Satisfaction Survey

USAA Survey says Shoppers Plan to Use Cash this Holiday Season USAA, the insurance and financial company who we've reported tops customer satisfaction surveys time and time again says shoppers are planning to use more cash and less credit this holiday season. Their insurance survey report shows 85% of shoppers plan to use cash and 62% plan to use more cash this year than last year.

They also found that 56% of consumers have been saving cash throughout the year to spend during the holidays. This jives with other survey research that Americans are, in general, saving more and spending less. Perhaps more important to USAA's financial services business, though, is their data which shows that 74% of those who plan to use a credit card for their holiday purchases plan to pay off the balance immediately. 

On a broader note, a retail survey commissioned by the National Retail Foundation reports overall holiday sales will be down about 1% and that two-thirds of families have adjusted their holiday plans due to the economy.

Online retailers continue to be the bright spot, however, with sales expected to increase about 8%, according to Forrester Research. 

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.

Market researchers write survey questions for different audiences all the time. Sometimes the groups are broad, like consumers or non-consumers, and sometimes they are far narrower, like employees at a small advertising agency. When writing surveys for any audience, be sure and use the clearest and most sensible language to communicate with that audience.

For instance, if you were hired by the small advertising company to complete a 360 performance survey, you should use the correct title structure for supervisors and employees at the company. You don’t want to refer to managers, if at the agency supervisors are referred to as account executives. It would be confusing and yield improper results for your employee questionnaire.

Similarly, if you were performing a bank customer satisfaction survey, you wouldn’t want to ask survey respondents who only have standard checking accounts about their habits with their savings accounts.

In addition to doing the research necessary to communicate with your audience, you must also use clear language. There’s nothing worse than trying to respond to a survey questionnaire that is poorly written, with confusing grammar or overly long sentences.

Writing as clearly and directly as possibly will give you the answers you need. Have multiple people proofread your survey if possible. Everyone processes information differently and a variety of people may find different errors or points of confusion. Having others read the survey is beneficial, because as the survey creator it is hard not to be biased. You need to make sure it is clear to the respondents and as the survey creator, it is hard not to be biased.

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.

Does your customer survey have "survivor bias"? I'm betting it does. Why? Because when most survey designers create business questionnaires or client satisfaction surveys we only collect feedback from individuals who are still customers. What about lost business? Why aren't those customers who left asked to complete your client feedback form? You better believe they have feedback.

In her post at the Dimensional Research blog, Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Avoid "Survivor Bias", Diane Hagglund defines "Survivor Bias" as drawing conclusions only from data that is available or convenient and thus systematically biasing your results. AKA biasing your survey sample by only asking "happy" customers. They may not be over the moon about your product, but they're at least happy enough with your offering if they're still paying you.

I agree with Diane on this one, it's pretty ridiculous to allow this bias to creep into your customer market research. It's easily avoided considering you should have all the customer data you need to send them the same client survey template. Make sure you're measuring client satisfaction among customers who left you for a competitor as well as those who simply decided not to renew the service (and didn't go with anyone else).

When you begin writing customer survey questions to create client questionnaires or update your annual template for a client satisfaction survey make sure you think about your former customers. If you don't know who they are, this is a good time to find out. Thank goodness for internet research software and customer insight solutions to make the act of surveying clients a little easier.

I probably don't need to explain why creating employee surveys should be part of every HR department, but coming up with the correct employee evaluation template or employee job satisfaction survey questions isn't as as obvious as know you should do them. I recently came across a few sample workplace survey questions I thought may help when you start writing employee questionnaires:

One thing you should notice in the example employee satisfaction questions are they are different survey question types. A general online survey best practice to remember when crafting employee survey questions is to vary the question type. It helps keep the respondent engaged and lowers survey abandonment rate.

Here at Cvent, we get asked for survey templates all the time. That's why we've created a bank of survey questions and pre-created questionnaires for all clients to utilize within their account. But it never seems to be enough. Sample employee motivation surveys, employee evaluation survey examples, sample employee questionnaire, employee satisfaction survey templates, the list goes on, and on, and on...

While this post may not give you all the answers or the complete employee survey template you're looking for, it definitely is a start. Below are some sample survey questions for employee questionnaires.


While not all of these questions are necessary (or appropriate) in any given employee engagement survey or job satisfaction questionnaire, you should see how some of them will fit into your next employee satisfaction survey template.

