Survey Design

Conduct Surveys in Multiple Languages

Friday, November 20, 2009 by Caitlin Rawles
Conduct surveys in multiple languagesThere is a word in French I have always loved: mondialisation. Like many French words, there is no direct English translation for this term. To give you a rough idea though, mondialisation refers to the way that new communication technology has recently facilitated conversations between people on different continents. Companies headquartered in London are doing business deals with organizations and offices in Beijing, and American firms have clients in India. Cvent is no exception to this rule.

Since Cvent has clients literally all over the world, it makes sense that our clients want to conduct and design surveys in many languages other than English. I received an email from a web surveys client today who was wondering how she should best translate her survey into six different languages: English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi. My response was quick: I told her that she should create six separate surveys, one which was translated into each of the languages she had mentioned.

I explained to this client she could simply translate her questions in Microsoft Word and then copy and paste the translated text into the Cvent Web Surveys Question Wizard. Yes, you can even paste Chinese characters! I also explained that it would be easy for her to collapse the data from all six global surveys into one report. This is why we have made it easy for you to export your survey reports into Microsoft Excel. If you simply run the Answer Details for All Respondents report for each survey and export the results into Excel, you can copy and paste to combine the data from all six surveys into one spreadsheet.

Another great thing about conducting multilingual surveys in Cvent's online survey platform is that you can utilize the display text feature! Remember that display text allows you to specify the question text that your survey respondents will see separately from the text that you will see from inside the survey application (where you create and design surveys) or in your reports. So, it is easy for you to translate your survey questions in the display text window and leave the question text in English. This way, you don’t even need to speak the language in order to correctly interpret the electronic survey results!

I wasn’t lying when I told my client today that Cvent is also a multilingual survey software solution and is ideal for setting up multilingual surveys. Anyone who knows their right hand from their left knows that the corporate world is confined to your immediate surroundings and the world truly is one global market, so use the Cvent Web Surveys software to survey employees or clients worldwide.

How to Increase Survey Response Rates

Friday, November 20, 2009 by Andrew Upadhyaya
Communication is a very important part of conducting a survey online. How to inform the invitees about the survey, how to make sure they read the email survey invitation and respond to the survey. This totally depends upon what kind of email is sent to the invitee so they respond to your call to action (aka answer the survey). Here are a few online survey tips that will be helpful when you create survey invitation emails.

Send your invitations out automatically:
After you have tested the email invitation, you are ready to send it out in bulk to all of your invitees. We recommend you switch the How to Send option on the Edit Settings page to the Send By Date.

Making No responses or Visited respondents take the survey: send reminder emails. Some people will take your survey right away. You will get increased responses, however, if you send follow-up email reminders with the survey link included. We recommend sending a minimum of two reminder emails depending on how long your survey will be running. Be sure to use our Partial Response reminders in addition to the No Response reminders.

Use HTML emails instead of plain text emails. To send an HTML email, go to the email you are sending out and then click on the HTML Email tab. Click on the Edit button, and you can create your HTML email, adding any images you want to include and formatting the text to emphasize your main points. Make sure to click on the Save and Update Plain Text Email button, so that your HTML email message and your plain text email message both convey the same information.

Feedback: Seek advice & suggestions from your respondents. If you are new to conducting surveys or have surveyed the same people for years, ask them what they like and do not like about participating in your surveys. Add a question or two to ask why they take the surveys and what would improve the questionnaires.

Thank your respondents. At the end of the survey, be courteous and thank your respondents for taking time out of their busy schedule to complete the survey. Also, if the survey is a collect respondent contact information survey, turn on the completion email and thank your respondents for their time in an email as well.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Why Aren't They Happy?

Friday, November 20, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Measuring customer satisfaction is nothing new, neither is benchmarking that data and tracking improvements. It's typically easy to find dissatisfied customers. When you're looking for customer feedback, dissatisfied customers often come out of the wood work to let you know you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Sometimes understanding why those customers are unhappy can be a challenge.

If you have a well designed survey form with strongly written questions, answering Why suddenly becomes a lot easier. Here's my best suggestion: Read the comments. Comments are often where you're going to find the most customer insights. You'll also be able to see trends emerge as you read through. Training, missing features, poor support, issues with the sales process, they'll all begin to emerge. If you have dissatisfied customers, they usually will let you know how you can fix it and transform them to happy customers.

