Product Survey

Cvent offers a variety of Pre-Designed Survey Templates you can choose from for your first online web survey. These internet survey templates contain default questions, email, welcome and thank you text which you can utilize when designing a questionnaire. You can also choose from over 50 different graphical templates to suit the look and feel of your survey forms. Here’s a list of the different pre-created survey templates that you can use to build the base of your survey:


Besides this vast list of pre-designed questionnaires and graphical survey templates, Cvent also offers you a Question Library, which is filled with Customer Service, Demographics, Event, HR/Training, Marketing/Sales questions that you can utilize in your survey.

So! Go ahead and Sign up for an online web survey free trial account now and enjoy these á-la-carte features absolutely free.

Completing a study is just the first step in the market research process. A good researcher knows there is plenty of work left to be done analyzing survey data and taking action on survey results.

Stay in touch with the client and schedule presentations of the research. If you have a client contact assigned to the project, go over the preliminary survey data to see what key findings they feel are the most important to share. Create presentations around these key findings. You can also create separate market survey reports for different groups within the same company.

For example, if you have just completed a large product survey that includes feedback on customer satisfaction, the client may want a presentation simply on customer feedback for their customer service team.

A good researcher also has an eye for finding problems. If you notice an area for improvement in the course of your market research analysis, propose a solution to that problem for the client. Take this market research survey example, customers complain about being on hold too long when calling customer service. You could propose several ideas from hiring more staff to setting time goals for staff to talk to customers.

Even though the client may not agree with your solution ideas, ignoring problems you identify through the research is a bad idea. The client is paying you to compile and analyze research data, and they will likely appreciate all your efforts even if the information does not fit in with their current business plan.

When many of us think product market research, we think along the lines of consumer interest or consumer satisfaction studies. But what about a study conducted specifically to find ways to improve a product?

Sometimes a client may want to find ways to improve an existing product or service. It is risky to launch a brand-new product, particularly in today’s economy when businesses are failing more frequently. It is often better to grow a successful product than try and start from scratch.

When you are conducting a study for this purpose, it is important to analyze from several angles. You need to gather current consumers for a consumer satisfaction survey, as well as non-consumers for a survey or focus group. To gather product feedback ask the consumers questions like:


Utilize the survey to gather their opinions on pricing, quality and more. The client can use this information about what they are already doing right as a baseline for improving their product.

The non-consumers are a little tricky. You need to find out why they don’t purchase or use the product. Maybe the price point is just a little too high. Depending on what type of product it is, perhaps the client might be able to offer a similar item at a lower price point to gain more customers.

Perception of non-consumers is just as important as that of consumers. Perhaps the reason they are put off is something the client can easily fix, thus gaining new and loyal customers.

I was asked to complete a product market research survey today. The product survey asked me a series of questions about possible products related to improving my beer drinking experience. One of the many things I didn't like about this survey was they never asked me if I thought there was a problem.

For example, one of the possible products was for a different method of carrying beer. Unfortunately, I'm perfectly happy with my current method: keeping the beer in the package it comes in. The suggested product would make me move the bottles from their packaging to take them somewhere. I'm not interested in that extra step. Did they ask me why I wouldn't by the product? Nope. They only asked if I would.

Maybe for their survey research goals, that's all they cared about: Would I buy the product, Yes or No? Kelli mentioned in a post earlier today that it's important to gather product feedback on a smaller scale before launching a bigger market research study. The goal of this market research questionnaire easily could have been to identify which product ideas should be considered for further qualitative and quantitative research. Only products where more than 20% of survey respondents indicated they would be interested in purchasing will have more research around it.

On the other hand, I like to make sure my position is clear when completing attitude surveys. This is probably a respondent bias I bring to the table because I spend so much time sharing online survey best practices. I know that often survey questions are written in a way that doesn't always collect the data the survey creator wants. They just don't always write the right questions. So avoid being "mis-quoted" so to speak, I like to be able to answer a series of question about why I feel one way or another.