I got an email today from Smarter Travel announcing the winners of their 2009 Readers' Choice Awards. Notice anything interesting?

Some of you may have read my post a couple weeks ago about thinking ahead to reporting before you design your survey in an online poll generator. Well, I recently received a phone call from a client who works in the health care industry, and this particular call convinced me to write another post on the same subject, but with a slightly different spin on things this time.

The client who called me, we can call her Melanie, had set her online survey up perfectly considering the reports she wanted to run. She called because she wasn’t sure exactly how to filter for the appropriate data in each report. Melanie had conducted a client satisfaction survey. She wanted to run a survey report to pull contact information for all of survey respondents who had answered they were either dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied with their customer experience. However, she only wanted to pull those respondents who had also indicated they were willing to be contacted regarding their survey responses.

Because Melanie had asked for the above information in two separate survey questions and she had also made these questions required, it was easy to walk her through the steps to generate the desired report. I instructed Melanie to run the Answer Details for All Respondents report, checking off the survey questions she wanted to see in the report and also the contact fields she wanted to view for each survey respondent. I then had her set up two advanced filters for the criteria she wanted to use to filter the report. I told her that she should apply the filters on all of the above criteria.

Since Melanie considered reporting before she sent out her survey invitations, she did not have any trouble pulling the report she wanted in the end. Always remember you can filter your final reports by contact information and survey questions, so make sure to follow Melanie’s survey reporting example and make these fields and/or questions required in your survey if you plan to filter by them in your reports.

There are several things to remember when creating an employee survey. Obviously, you must ensure no one outside the company can view or take the survey. This is simple enough to do by setting the survey settings in the employee survey software to only those on a targeted list. This will guarantee that your data is not compromised by pranksters, former employees or anyone outside the company.

You must also guarantee anonymity for your employees. This is generally a standard practice but cannot be emphasized enough when you create employee questionnaires. Employees are going to be more skittish than the average survey respondent because they may be concerned about repercussions if they admit dissatisfaction in the survey. So, you cannot express anonymity enough.

When creating a workplace employee survey, include both quantitative and qualitative questions. Provide an open-ended comment space for them to write down any concerns they felt were not covered in the survey. This is a great opportunity for employers to find out things that bother or impress employees. Employers should also share all survey results with employees once the online questionnaire is closed. It could negatively impact employee morale if the results are perceived to be kept secret. Also consider creating action items immediately, if they make sense for the company. For example, if employees express a desire for more training opportunities, look into them and offer a few on-site training classes if feasible.

You should think about employee workplace surveys as employee morale surveys.

Most survey poll creators will agree that while respondents always prefer to have choices explained clearly in words and phrases, numbers are much easier and far more effective when drawing inferences from the data collected. Take this typical sample customer service satisfaction survey question:


The client satisfaction survey sample question above from a measuring customer service sample survey looks much better by listing the choices as "Very Satisfied/Dissatisfied" as opposed to asking respondents to check one of the numbers between 1-5.


However, when the survey data collection is complete and it's time for data analysis and running survey reports, many survey administrators are left scratching their heads. What analysis do they draw from the individual number and percentage of respondents listed as "Neither Satisfied nor Dissatisfied", how to they compare these percentages to last year’s survey on a category by category basis and still draw an overall inference? How do they know the percentage increase in the level of satisfaction? Is it better to have a large number of people fall into the neutral category?

The answer to all these questions is the same – Export Values. The ultimate tool for anyone looking to analyze the data they have collected. Using Export Values the survey builder can assign a number (or a different word or phrase if you like) to answers as well as questions in their survey! In other words, instead of going through the never-ending text of questions and answers trying to find some semblance of meaning in the data, the questions in your report could be listed as CS1, CS2, CS3, etc. and the answers as 1,2,3,4 and 5 for each question. After exporting the Expanded Answer Details for All Respondents (the survey report with Export Values) to Excel, you can even use these numbers to calculate a mean or average – how much easier would it be for the decision makers in your organization to see the response to the above question summarized into a single number:


A case in point is our survey clients who go a step further and used this feature to export just such a report to Excel and then analyze it using SPSS and other survey research analysis software. For those of you who are already drooling over the prospect of generating such accurate feedback for your organization, export values are pre-included in your Cvent Web Surveys Professional or Enterprise account. Go on, generate that perfect report – you can thank me later.