In the past, I told you that as part of any customer satisfaction survey you should be categorizing customers to better focus your energy and bring in more revenue for your organization. As part of that categorization, consider grouping customers into buckets based on why they're unhappy. From there you can create action items for how to improve the overall satisfaction of your customer base. If it's not clear why a customer is unhappy, reach out to them to find out more. If you want to make things better and understand where you went wrong, chances are your customers are going to be happy to help - so let them.

Paper Questionnaires vs Online Web Surveys

Friday, November 20, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Just last week I shared how expensive conducting paper surveys can be, particularly if it's a survey project run every quarter for benchmarking or trending analysis. But cost isn't the only benefit online survey questionnaires can have over the old fashion mail questionnaire. Here are a few other things to consider next time you're debating between an instant survey online and it's paper-based equivalent:

Speed: Creating surveys online offers instant distribution via web links posted on your website and email survey invitations. When you make surveys online, you can see the responses begin rolling in immediately - not trickle in a week or two after you first put them in the mail. Don't discount how much quicker you can analyze survey data either, since response are collected online, there's no manual data entry.

Efficiency: This benefit goes right along with speed. It's more efficient to design a survey online and collect feedback using the internet. It's also easier to copy, or clone, your surveys for repeat deployment. 

More Thorough Responses: By utilizing survey technologies like email survey invitations, and survey reminders for both non-respondents and partial respondents, you can collect more thorough responses and improve the accuracy and validity of your survey data.

Randomization of Answers: We shared our thoughts on the benefits of randomizing answer earlier today. To get caught up, read this post on when you should randomize answers. But in summary, randomizing answers helps decrease certain types of survey bias and makes your survey results more reliable.

Improved experience: Paper surveys limit you in providing a less than excellent survey respondent experience. Remember, every interaction with a customer impact the overall customer experience - this includes completing surveys! Designing surveys online gives you the ability to use survey question logic such as skip, branch, link logic or other types of  advanced logic that improves the overall experience. Instead of having to write survey questions like, If yes, when was the last time you purchased Agent ABC? Instead, that question only shows when the respondent indicates they have purchased Agent ABC. Couple these types of question logic with pipe logic that makes the survey even more engaging (remember, more relevant and engaging the survey is, the higher he response rate will be).

Unfortunately for the mail survey, they just don't have these types of functionality. Luckily for all online survey builders out there, you can simply select a survey designing software (like the Cvent Web Surveys application), and start improving your survey programs while cutting costs.

Sneak Peak at our Web Survey Question Library

Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Lisa Boruah
Last time we discussed in detail about the Graphical Survey Templates offered to Cvent Web Survey software users. Today, I wanted to share with you another marvelous feature available in Cvent’s online survey tool: Cvent Web Surveys Question Library. The question library is home to a list of customer service, demographics, event, HR/training, and marketing/sales survey questions you can utilize when creating surveys online.

Here’s a Sneak Preview:

Customer Service Survey Questions:
1. Did the representative answer your question adequately?
2. Did the representative respond to your phone call or email in a timely fashion?
3. How likely will you be to continue service with our company?

HR Survey Questions and Training Survey Questions:
1. Did this training meet your expectations?
2. Do you have all of the necessary resources available to you to perform your job?
3. Do you have any comments about what might improve your work experience at the company in the coming year?

Marketing Survey Questions and Sales Survey Questions:
1. How does this product's pricing compare to other similar products?
2. How likely are you to return to our site in the next 30 days?
3. How often do you use this product?

If you are new to the survey tool and need help with designing online surveys, I certainly recommend you to make use of these wonderful features. You can also call our award winning Client Services Team at 866-318-4357 for additional help.

Are Online Survey Samples & Results Skewed?

Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Tyson Gingery
With the emergence of widespread internet usage and powerful online survey software, the web has become the survey method of choice for many project managers and market research professionals.  Utilizing an online web survey design allows for levels of efficiency unheard of in traditional mail questionnaire projects, but it also poses new challenges for business survey researchers.  One of the questions that is asked often is, Is my customer feedback sample and/or survey data skewed because I used an online survey?

The answer could be either no, yes, or maybe, depending upon your specific research issues and target demographics.  The demographic that use the internet (and newer technologies in general) the most are younger people.  Those who are new to online technologies, or those who are not tech-savvy, might be intimidated or confused by a web survey form or an email survey invitation from an unknown sender, which can decrease your rates of nonresponse.  Also, you can run into the issue of coverage error for those who do not have internet access, which is more common among lower-income and less-educated individuals.

