Satisfaction Survey Questions

Before you select a sample or design a single question, the first step in a survey research project is to establish your goals and objectives.  With proper planning, time and attention given to this step, all subsequent steps will flow more smoothly. 

Ask yourself--and answer, in writing--broad questions such as the ones below, and then you can drill down into more specific research questions and move on to procedural matters.

What information am I seeking to gather?  Why do I need it?  What is the “end game” regarding what I’m trying to learn?

Who (exactly) can I get this information from?  How can I contact them?  How many people do I need to contact, and do I have an exhaustive list?  Am I interested in any particular subgroups?

Has anyone else done a similar project in the past?  If so, what did they find out and how could what they did help with my current project?

What kind of data and results do I want my questions to produce?  Am I interested in public opinion, actual behaviors, satisfaction levels, employee feedback/workplace surveys, etc.?  How will I go about collecting and analyzing the data?

How will my results be reported?   What will the report format look like, and who will receive the results?  What kind of summary data do I need, and how can I design questions with response options that will provide me with actionable data?

Establishing clear, attainable objectives and goals is of the utmost importance when undertaking a research study.  Your results will likely only be as clear as your objectives, for better or worse!

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.

Incentives with surveys are often used to increase response rates.  Well, do you handle internal trainings? Is your organization involved with continuing education courses? Use online surveys to gather information on those attendees: What is their satisfaction with the training course or training instructor, what kind of courses would they like to see, etc.

Then, let those attendees know how important that information is to your work by giving the certificate of completetion only after they have finished the survey (by the way, with Cvent Web Surveys software that can be automatically done for you). Survey incentives can work both ways - as a gift for the respondent OR a gift for the survey creator (which in this case is incredibly high response rates!).

Don't inundate survey respondents with too many questions though. After all, they may have just paid for a class, seminar, or workshop. Get your data quickly and easily and let them be on their way. They'll appreciate it.

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.

Yesterday, I shared the first 5 tips from the Meetings & Convention article, Survey Science: How to craft more effective attendee evaluations. No one can deny the importance of measuring customer satisfaction, so why wouldn't you want to conduct a post-event survey to measure attendee satisfaction? Particularly if it's an annual conference, meeting or tradeshow. If you want attendees to keep coming to your events, you need to make sure you're gathering feedback on what worked well, what didn't, what should be included next year.

In continuing with the fifteen survey best practices shared in the article, here are the next five:

6. Be careful with demographic survey questions. This tip comes from our very own Eric Eden, VP of Marketing here at Cvent. Survey respondents don't always like to share all their demographic information on surveys. If you already have the information from registration, match it up later. Otherwise, if demographic information is a must for your survey analysis then make sure to put them at the end of the survey.

7. Ask intensity questions. You don't want to just ask yes-or-no questions. You want to know the degree with which the survey respondent agrees or disagrees with your statement. For example, don't ask if you should include public speaking skills at your next training conference, instead ask how valuable the attendees would find a session on public speaking. Asking these types of questions in the pre-event survey can help you prioritize the agenda. If you get a lot of weak interest for one session, you may want to include the session that got fewer, but more passionate, votes instead.

8. Offer a midpoint. As I've mentioned in the past, there are passionate arguments among market researchers about how many points should be on your scale. This article suggests going with an odd number scale because it has a true midpoint.

9. Questionnaire design should be balanced. This is another suggestion by Eric I fully agree with. Survey design is a definite skill. Some people try to write a lot of open-ended questions when they're working on designing survey questionnaires because they think they get better data. This is a mistake. You want to have a mix of close-ended questions (multiple select, single select, rank questions) and open-ended questions. The best surveys will include more closed-ended questions. They provide you with better data and are much easier when it comes to the survey data analysis.

10. Introduce the survey. We've gone over this many times. It's important to introduce your questionnaire. In the introduction you want to explain what the survey is about and why you're conducting it. By providing survey respondents with this information, you're likely to see a higher response rate. Introductions get "buy in" from the survey sample, they see that the data collection is important and are more likely to complete your survey.

Do you have anything to add to these conference and seminar survey tips? What questions have you asked in pre-conference surveys to  help you plan the event?

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?

Sabre, a travel-reservations-technology company, recently conducted a survey of 90 global airlines and a whopping 86% said that efforts aimed at maintaining and growing customer loyalty had the most positive impact on their business. The survey also found that 58% of airlines are increasing fees on checked bags and peak travel times, among others, to help their bottom line.

See the disconnect? No? Well, JD Power reported in June that customer satisfaction with airlines has dropped - for the third straight year. JD Power cites increased fees and decreased services as a prime reason for the drop and also notes that the low-cost carriers - Southwest, JetBlue, and Virgin America - have significantly higher satisfaction. They also tend to have far fewer fees.

Everyone knows that airlines are struggling right now, but I bet your business has seen better times as well. Would you ever simultaneously think that customer satisfaction is the most important driver for your business... and then do exactly the thing that depresses that satisfaction the most? The industry has conducted some great research, but the belief that they can somehow do the opposite of what that satisfaction research suggests and still satisfaction in the long term seems tenuous.

But not all airlines are chasing short term revenues as the expense of long term customer loyalty and profits. The New York Times is reporting that some are urging regulation to stop airlines from charging "holiday surcharges" that do not appear as part of the fare, but are added to the price of your ticket later in the purchase process. Who is urging this regulation? Not consumer groups (well, they probably are as well!), but none other than Virgin Group founder and Chairman Richard Branson. Branson says the "fees are not a good idea" and is worried that airlines risk alienating travelers if they add to many after-fare fees. 