Customer care and client service novices (and professionals) often wonder: What is the best survey formula to ensure customers have the ability to share their satisfaction, concerns, evaluations, etc. of their company?

My customer service suggestion: Whenever your customer care employees speak to a new client, make sure they make that client aware that your company does quarterly (bi-annual, annual, etc.) customer satisfaction surveys, as well as surveys pertaining to satisfaction of other aspects of your company, events, product enhancements, new marketing initiatives, etc.  Let them know that data is benchmarked and used for important decisions pertaining to customer initiatives. Validate that the customer information is being assessed and acted upon.

Do you want higher response rates? Do you want data that is useful from your customers? Set the stage early with your customer service team, and your customers WILL REMEMBER to give you feedback!

Don't be frustrated with survey data after the fact. Deal with client expectations up front so your customers give you data time and time again.

A recent article in Meetings & Conventions Magazine caught my attention this month: Survey Science, How to Craft more Effective Attendee Evaluations. Meeting planners are usually not survey experts, their expertise lay in planning and executing events, not crafting flawless survey research questionnaires. However, in the last year the value of meetings and events have been called into question after bad press surrounding some organizations' meeting practices. With meeting and event planners having to increasingly prove the values of meetings and measuring meeting results, being able to create event surveys to gather attendee feedback has become even more important.

While we've discussed several of these survey best practices in the past in reference to sample staff survey questions or customer feedback forms it never hurts to review them again. Here are the first five online survey tips from the article:

1. Set survey goals first. This shouldn't be a big surprise. On Friday I wrote about how to create a customer survey, and setting customer satisfaction survey objectives was the first step there too. If you don't figure out what your objectives are in the beginning, writing meaningful survey questions will be a lot harder later on. For example, if the survey objective is to figure out how to improve the event next year, only ask questions about things you can change for future events. It doesn't make sense to evaluate the location if you've already booked the same venue for next year; if you haven't booked next year's location, asking about the venue makes sense.

2. Write survey questions that are clear and ask what you really want to ask. Articulating a question to really collect the feedback you're looking for can be quite a challenge. Take these sample conference survey questions, if the planner wants to identify which sessions would be best to add to next year's lineup (assuming attendees must pay to attend the sessions):

If you've been paying attention to survey best practices, you'll know the third one is the wording you want. Why? Because it's the only one that explains the attendees will have to pay for the sessions. It's not a matter of which sessions sound interesting, it's a matter of which sessions present enough value to be worth the cost.

3. Find out why they're dissatisfied. It's not enough to know that an attendee was dissatisfied with the registration process. Planners should provide attendees with the chance to explain why they are dissatisfied - maybe it was a technical problem or there wasn't enough event staff to mitigate issues.

4. Keep it short. General survey best practices suggest keeping your online survey as short as possible. The best methods for making sure you're keeping it short is to only ask questions that have a direct link to your seminar survey objectives. The second method is to make sure you're using survey question logic, such as branch and skip logic. This allows you to keep the survey relevant to the respondent and only ask questions that make sense. We hinted at this in a recent post where we talked about using one survey to gather event feedback for all the sessions at your event.

5. Think about the survey's organization. When designing questionnaires it's important to keep the flow of the survey in mind. Start with general questions and work your way to the more specific questions. The survey should only focus on one topic at a time. In the example of multiple event sessions, it doesn't make sense to mix up the session questions. Instead, ask all the questions you have about one session, then move on to the next session.

In the next few days, I'll share the other 10 survey tips from the Meetings & Conventions article. As a meeting or event planner, how have you found pre- and post-event surveys helpful in planning events?

Many people ask the question How do I create a customer survey? The basic steps are the same no matter what type of client survey you're writing: customer satisfaction, global market research, product development surveys, etc.

Step 1: Sit down and figure out what the goal of the survey is. Are you trying to identify upsell opportunities? Want to discover features missing from your current product? Figuring out if it's a good idea to take your marketing overseas and attack a global market? In the very beginning of the survey planning process, you should know what it is you want to get out of the consumer survey. If you don't have a firm customer satisfaction survey objectives in the beginning, while you go through the other steps such as writing survey questions or selecting the best survey software, you're going to stray from the path. If you stray from the path, you may find the final survey results are not as helpful as you had hoped.