But overall, the reliability and validity of online survey results can be on par with or better than other modes, especially if you know your target audience well, including their rates of internet usage.  According to a September 2009 survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 77% of all adults - and 93% of those ages 18-29 - use the internet “at least occasionally.”  Less than half of those aged 65 and older use the internet or send and receive email, however.

So while there are drawbacks to online questionnaire designs of which you should be mindful (as there are with any survey modes, such as interviewer bias, etc.), the efficiency and reduced costs are more than enough rationale for most to employ online data collection techniques, either exclusively or as part of a multi-mode survey design.  Knowing and understanding your target audience is the best way to be sure that your chosen mode will produce quality data.

Survey Sampling Demystified: Quota Sampling

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 by Tyson Gingery
Quota sampling is frequently used in survey designs, and especially in market research projects.  This technique is a form of "convenience sampling," where respondents are chosen not at random, but because they are available or easier to reach.  A probability-based sampling design is not employed, due to decisions made by the researcher based upon various reasons: the population frame cannot be known, contact information for respondents is unavailable, or even because the time, effort and costs are simply too high for the budget.

Quota sampling is a way that you can gather completed questionnaires, producing adequate amounts of data, from people with different demographic attributes.  Often, market researchers want to ensure they get roughly equal amounts of data from males and females, may be interested only in a specific age range (i.e., their target market/demographic), or would like to know if preferences differ by other characteristics such as ethnicity and income level.

So where does the “quota” come into play?  Well, just as in stratified sampling, the population is divided into mutually exclusive subgroubs, often based on demographic characteristics.  The researcher sets a quota for each subgroup (100 females and 100 males, for example), collects data until the quotas are met, then stops data collection and begins data analysis.  The reason that quota sampling is not a probability-based sampling technique, thereby limiting your ability to generalize, is because respondents are not selected at randomQuota sampling does go a step further than simply selecting whomever is available without regard to any criteria, and that's why it is used so often.

6 Online Survey Best Practices

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Andrew Upadhyaya
In the past, I've shared online survey best practice tips you should keep in mind when designing a questionnaire to ensure quality survey data. We like to always share survey best practices, and today is no exception. Here are six more notable online survey tips.

Keep your email survey invitations short: Email marketing best practices always tell us to keep emails short and simple, with one clear call to action. In the case of survey emails, your call to action is the link to access the online web survey form. Be sure to include these important points to help recipients make an informed decision about whether or not to complete the survey:
• Who you are and the purpose of your survey
• How the survey benefits the individual
• How long the survey will take
• Privacy statement, if required by your organization

Send personalized email survey invitations: Emails with a personal salutation result in increased response rates. Send your education survey as "Dear Mr. Wright" or “Hi John,” rather than "Dear Valued Alumni." In addition, you can insert other contact fields like organization names, work cities, amount they last gave, etc. throughout the body of the email, in order to make it highly personalized for each recipient.

Include the survey link in the email: Be sure to use the appropriate link in your outgoing emails. The default link in the emails {[S-RSVP LINK]} takes your respondents to the first page of the survey and skips the Welcome page. However, you might want to change this link to {[S-HOMEPAGE LINK]} if you have added important information on the Welcome page.

Incorporate an opt out link in all emails: Cvent requires that each email contain an opt out clause for all external surveys. It is very important that all of customers maintain compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Launch survey invitations automatically: After you have tested the email invitation and your survey, you are ready to send it out in bulk to all of your invitees. We recommend that you switch the How to Send option on the Edit Settings page to the Send By Date.

Remember: Timing is everything: In order to make sure your email invitations are opened and read, avoid certain days and times. Never send out an email over the weekend or on Monday morning. This is when people’s mailboxes are full, especially with dreaded spam. We recommend sending emails in the middle of the week and the middle of the day.

One More Reason Why Cvent is the Best Survey Designing Software: Our Address Book

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Lisa Boruah
In today’s competitive world, most of us find ourselves asking, What more do I get out of our online survey management software besides the obvious?

Well here’s one extraordinary feature you get along with the Cvent Web Surveys tool: A Robust Address Book. The Cvent Address Book is where you can store all you contacts; you can manually add new contacts if you need to update your records with just a handful of contacts or you can use our 4 Step Import Wizard to add bulk contacts in one go.