Believe me, there were a lot of poorly written survey questions in the feedback form, as well as other issues with their data collection method. I've found that where there is one serious problem with a survey template, there are others hidden as well. If you're worried your survey questionnaire may have problems, go ahead and ask our online survey Professional Services Group to take a look. We're always happy to help.

Looking for sample market research survey questions? Here are a few sample product survey questions you can use in your next product research survey:

Market research is incredibly useful at any stage of the game. Though starting out small may seem like an unnecessary step, sometimes it works out better for you and your client. A thorough study is necessary for any new product or service launch. When dealing with a NEW concept, you may want to conduct a smaller initial study to gauge interest level before continuing.

When conducting the smaller study, set criteria for continuation of the study. Criteria for every client and every study will be different, but the goal of setting parameters should always be the same. Decide what percentage of respondents must be interested in order for you to further develop the concept before continuing the study.

For example, if you gathering product feedback for a major cleaning product company about a brand-new product, you might want 60% of product market research survey respondents to express an interest in order to develop the study further. A full product market research study is extremely time-consuming - the entire project will likely include multiple online product surveys, focus groups and other data-gathering methods.

Market research projects like this have a lot of moving parts - your team will have to write survey questions, compile results and create presentations based on their market research analysis of the data. If it turns out that only 20% of respondents are interested in the new product, it may be better to return to the development phase before continuing with the study.

Even though it might be tempting to forge ahead, particularly in lean economic times, your clients will appreciate you more if you save them time, effort and money by starting out small.

The social media storm has hit and continues to rain down a variety of opportunities for market researchers. Everyone’s getting on Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, and the like.

What does this mean for market researchers? Social media sites can provide another avenue to explore for focus group participants or survey respondents. In fact, they make it easy for you.

Think about a typical Facebook user page, for example. Most users generally input their age, location, high school and college graduation dates, and some basic personal information. Some are even more elaborate, putting their job title, functions and a veritable fact sheet on their life and interests. Essentially, a Facebook user page is a sort of consumer profile.

The Facebook ad system allows you to target particular groups. For instance, if you were doing market research for a running shoe, you could target those who list running as an interest in their profile, in a certain area or age group – there are many possibilities. Invite them to join the group and gather new product feedback through your ad.

Once you have your members, you can view their basic information to see who fits your target profiles. You can also utilize the discussion pages or Facebook “wall” to gather general, qualitative remarks about the product type. While Facebook is a good place to start building a target group, naturally you must work closely with your client about what you can reveal online, and exercise caution in what you reveal to the group.

Check back tomorrow, when I will discuss additional ways you can utilize the Facebook group to send out surveys and gather information.

A year ago, the Cvent Web Surveys Blog posted it's first post. Over the past year, we've shared many survey best practices with you that can be applied to online surveys and paper questionnaires alike. Here's a list of some of our most popular posts:

• Tips For Providing Survey Incentives: We get asked all the time about incentives and their place in survey research. There are arguements for and against offering survey incentives. This post isn't about those sides. Instead, it focuses on tips for offering survey incentives if that's the path you choose to go down.

• Offering An Additional Comment Section Is An Online Survey Must: Simply asking for customer or employee feedback implies you're ready to make changes, you want to identify problems and fix them. If you fail to offer a "last ditch effort" with and additional comments (optional) question type, 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.

• Survey Question Flow Impacts Survey Findings: Question order is an important part of good survey design. Whether it's a paper survey on customer satisfaction or an online questionnaire to gather employee feedback, how you order your survey questions could impact your survey findings.

• Survey Report Tips: Writing the Executive Summary or Setting the Stage: When writing a survey report, you can't just launch into the survey responses and the data collection results. You need to provide the report reader with some general background information about the survey project including why you ran the survey, what the goals were, what the data collection methods were. Then you can summarize the results and make recommendations.

• Five Steps to Begin Interpreting Online Survey Results: The hardest part of any survey project is creating the questionnaire. If you design a good survey and plan the analysis, interpreting the data should be a walk in the park. Make sure to review these five easy steps for analyzing survey data.

• Analyze Open-Ended Questions Faster with a Quick Trick: We all know using closed questions are easier to analyze. But sometimes they just don't cut it. This post gives you a quick six step process for how to analyze survey data quickly to summarize survey responses without spending days on the survey analysis.