Step 2: Decide on a research methodology. Your goals should help you on this step as well. You need to first decide if you're planning to do qualitative or quantitative research. From there narrow the scope further, if you want to do qualitative research are you interested in focus groups, advisory boards, one-on-one interviews? With quantitative research you may decide on comment cards, feedback forms and surveys. Is your survey method going to be online, telephone-based or paper questionnaires?

Step 3: Survey Design. I'm making the assumption since you're reading a survey blog about how to create customer surveys, you're not interested in the other market research methods right now so I'm going to focus on the process of building customer surveys. Once you've gotten through the first two steps, you're ready to start writing survey questions (Finally! I bet you thought this would be the first step!). Customer satisfaction survey design can be the biggest challenge. Luckily, there is survey designing software to help you step through this. Survey software tools often have templates and question libraries to help you write good survey questions.

Step 4: Data collection. Okay, you've picked your customer survey methodology, created a client survey and you're ready to field your survey (or use the data collection tool in your survey application to collect responses). Exactly what you do in this step will depend on what type of survey you decided to collected: telephone, paper, online. One way to get survey responses is to use email marketing tools to send personalized email surveys. You can also share the link on your website, social media sites, invoices, etc.

Step 5: Analyze customer feedback. Analyzing survey data is one of people's least favorite parts of the surveying process. We have some tips for how to analyze survey data here. Don't be afraid of this step. You need to conduct the survey customer analysis to achieve your goal. It's what you set out to do, so keep your chin up. You're only a step away from the final product (and once you choose survey analysis methods you should be almost finished).

Step 6: Share the survey findings. This is what you set out to do. Get answers to your customer questions. Take the customer feedback analysis you completed in the last step and format it. You're creating a survey report you can share within your organization (and maybe with others outside of your organization). If you need tips for creating survey reports or an example survey report, you can read more about them here.

Step 6.1: Take action. This is still part of step 6, but it's important enough it should be broken out. In your customer analysis survey report, you should have shared your recommendations for moving forward. Make sure you make recommendations and there is an agreement about moving forward based on the customer survey findings. If you don't plan to take action in Step 1, then you should save yourself the time of conducting the customer research in the first place.

Any other survey research design tips? How have you used these steps to create a customer survey that improved processes in your organization?

I was recently asked to complete a restaurant customer satisfaction survey. Only two questions into the restaurant questionnaire I was asked the following restaurant survey sample question:


None of these answers fit my situation. I simply just don't eat out that often. So to me, none of these answers fit. I suppose technically, after thinking about it for awhile, I could have answered that I think it's too expensive or the value isn't good enough. However, because of the question before this one, to me this restaurant customer satisfaction survey question is asking why don't I eat there over other restaurants more frequently. So in reading the options, I'm thinking the survey builder want to know why I don't visit their restaurant over other restaurants more frequently.

Morale of the story? Survey respondents will not always read your restaurant, market research, employee or retail survey the way you planned. Everyone makes different associations and is influenced by question flow or answer choices. Make sure that if you're going to give a long list of options, you include all the possible answer choices. This question could have been improved simply by not requiring it.

In the past, if one of your customers had a bad customer experience with your product or service, it certainly wasn’t good for you business but in most cases the potential impact was limited to an extremely small audience. Today, the reality is much different thanks to Web 2.0 applications including Yelp, Facebook and of course, Twitter. These websites, and others like them, expand the reach of a single customer’s opinion, effectively giving them an oversize soapbox to espouse their opinion on your product, service or employees. If these cries are ignored, or more cries of the same creep up, you have a problem. The customer complaints will gather momentum and begin to spiral, that is if you're not doing anything about it. Monitoring and measuring customer experiences and satisfaction ratings is definitely one step business can take so they don't have an explosion of bad buzz.

In order to protect themselves against these unilateral attacks, businesses need a robust partner to help them improve customer relationships. Cvent’s web based survey software and enterprise feedback management solution can be one of these invaluable protectors. Cvent’s real-time email alerts leverage the effectiveness of conducting surveys. Take the following sample customer satisfaction survey question, “How satisfied are you with our latest product upgrade?” you can have an email sent to your Director of Client Services whenever somebody responds that they are unhappy or dissatisfied.

By proactively reaching out to clients, you are able to simultaneously improve relationships with customers and protect the value of your corporate brand. Even better than simply helping everybody breathe easier, these types of customer satisfaction initiatives can fatten the organization's "wallet," as research indicates increasing customer loyalty and customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 75%!