You can also export contacts out of the survey software if you need to update your personal database. For example, you want to be able to update contacts in your CRM system that attended your conference and completed your post-event survey so sales can follow up appropriately with attendees. Using the Cvent Address Book you can also merge duplicate contacts, create contact groups to help manage the Address Book more efficiently, or edit existing contacts to keep your records up to date.

Wait! There is more. In the Cvent Web Surveys application, you can not only run different reports to pull up information based on your address book, but also run reports to pull up information from your address book. Here is a list of some of our Address Book Reports:

• Address Book Update: Returns a list of updated contacts since a specified date. Each contact is identified by contact name, last name, created by, created date, last updated by, and last updated date.

• Contacts that Opted-Out: Returns a list of all contacts that have opted-out from receiving emails within a specified date range. Each contact is identified by contact name, last email status, opt-out date, and opted-out by.

• Contact Notes: Returns a list of contact notes created and updated since a specified date. Each contact note is identified by contact name, note type, note, note text, and date entered.

• Import Summary: Returns a list of all imports. Each import is identified by import date, import type, import mode, contact group name, contact group mode, import file name, status, number inserted, number updated, number skipped, error messages, and a details link. Click View Details to view the status for all import records.

• Contact Ad Hoc Report: Returns a grid of contacts for selected contact groups. Each contact is identified by contact name. Select additional contact and custom contact fields to include in the report.

If you are interested in knowing more about the benefits you can enjoy with Cvent Web Surveys, go ahead and sign up for a free trial account!

What to Avoid When Launching Online Surveys

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Kelli Kelley
While designing a web surveys is fairly simple, make sure you are aware of common online survey pitfalls so you can avoid them:

Plan the correct date and time to send survey invitation emails and consider your target audience. If your survey sample is office workers, it would be best to send it out during the work week when they will be at a computer most of each day. Do a little research on what the best day is – while it is widely known that Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays are not optimal, there is always new information on this topic. Don’t forget to consider the time zone of recipients too – if you are sending something that will land at 7 p.m. their time, it will likely be buried or forgotten by morning.

Create your questions carefully. In an online web survey, the respondents are obviously on their own. You can’t clarify things for them. Make sure the questions are clear and easy to understand.

Keep the open-ended questions to a minimum or you will be poring through the answers for hours. Respondents tend to be more forthcoming with electronic surveys, and this is a positive thing. But just because you can get all those open-ended responses, you may not really want them. Always be thinking ahead to how you will analyze survey data and present findings.

Entice the respondents to take the survey. Many times online surveys fail to offer enough incentive. Even though online surveys are more convenient, the respondents are still volunteering their time and should be rewarded.

Vote for your favorite Pot Luck Dish with Ease

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Holida Pot Luck: Surveys Ease the Planning NighmareWe all know the holidays are getting closer, which means office pot lucks are about to become all the rage. What will you be bringing? How is your office going to make sure that not everyone plans to bring the same thing? How do you determine the winner of this year's Tastiest Dish Awards?

Competitions involving food are definitely a favorite around this time of year. However, if you have a big office, it can be a pain to collect everyone's votes. As I mentioned at Halloween, building polls to quickly identify the winner of your office Halloween Costume contest can be applied to the Best Dish Award too. Simply log into your web site voting poll software, make a poll to gather employee opinions on who should win this year's Best Dish Awards. Have different categories, such as best presentation, tastiest appetizer, most unique recipe? Add in images of the dishes to help jog people's memories and create one web poll using your poll maker.

Don't think that an online poll survey software tool can only play it's part at the end of the pot luck event, you can send a pre-event survey to find out who plans to bring what. If too many people are planning to bring dessert, a typical favorite, the online poll generator can easily run a survey report to identify categories with too many volunteers. You can easily create a survey contact group to email those volunteers and ask them if they can bring something else.

Holidays are a time to celebrate with family and friends, and eat delicious food. Unfortunately, we often make such office traditions a little more painful than they need to be by forgetting we can use a polling system or survey software tool we already have. Since Cvent Web Surveys doesn't limit the number of responses you can have, it wouldn't make sense to suffer through paper ballots when it can be done for you! Ready to create a poll for your next staff opinion survey? Get started with a free trial.