It is good to see that not everyone in the industry is blind to the data - and my personal customer experiences say that Branson is right on the money. I know that I am now far, far less likely to even consider flying on the legacy carriers these days. Why fly United if I'm going to be nickled-and-dimed when I can fly Southwest, JetBlue, or Branson's Virgin America? 

Surveying customers and your target market is only worthwhile if you actually listen to the results and act on them. As the former CEO of Southwest Airlines (a Cvent Web Surveys client!), Herb Kelleher said: "We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things". Survey your market, your customers, and your employees and use the date to enact change. Don't ignore it and hope for the best!

Every organization should ask themselves What is good customer service? and create their own definition for good customer service based on the answer they come up with. Giving customers the opportunity to provide feedback on their customer experience is one way to improve customer service quality, but only if the customer feedback gets back to the employees. Lots of organizations use customer service surveys to measure customer experiences and customer loyalty. What separates the organizations with mediocre customer service from the organizations with excellent customer service is sharing the feedback from the customer loyalty surveys with the employees. Seems pretty straight forward, right?

I suggest you take it a step further, however. While sharing the aggregate results of customer feedback surveys with front-line employees is important, you can use these customer surveys as assessments of employee performance or staff evaluations. If you're not already using customer surveys to support this type of employee performance feedback, here are some steps from the CRMBuyer to make this type of process possible:

• Move from random survey sampling to an attempted census. Random survey samples are great when you're just trying to get an overall sense of customer satisfaction rates. However, if you're trying to collect feedback to figure out how to improve employee performance, a random sample is unlikely to provide enough data for each employee. Like with all other types of surveys, not everyone you send personalized survey invitations to will participate, but you will likely get enough responses to support the employee assessments.

• Develop new employee reports. To improve workforce performance, organizations can't continue to provide infrequent high-level survey reports. Instead, employees should get to see weekly reports. Using standardized reports that compare the employee to the overall average and to their colleagues as a group have the most impact.

• Develop new management reports. Like with how employees see the customer feedback reports needs to change with this strategy, management reports do too. Managers should be able to see responses by employees so they can take appropriate action. Managers will have different opinions on how much information should be shared with their staff; some will want to share every customer comment from the employee performance evaluation form, others wont want to share individual survey results.

• Develop HR guidelines for the use of these employee reports. The HR department should be deeply involved in the creation of these HR employee appraisal forms and employee survey reports. If an employee constantly receives negative customer feedback, the organization may choose to terminate their employment so it helps to keep HR in the loop. However, that shouldn't be the goal of this type of customer survey program. The survey feedback should be used to improve employee job performance and mentor them. With the help of customer service assessment surveys and employee performance review forms organizations can figure out how to improve customer service quality.

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.

Generating new customers is much more difficult than retaining current customers. Businesses can stay afloat in a time of recession by leaning on those current customers - the downfall: they must do everything in their power to keep them as customers. One of the most effective ways businesses have successfully had good customer retention programs is by surveying customers.

By using the net promoter score (NPS) question type, a company can survey customers using a 0-10 point scale with 0 indicating the extreme negative and 10 extreme positive. There are three categories: promoters, passives and detractors. Promoters are those who rate a 9 or 10. Passives are those who rate a 7 or 8. Detractors are those who rate the organization a 6 and below. The total NPS score is determined by subtracting percent of detractors from percent of promoters- with 50 and above considered a good score. The NPS survey question asked is: How likely is it that you would recommend this product to a friend or colleague?

With promoters, there are two main types: high-profit and low-profit.

High-profit promoters are those individuals who buy the most, most loyal, and essentially make up the company’s revenue stream.   But low- profit promoters are loyal customers who are restricted from purchasing as much as they like (typically due to budget). In the end, high-promoters are essential to company’s profit because if you believe the 80-20 rule (80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers), then you certainly want to survey to find out who those high-promoters are in order to keep them happy.

Like with promoters, there are the high-profit and low-profit detractors.

Customers who are high-profit detractors are still very important, because they are still high dollar clients. Companies must give them a lot of attention as these are the people who your competition will want to steal. Low- profit detractors are those you cannot please within reason. However, while you may lose these as customers, it’s important to maintain professional relationships as well a good company image. You don't want to give your detractors any additional reasons to say anything negative to other potential customers. 

Something to keep in mind: dissatisfied customers will eventually tell 9 other people about their problem with satisfied customers will tell 5-6 others about their positive experience. Having customers that are willing to promote you are the biggest indication of a high customer satisfaction.

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.

Today we're continuing our count down of our top five posts. Today's theme? You guessed it customer, client and consumer surveys.

• Don't Just Conduct Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Also Collect User Satisfaction Feedback: In this post, we talk about how the purchaser and the user are not always the same person. So when you review your customer feedback procedures and customer survey best practices, make sure you consider who you're surveying: the purchaser, the user or both.

• Customer Service Feedback To Increase Customer Loyalty: Customers have higher standards for organizations than 20 years ago. We all want more, more more! In this post, we talk about the importance of good customer service and how to boost your customer service satisfaction survey scores.

• What's Your Customer Satisfaction Score? This post debunks the myth that customer service is the defining factor in client satisfaction. Customers switch to competitors, become repeat customers, and recommend products and services based on their overall satisfaction experience, not just customer service experiences.

• Classify Customers: Are They Secure, Satisfied/Favorable, Vulnerable Or Dissatisfied? Typically, client survey best practices say there are four distinct customer satisfaction categories: secure, satisfied, vulnerable and dissatisfied. It's important to classify customers into these groups and uncover similarities in each group. Why? Because it will help you identify new revenue opportunities.

• Customer Reviews Matter: 6 Reasons Why: It's common knowledge that customer and consumer reviews have become an important part of the decision making process. As the title suggests, the post takes a deeper look at why reviews are more important than we think they are.