Survey writers from various industries conduct surveys using the Cvent Web Surveys software tool. One of the most common industries is customer service, where the survey creator is trying to make sure their customers are happy with their products and services. Customer service surveys are used to ensure the quality standards of customers satisfaction.

When the Cvent clients conduct a customer satisfaction survey, they wait for the survey responses to be completed before running reports to see how respondents feel about their offerings. What about the respondents who were dissatisfied with the product or service and want to be contacted immediately?

Email alerts are one of the most useful features that survey designers can use to identify and then take action, where appropriate, when respondents say they are unsatisfied with the service or product. Email alerts provide the option for the person creating the survey to set alerts on questions, this can be a question where the survey respondents are asked about their satisfaction level with the organization's offering.

Take this example customer satisfaction question: "How satisfied are you with the quality of the product?” If emails alerts were set up, an email will go out to the specified people letting them know a customer selected the survey question option of “Dissatisfied."

When someone answers the question and says “Dissatisfied” an email will be sent to the people who were added to the email alert. In some cases, it may be the same person who created the survey, in others, it may be the sales person who owns the territory the respondent is located in or even the customer service manager. The employee or group of employees can quickly get in touch with the customer to inquire more about their experience. Why do organizations want to do this? Because closing the feedback loop can make the respondent feel valued and in some cases move them to the satisfied customer column.

The email alert function doesn't only work on the question level, you can also use email alerts on the survey level and receive an email anytime someone completes the online web questionnaire, or you can set email alerts based on respondent scores. If you're using scoring in your survey questionnaire, you can set alerts to be sent if a respondent falls above or below the specified score. While we used the example of customer satisfaction questionnaires to explain the value of email alerts, they can also be used with employment performance review forms or market survey questions or other types of web survey research.

Earlier this year, I was talking to a potential Cvent customer that was sending out a customer satisfaction survey. For people taking his survey, he offered a promotional gift upon completion.  He said that his response rates were miserable and he couldn't understand why. I looked over his survey, found a few small issues with the content, but nothing too alarming. I then looked at his invitation email. It was full of words like “FREE” and “GIFT”, all in capital letters. There were also dollar signs in the title. This email was begging to be caught in a junk filter.

I took his email, reworded it with words like “complimentary” and “no cost” and got rid of those dollar signs. I then ran it though Cvent’s Spam-O-Meter just to make sure our message was clean of junk words. This prospect then ran his survey again.  He finally got the response rates he was looking for.


This message in this blog… Make sure you run your email survey invitations, reminder emails, and partially completed emails through Cvent’s Spam-O-Meter. You’ve worked too hard and too long putting the perfect survey together for it not to get to your target audience.

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.

Did you know there are 6 steps in the market research process?  While this process speaks directly to marketing research professionals, the process applies to HR, customer or education surveys as well:

1. Identify and define the problem.  Before you start any web survey project, you should identify the key issues you hope to be able to solve.  This step should also include clearly defined objectives.
    
2. Develop the approach. In this step, you need to establish a budget, understand influencing factors such as the environment or economy, decide on sampling and survey methods, and formulating hypotheses.
    
3. Research design. Designing a survey or questionnaire is considered the most important step in any survey process.  Question design takes a lot of thought and time.  We like to say, "If you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out."  This means that if the questions are bad, the data will be bad as well.  During the survey research design, keep in mind sampling methods and data analysis factors you intend to use.
    
4. Collect the data. Don't forget to test your survey before to ensure you're fielding the correct data.  Thankfully, with the help of an online survey tool, this step is relatively painless.
    
5. Analyze the Data. The types of analysis you planned to perform on the collected survey data should have been decided in earlier steps, but after collecting the data you have to actually perform the survey analysis.  Analysis can be performed using survey analysis tools like office programs, such as Excel, or more advanced programs such as SPSS - the complexity of the questions will determine this.
    
6. Report, Present, Take Action.  The final step in the market research process is to present your survey research findings and draw conclusions.  While Step 3 is the most important because it defines the outcome of your survey, if you fail to complete this last step and act on the findings in some way, the previous steps don't matter. 

As I mentioned in the beginning, this same process can be applied to any type of project: product evaluations, customer satisfaction questionnaires, public relation surveys, etc.  If you give each step the attention it deserves, each of your online surveys should be a success.