What are your other sample employee opinion survey examples?

Reduce Survey Abandonment: Make Your Survey Easy to Read

Monday, November 16, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
A few weeks ago, I did a series of posts about the effect colors can have on individuals and how you should keep them in mind when designing a web survey. Today, I came across a survey form that reminded me again of the importance of your survey template's color scheme. When you're designing surveys, make sure you pick colors that are easy to read.

Example Survey Question: How long have you been a customer?

Can you read this question from a sample customer questionnaire? Probably. Is it easy to read? Do you want to answer pages and pages of survey questions writen with this color scheme? Probably not. Because it's hard to read, you will probably see a high abandonment rate and then you'll have to deal with speculations about nonresponse bias. To avoid having this issue, make sure to ask people if they find the survey easy to read when they're testing it for you. Believe me, you don't want poor color selection to decrease your response rate.

You can read more about the effects different colors have in these posts:

Writing Survey Questions That Work Part III

Monday, November 16, 2009 by Ariel Finno
Last week, we reviewed poorly written survey question items, and what makes them inefficient tools for collecting the data you desire. For our final installment of "Writing Survey Questions the Work," we'll discuss some final points to keep in mind in order to write great questions.

In general when you design a questionnaire, try to write from the respondent's perspective rather than your perspective. Hark back to last weeks post where we discussed writing objectively and from a non-assuming point of view. Writing from neutral viewpoint and keeping far away from internal workplace jargon and slogans that wont be understood by your clients is key.

Having a sample of your survey population and other neutral testers review the wording of your survey is a wonderful way to attain clarity on question items. After spending what may amount to dozens of hours on a survey form project, having an outsider do things like proofread and spell check with a fresh pair of eyes can be well worth the effort!

And as we've talked about in other posts, pre-testing your survey with a segment of your audience is crucial to detecting question item mis-wordings as soon as they occur.

If we have poorly worded question items in our survey, not only will the answers we receive be inaccurate, our data analysis will be inaccurate as well. This could result in poor decisions being made based on data that has either overstated or understated our clients needs for a product or service. 

Staying in tune with the needs of our clients and our target populations starts with skillfully worded survey question items. If your question isn't worded right, your analysis wont be right.

Specificity in Survey Question Design

Monday, November 16, 2009 by Tyson Gingery
One of the best descriptors attributed to good survey questions is the word specific.  A main goal in designing valid, reliable survey questions is doing everything in your power to make them clear, standardized and unambiguous.  A great way to follow through on that is to make sure your questions are as specific as possible.  The degree of specificity affects how people interpret and respond to your survey questions.  Several examples are listed below to help you analyze your survey questions regarding their level of specificity.

Be clear with demographic questions.  Your objective here should be to use words and categories that your respondents can clearly understand and identify with.  Will you use Census designations for Ethnicity?   Exactly what do you mean by “marital status?”

Define vague concepts, words and phrases.  Your respondents will likely widely differ with regard to their backgrounds, experiences and perceptions.  Words like “justice” and “equality” can mean very different things to people, so it is best to define exactly what you are asking about.

Objective or subjective?  Use verbs that trigger respondents.  Attitude survey questions are usually subjective (i.e., how do you feel about the war?), while behavioral questions are usually objective (i.e., what did you eat for supper last night?).

Always try to attach a time frame to behavioral and recall questions.

For market and product research, identify the actual brand name, and ask how they feel about specific items, not just groups or genres.  For example, don’t use the vague word “furniture” if you’re really interested in how they feel about a table or a chair.

Survey designing software can't look at your questions and tell you if your online survey form will give you the data you want. However, it does make it easier when you're designing a web survey because it takes out the added complications with writing your own code. So make sure next time you're working on an instant survey form, you think about the specificity of your survey questions.

Planning your Online Market Research Study

Sunday, November 15, 2009 by Kelli Kelley
When you plan your online market research study, you still need to remember the standard steps for any market research project, plus some online specific tasks:

1. Identify the target audience
2. Write a detailed questionnaire
3. Design an online survey using an internet research software tool
4. Set the time frame for the study (including the time frame for data analysis)
5. Determine how survey results will be used and how to analyze survey data
6. Decide the honorarium for participants and how it will be paid

Most of these tasks are familiar to any market researcher, but online web surveys do require a bit more planning. For example, how much to pay the respondents and the method for payment. Typically, research study participants are paid for their time, and for in-person studies it is a simple matter to give them cash or a check.But electronic surveys are online and immediate, and the payment can be as well. Consider paying the participants online through a service like PayPal. Payment can be made after results have been verified to ensure that pranksters are not paid for fraudulent answers. Online surveys are often a cost-savings because you can pay participants less than you might for an in-person interview.

