what is measured, incentivised and celebrated

Obviously, conducting client surveys to find their satisfaction levels is important for customer analysis, product enhancements, customer service feedback, etc., but checking in with employee's satisfaction is equally important. Here are a few of the highlights from Bruce:

• Great customer experience is not sustainable unless employees buy in to organizational goals
• Wowing customers is nearly impossible if you have low employee morale
• Employees are less likely to do something if it's hard - make it easy to do the "right" thing
• Employee relationships are just as important as customer relationships
• Measure employee engagement, this is a great time to use a net promoter (NPS) question to ask employees how likely they are to recommend your organization as a place to work

Various types of employee feedback and HR surveys can include questions to evaluate how your organization is doing when it comes to fostering the correct environment for providing amazing customer experiences. A quick online survey can show management if they're doing a good job communicating organizational goals, motivating employees, boosting morale by celebrating their successes, etc.

Employees are an organization's biggest asset; but if employees aren't motivated, don't understand or are just expected to churn through tasks, they could also be your biggest liability when trying to boost customer retention. A good first step to checking in on your customer experience is to check in with your employees through some type of employee satisfaction survey.

If your organization doesn't currently conduct employee surveys or conducts paper based surveys, I'd recommend signing up for one of our online product demos or a free trial of the Cvent Web Survey software.

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