• Difference Between Causation vs. Correlation in Survey Data: To be able to prove causation, you need to be able to rule out all other possible explanations for the connection. This post aims to debunk the myth that correlations found in survey data means that one thing caused the other.

• What To Look For When You Move Your Online Survey To Test Mode: It's definitely an online survey best practice to move your web survey to test mode before sending it out to your survey sample. Make sure to use this 7 step checklist to avoid any online survey pitfalls.

• Market Research Process: 6 Steps to Project Success: When working on survey research projects - be it a customer satisfaction survey or product development survey or a staff performance review form - you should always follow this six step process to make sure you get the maximum return on investment from your survey project.

• Online Survey Question Pitfalls—And How to Avoid Them: This post points out common online survey pitfalls that are in surveys all the time. However, identifying problems with your work performance assessment or customer feedback questions is only half the battle.

Many product market researchers ask survey questions about consumer behavior.  Often, this includes conducting consumer product surveys that asking how much customers are willing to pay for particular goods and services.  Gathering information about purchasing decisions can help you determine price points, but it is important to remember that how you design your survey questions will affect the validity of the results.  Consider the following tips before finalizing your survey questions about customer willingness and pricing options.

Be concrete.  Use as many specifics as possible about the products and services you ask about, especially if you’re interested in brand or item comparisons.  The more general a question is, the more a customer’s mind can drift or think of categories and items you may not have anticipated.  If you need to define a concept or product, do so.

Use a time frame for reference.  When determining how often someone buys or uses a certain product or service, provide a time frame for them to reference (e.g., How many times do you eat out during an average week?). 

For questions that include possible prices as response options, ask survey respondents whether they would pay a single specific amount (yes or no) rather than asking questions with different amounts as responses.  If they are offered a staggered price list, consumers naturally tend to choose lesser amounts than they might actually be willing to pay in the real world.  In your consumer survey ask some respondents if they will pay price x and others if they will pay price y, and then compare the results of the two groups. 

This Friday we are will be celebrating our blogs' first birthday. I can hardly believe it's been almost a year of sharing our Web Survey Best Practices with you. Each day this week we will be counting down our top favorite posts. You might have already guessed, today's theme is employee surveys.

• HR Survey Tips: Weed Out Unqualified Job Candidates: In this post, we talked about how pre employment assessments can be a big time saver for HR. It can be a real struggle for hiring managers to identify the best candidates. It's no secret that asking pre-interview questions or providing job applicants with a pre-interview questionnaire can save you from having to speak with people who are not a fit from the start.

• Employee Surveys Can Help Cut Costs: This post highlights how staff opinion surveys can help you identify areas to cut costs. You may find that the best cost cutting ideas come from the trenches and not senior management. All you need to do is ask.

• Employee Satisfaction Surveys Boost Productivity: This post is about employee morale and satisfaction surveys. Research has shown that motivated and satisfied employees tend to contribute more in terms of organizational productivity and maintaining a commitment to customer satisfaction. So how do you make sure your employees are, and remain, motivated and satisfied?

• When other companies come calling, will your employees remain loyal? This post talks about how you may have high employee retention rates now, but that doesn't mean you have satisfied employees. When the economy picks up again, organizations will begin to grow their workforce and skilled professionals will be in high demand. If your business fails to take care of their employees now, they may not keep those employees once hiring starts again.

• Employee Surveys Can Improve Customer Experience: This is my favorite post on the list, probably because my precondition to focus on the importance of creating a positive customer experience. One of the best ways to measure client satisfaction and experiences is to measure employee loyalty using employee satisfaction surveys.

Did you know, Spanish is the third most used language on the internet? According to Internet World stats, English has the most penetration, followed by Chinese then Spanish. Makes sense considering the three most spoken languages are Chinese, English and Spanish. Depending on what source you're looking at, Spanish and English tend to swap places, but that should tell you something.