The time frame for an online study is, as discussed previously, often shorter because of the immediacy of the results. Keep this in mind but be sure to give yourself enough time to analyze survey responses.

The Holidays are Coming - Are you prepared with targeted campaigns?

Friday, November 13, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Holidays Coming Soon!Every year it seems like the holidays get earlier and earlier. This year I noticed stores had holiday decorations out before Halloween costumes! While I can attest to retail stores being ready for the holiday shopping season, it makes me wonder, are you?

Online web surveys are just one more way you have the ability to engage with your consumer email lists. Customer surveys should be no brainers. But how can an online survey form apply to holiday marketing strategies? Well that depends, are you setting survey objectives that will impact your marketing strategies?

Here's what I mean: I receive countless retail marketing emails everyday. Most of which I opted in to, however, no one ever asks me about my shopping habits or preferences. These companies could easily put together a retail survey using an online survey application and find out more about who I am as a customer, what I prefer, how frequently I shop in their stores or how frequently I visit their website. From the responses they get back, they can then customize their marketing messages based on how I shop with them. If I only shop online, it may make sense to group these customers together and do a special online promotion. All the customers who only shop in the stores would receive a different promotional offer because they shop differently than I do.

This concept goes back to one I've shared previously: profiling customers to better understand your organization. The holidays are closing in quickly, but it's not too late to build an online survey and collect customer feedback instantly.

How have you designed online survey questionnaires in the past to impact your marketing strategies?

Think before you survey!

Friday, November 13, 2009 by Drew Northcutt
Surveys are an invaluable tool for researching the community attitudes, employee concerns, product needs, customer loyalty and priorities held by different groups or target audiences.  Designing a questionnaire and collecting survey responses from a sample allows us to draw a profile of the group as a whole, and perhaps perform some correlation analysis to understand the source of those feelings.  The online survey findings can then support fact-based organizational decisions or improvement projects to help continually improve the organization over time.

Survey research can be applied to many venues.  Here are just a few practical applications listed below:

An Internal Employee Survey could identify reasons for low employee retention and provide ideas for reducing those costs, such as a better designed benefit program, improved training opportunities, or problems in the way the organization functions.

A Training Survey can identify how a training program has improved the capabilities of some group and how the training program itself can be improved.  

A Product Satisfaction Survey can identify initial customer experiences with a product, providing data to address unforeseen problems and help the next product release.  

A Market Research Survey can identify customers needs when creating these new service and product offerings.  Surveys can be part of Design for Six Sigma activities.  

An Association Survey, which is similar to market research and customer surveys, can show the member benefits most of interest.

However, a survey program is only valuable if it is properly designed and executed.  While performing a survey project seems deceptively simple – it's just a bunch of questions, and survey software tools make electronic surveys quick and cheap – a small mistake in the survey questionnaire design or survey administration can skew or bias the data, leading to erroneous conclusions.  No organization should ever make critical business decisions based on unreliable or invalid data.

Bad data is worse than no data!

One Survey, Unlimited Opportunities

Friday, November 13, 2009 by Dorian Rosen
I realized it only after the emails had been sent.  It was a test survey that wasn’t intended for entry level employees and senior management.  It was an employee evaluation that had initially been slated to go out only to our newest batch of hires.  Only last minute did we discover we could use logic to create one interactive survey online for senior management to evaluate the progress of new hire training, and new hire survey questions for them to evaluate the training process.  The wording, the slang, everything was wrong!  What did I do…

Hopefully, this scenario has appeared solely in a nightmare (and yes, survey nightmares are very real and very terrifying).  But a similar, less daunting situation is common among many: You have an online web survey that will go out to two groups of respondents, the wording in the two would ideally be completely different, and you do not have the time to go into the two templates you’ve created and select the different audiences then manually send the emails.  Not to mention, this method would require using Cvent’s email survey tool's default templates and the Custom Messages.  What if I told you it was possible to create entirely separate email marketing campaigns, set the emails up to go out automatically AND keep the both default templates and custom messages for each group of respondents

The multiple email marketing campaigns feature allows you to do just this!  You can select the number of separate email blasts you intend on sending, you can add entirely different contact groups to each campaign, and you can set up your emails to go out automatically. 

