5 Benefits of Online Employee Surveys to Improve Your Small Business

Not long ago, I learned some startling statistics: The loyalty of employees who work for small businesses has dropped by almost 20% since 2008, and currently stands at a paltry 50%. Although I have never experienced any serious turnover in my own venture, I decided to take preemptive action by...read more

Customer Profitability Requires a Good First Date

The season of Valentine’s brings out the best in some and the worst in others. Many of us find ourselves reminiscing about first dates and whether or not the date led to a meaningful relationship. The same romantic wonderings can be applied to the customer – company relationship. When cast in this...read more

Ozzy Osbourne's Advice for Questionnaire Design

In one of Ozzy Osbourne’s songs he uses the phrase “going forward in reverse.” Little did the singer know that his lyrics would also apply to survey research, specifically to the area of questionnaire design.  One of the key concerns facing researchers today is data quality. It is all too easy for...read more

Adding Questions to the Matrix

On occasion a survey comes my way that illustrates, either with excellence or lack of vision, good online survey design. The illustration below comes from a customer satisfaction survey provided by a regional grocery store to their online community. The table speaks to one dimension of the...read more

20 Most Popular Posts of 2012

While we highlight the most popular posts from a given month in our newsletter, one of my favorite activities is to look back and see what posts were the most popular overall each year. Keeping with tradition, here's a look back across the 20 most popular posts of 2012!   Customer Loyalty Month: 25...read more

Don’t Train Your Employees – Educate Them!

Poor customer service could land you a prime time spot filled with bad reviews on various social media channels for everyone to see. Customers have power, which means they can and will publicize both good and bad experiences, so exceptional customer service is necessary. You probably already know...read more

The Secret to Buying Employee Happiness

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...read more

Employee Engagement to Boost ROI

Many organizations are big fans of publicizing slogans about how their people are their number one priority, yet constantly increasing shareholder value is more often their biggest concern. Luckily for most of the workforce, recent studies have found that actively engaging (and not just satisfying)...read more

National Survey Supports Workplace Levity

The workplace can seem like such a serious place, and sometimes it should be. Research from fall 2011 that was conducted for Accountemps found that nearly 60 percent of chief financial officers thought that having a sense of humor helped an employee fit in with the companies' culture. That's right,...read more

Employee and Customer Satisfaction Correlation

Is customer satisfaction strictly a function of the product or service the consumer purchased? The short answer is no. Is it solely dependent upon the context of the purchase situation? Again, no. From the depth of customer satisfaction research we can glean that customer satisfaction is a...read more
The Rise of the Smart Phone: Are you Leverging Mobile? 10 Tips for Mobile-Friendly Survey Creation