What does that mean to you if you're designing a consumer survey for product users? Depends on your product, target market and intended survey sample. In most cases, consumer products serve the masses. If you want to conduct a consumer satisfaction survey, you're going to need a representative sample. Considering the number of Spanish speakers there are in America, I hope you're considering a multilingual survey. Traditionally, Hispanics have a much lower survey response rate than other ethnicities. If you ask them to complete a survey in their native language, your chances for a representative survey sample goes up.

So now the challenge is finding a multilingual survey software provider. Not all survey platforms support multilingual surveys, and the ones that do are not created equal. If you're looking for a survey tool that gives you the flexibility to conduct surveys in different languages, make sure to ask whether they support the language you're looking for with all the features you need. Want to learn more about our survey tool and how we can help you conduct multilingual surveys? Sign up for one of our product demos.

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.

In the past, I've shared survey best practice tips for writing survey introductions - like the fact you should have one. But just like writing unbiased survey feedback questions can be tricky, so can writing survey questionnaire intros.

Survey intros aren't just standard, they're necessary. Why? Because if you don't tell a survey respondent what they will be answering questions about, you may find you have a lot of unqualified respondents in your survey sample. Does it make sense to have lawyers filling out a health care survey? Probably not. If you include some sort of introduction to the survey, either in the survey invitation or the welcome page, those lawyers will know the web based survey is not targeting them. Since they'll avoid your survey, you'll lower abandonment rates and the data collected will be more accurate.

What's the catch? Well, sometimes you can provide too much information in the introduction that will result in biasing your survey sample. Believe me, no survey creator wants that to happen. They spent a lot of time on questionnaire design and question writing, they don't want to bias their data. However, if you give too much information, it's the same as writing leading survey questions. You can also think of it as ruining the end of a book for a friend, or accidentally telling someone that the guy dies at the end of the movie. You don't want to ruin the end of the story any more than you want to share too much in the introduction.

It doesn't matter if you're conducting product feedback or consumer satisfaction surveys, this even applies to restaurant questionnaires and course evaluations, your survey should include a brief explanation of the project's purpose. Are you asking survey questions that measure customer experiences to improve employee training? Does your bank customer satisfaction survey aim to identify new services customers feel are missing? What about your professional development questionnaire, are you gauging the effectiveness of the training programs?

Always remember to keep your survey introduction short, no one wants to read a novel. But more importantly, you don't want to give away the cow. If you give away the cow, you may find your survey findings are less reliable than you'd like because you provided too much insight and basically led survey respondents down a specific way of thinking.

In April, we added a Cvent Web Surveys software feature to allow survey creators to import responses from outside sources. Last month, we added a new feature that will save you a lot of time creating client questionnaire, or product feedback surveys or employee 360 feedback forms. Whether your data collection methods are telephone surveys or paper questionnaires, importing question as a batch instead of manually entering them began saving users time before getting to the meaty task of analyzing survey data.

Whether you're migrating to our survey software system from another online survey tool or making the jump from paper questionnaires and paper survey design software to online surveys, being able to import your questions in a batch rather than creating survey questions one at a time is a huge time saver. You certainly don't need me to tell you cutting a few minutes here and there leaves you more time to do other tasks.

Using various survey question types in your survey is important, we've mentioned it as a survey best practice before, and you can import all 19 different question types using a single spreadsheet.

When you begin creating your next survey, you'll see an additional button at the top of the design survey questions section. If you click Import Questions, a 5 step survey creation wizard will walk you through the steps of importing your questions, including mapping the fields in your spreadsheet to the fields in Cvent.


After completing the wizard, all your questions will be added to the end of your online survey questionnaire. If you're just creating a simple survey, you're done. If it's a more complex online survey questionnaire, you can go through and apply any survey question logic and page breaks to improve the survey respondent experience.

Have a question about how to improve your next online survey using our new features? Contact our client services team via email at customercare@cvent.com or by phone at 866-318-4357.

We know Cvent Web Surveys software allows you to automate survey invitations, reminder invitations to non-respondents and reminders to partial survey respondents, but what about other types of emails you can automate with our email survey software tool? Most survey companies' feedback management software have a lot of features, but not all of them have robust email marketing capabilities. It makes me wonder what pain customers feel when they need to send survey emails.