1. This feature is perfect if you have a multilingual survey.  You can translate your message into as many languages as you like to ensure maximum comprehension. 

2. Multiple email campaigns is also great for newsletters that are tied to a generic instant survey.  Instead of copying your survey and creating a new email blast every month, you can add an email campaign for the October '09 Newsletter, November '09 Newsletter, December '09 Newsletter and so forth.  You can then get an aggregate view of the data collected across all months.

3. The nightmare scenario outlined above.  It is likely that emails sent to your senior management are not worded the same as emails sent to entry-level new hires.  The formality of the verbiage aside, your new hires might be a bit disconcerted to know that the bosses of the bosses are watching them and evaluating their decisions. 

We all know creating surveys and designing questionnaires can be a bit overwhelming.  Why put yourself through that again just so different people can receive the same questionnaire?

Writing Survey Questions That Work Part II

Friday, November 13, 2009 by Ariel Finno
In yesterday's post we looked at how your survey question items, if worded improperly, may be biased, resulting in unusable or incorrect results. Now we know how survey questions shouldn't look, let's delve deeper into why those previous examples were poorly worded, and how with just a few small adjustments you can easily start to hone question items within your survey forms.

When you design internet surveys, how do you write objective questions that won't bias your results one way or the other?

Here are a few main points:

• Your questions should use non-judgmental wording and neutral terms. This first point is important. Respondents reading your business survey questions should not be able to determine where you stand on any topic.

If your market survey question is phrased neutrally, it wont pre-suppose anything (pre-supposing questions can also be called "leading questions"). E.g. Instead of asking this conference survey question, "How many sessions did you attend at our national meeting?" re-phrase it to ask, "How many sessions, if any, did you attend at our national meeting?" If you are creating an electronic survey, this is also a great place to utilize online web survey features to further tailor your instrument.

• In an effort to save time and money, a common mistake is asking ;"double barreled questions," or two questions posing as only one question. Prevent these situations by splitting the one question into two after the word "and". Instead of "How likely is it you will attend our convention this year and accept our incentive offers?" ask "How likely is it you will attend our convention this year?," and "How likely is it you will accept our incentive offers?"

Whenever possible, always attempt to use words that everyone will readily understand. This holds true for grammar structure as well. Always define terms within your survey form for the respondent, particularly if the word can have more than one meaning. This holds especially true for international surveys. For example if you are asking salary information, be sure to specify what denomination you would like the respondent to convert their salary into.

These first few points are a great starting place when you're designing a questionnaire. The final post in this series will look at a few final survey best practice tips for writing great survey questions and the benefits you'll gain from crafting quality items. In the meantime, questions previously stored in our question library already come properly worded and ready for use!

Need Sound Bites?

Thursday, November 12, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Client quotes are a marketer's treasure!Marketing departments love client testimonials and customer quotes. They're great to share with the sales team when prospects need referrals, they're helpful to put in powerpoint presentations, and can be a critical piece of any marketing website. Getting those sound bites from clients can be a challenge, however. As you can imagine, the challenge only gets bigger if your organization sells consumer products. Admittedly, the growth of social media has made finding people who are saying good things about your product, services or organization has gotten a little bit easier. But, it could be easier still.

Imagine a world where you had a plethora of client sound bites and quotes to share with the outside world. A marketers dream. No more tracking down sales reps to talk to their clients and mangle their words. Everything is already done for you. Well, if you're conducting client satisfaction surveys or consumer surveys, you should be gathering those sound bites already. You can even consider using website polls and website usability surveys to get those sound bites. Depending on the online questionnaire design, you may still need to contact the customer to get permission to use their quote, but the hard part is still done. You have the quote.

Question remains, how do you pull these customer quotes out of your survey web form? You make sure to add an additional comment box. Customers who love you will typically share those sentiments in the additional comments area, particularly if there are not other open ended questions in the survey for them to share why they like an organization.

Still wondering why your marketing department needs sound bites? Opinions for others is one of the driving forces behind purchasing decisions. If you want to learn more about the importance of customer reviews, check out this past post. It's also worth mentioning, this same idea can work for employee surveys and your HR department for recruiting purposes.