Thankfully, our clients don't need to feel any of that pain, and they don't have to waste extra time trying to create workarounds or moving data between systems. Cvent has the rules for sending emails already set up for you - all you need to do is turn them on and make any necessary edits.

One email type I think often gets ignored is the automated completion survey emails. Depending on how you're conducting a survey, how you want to use this email will be different.

Take these survey examples:

1. You're offering a free eBook after completing the survey. Consider utilizing the completion email instead of providing the link on the Thank You page or redirecting survey respondents.

2. You're gathering product feedback and want to give respondents a promotion code to use on their next purchase. It seems unreasonable to ask respondents to write down a promotion code you post on the Thank You page. It's often more convenience to have the code in your inbox to reference when you're ready to purchase. Besides, isn't the point of offering a promotion code as an incentive to drive more revenue?

3. You've created a customer feedback survey and want to share results with respondents. You can create a parked report and automatically send them the link to check the survey results when they want.

You know your survey methods and practices better than I do, but hopefully you see how you can utilize automated Thank You emails to survey respondents besides just a simple Thank You - not that simple thank you's are a bad idea.

Tonight, Cvent's technology team will be spending some extra time in our office to bring you new features!

So we can upgrade our online software offerings, Cvent will be unavailable starting tonight (Friday, August 21) at 9 PM US ET and should be back up by 3 AM US ET Saturday, August 22nd. As a result of this scheduled downtime, all clients will be able to access our exciting new features. Did I mention our new features are ideas and product feedback clients share with us?

With the upgrade to Cvent Web Surveys software, clients will gain access to some exciting new features including:

• Addition of Google Analytics tracking
• New email navigation to make it easier to customize survey invitations
• Question importing allowing you to import multiple questions
• Advanced logic can be applied to survey question answers to only show specific answers

I recently made a few online purchases from a major retailer and was told my order would arrive within 7-10 business days. It has been over a month, and I have yet to see my deliveries! Last night, I received a customer satisfaction survey in my inbox asking me to “rate and review” the products I purchased. Since the products have not been delivered, and I have never even seen them in person, how am I supposed to complete their retail survey?

We all understand online surveys can be an effective tool for gauging customer satisfaction. However, when the survey design for the entire process is not done well, it can create problems survey respondents. By sending me the email survey last night, the online retailer only reminded me I had not received my order.

So, how do make sure your organization avoids these miss cues?

First and foremost, it is imperative you create a process for organizing your survey projects. Find a survey method that will be quick and easy to implement (we recommend selecting an enterprise online survey tool).

Make sure employees understands the process. Even departments not directly involved should at least be aware of the process. For example, if the department in charge of customer surveys had coordinated with the order fulfillment department, maybe I would not have gotten any product surveys before I received my order.

If you plan to use an email survey tool to send retail surveys, ask if the survey software company can integrate with your CRM systems. This will make coordinating between your CRM system and the online survey system a lot easier.

We're gearing up for to bring our clients new features across our product lines - including Cvent's Web Survey software. I'm pretty excited about many of the new survey features and enhancements not just because they're pretty cool and allow you to improve the quality and respondent experience of your online surveys, but because they come from customer feedback and product enhancement requests! Our teams spend lots of time talking to clients and gathering product feedback. When we're able to take customer feedback and translate it to a better product and better user experiences, it's very exciting!

Over the next several weeks, I'll be sharing more information about how you can use these new features to get the most out of our survey tool and your survey questionnaire projects. But here's a sneak peek of the new features coming next week:

To be able to bring you these and other new features, Cvent will be unavailable starting next Friday, August 21st at 9 PM US ET and should be back up by 3 AM US ET Saturday, August 22nd.

No matter what kind of survey questionnaire you're working on, whether it's an employee satisfaction survey, product market research, a customer service questionnaire, a job performance review template or a customer satisfaction survey, having some basic knowledge of statistics and related terms is helpful.

If you're using survey analysis tools, chances are all the statistical calculations will be done for you, you only need to select the survey analysis methods. It's still important to know what the terms mean that are describing the data. Here's a quick "crash course" in basic statistics and what the terms mean:

Mean: Typically "mean" is used as a synonym for "average." While this is not exactly accurate, it's good enough for a high level understanding. To get the population mean, or the expected value of a random variable, take the sum of the results and divide it by the number of results.

Median: Separates the top half from the bottom half of the sample. The median is the exact middle number of your responses. To figure out the median, you order the finite list of responses from the lowest value to the highest value and select the middle value. If there is not a unique middle value, take the mean on either side of where the median would be (ie. in the list a < b < c < d the median would be the mean of b and c). The reason you would use the median over the mean is if there are outliers in the population that don't matter. Outliers will skew your mean in the direction of the outlier. However, using the median prevents the average from being skewed.

Mode: The mode is the response or variable in a data set that occurs most frequently (i.e. in the list a, a, b, a, b, c, c, d the mode would be a because it occurs the most). While the mean and median might be very similar for a data set, the mode may be very different depending on the data set's distribution.

Variance: Describes how spread out the distribution of a data set is.

Standard Deviation: Describes the probability of the data set's distribution. A low standard deviation means the the data points tend to be close to, or the same as, the mean. A high standard deviation indicates the data is spread out.

It's pretty frustrating when it comes time begin your survey results analysis using either the survey reports built into your online survey software, excel or another survey analysis tool and you find your survey has a high partial response rate. You spent a lot of time writing survey questions then building the survey in your survey tool. You thought about your survey methodology (including your survey analysis methods) and determined sample sizes using a sample size calculator, because you wanted to ensure you had a representative sample. However, survey best practices tell you that you should not use partial responses in your survey analysis. It seems unfair after all your time working on the survey project that you should have to throw out partial responses and fall short of your estimated sample size.

This is one of the reasons you need to test your survey to a small segment of your email list prior to fully launching your survey. A small test would allow you to catch this problem early. I typically see survey abandonment stem from an online questionnaire being too long, the topic of the questions are too personal or the respondent knows little about the topic.

You know how frustrating it is for you to see a high abandonment rate? It's equally frustrating to an online survey respondent to begin to completing a customer survey, website market research or web usability survey and find out it's long. Particularly because most survey invitations promise a short survey.

Solution? Ask survey respondents the most important questions on the first page (keep it to just a few, I would try to stay under five. Think about a comment card at a restaurant, would your questions fit on a comment card?) Then ask if they have time to give additional feedback. I've seen this method used on a number of customer satisfaction marketing surveys, but the same customer satisfaction survey methodology could be applied to employee questionnaires, product feedback forms and website surveys as well. Each question in your survey should have a purpose and contribute towards meeting your survey project's goal, but some may rank higher on your "need to know" scale. Offering respondents an out will not eliminate survey abandonment but it should reduce it without forcing you to throw out that respondent.

I just created a survey to gauge Cvent employee interest in playing in a local softball league this fall. It got me thinking after yesterday's post where I suggested using online surveys to collect employee feedback for product enhancements. Perhaps it's not obvious how human resource departments or any other department can use online questionnaires to survey employees.

One of our sales team members has been trying to organize a company sponsored softball team for years. This year, it looks like it might finally happen - if there's enough people who want to play. But how do you easily find out in a company with over 475 employees who wants to play, when they're available and what positions they can play? It could be a lot of emails to manage and spreadsheets to keep track of responses. Or you could build an online survey in ten minutes and email the survey to employees. Much less work to manage data collection via an electronic survey than responses via email. If you want to know every time an employee completes your survey or online poll, you can set up triggered email alerts within the survey software to receive all the survey responses or just the ones that meet certain criteria. In this case, I might want to set up a triggered alert when an employee says they want to play.

My survey example is only one use of web surveys for collecting feedback from employees. You can do a quick employee poll to get suggestions for happy hour events or even lunch orders. Not every survey project needs a lot of planning. When you need to quickly poll employees on a topic, surveys will do the job there as well.

How else have you used surveys to gather employee feedback quickly other than formal job satisfaction or employee performance appraisals?