Survey Management Software

There 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.

In a paper survey, a question asking for an email address or a phone number normally looks like this:

Even though respondents would not intentionally put in incorrect information here, you have no control when a respondent who just wants to get to the next page in a hurry puts in random text, which is useless to you. The problem becomes a little more real in cases when survey creators ask for figures like:

How do you make sure everyone enters numbers and currencies in the same format? Some might put the answer in words and make any calculations on the data (such as average income) extremely difficult. This is where Cvent Web Surveys software offers you a massive advantage over paper surveys. For your open ended (non-choice) questions, you can specify whether respondents put in Number/Currency/General text/Phone number/Email address. Additionally when selecting formats such as number, you can specify whether a number should be greater/less than a certain number, or even lie in a specific range.

You can even design your open ended questions to take answers in date or date and time format. Additionally, you can decide whether the date should be on or after or on or before a certain date. In other words, you ensure that respondents enter in exactly what they’re supposed to. If you decide to put in a calendar asking people what date they will attend a multi-day conference, you can make sure each respondent can only select one of those three dates. You can even make this question required so survey respondents can’t skip it and move forward. You will always get exactly the information you need and all of your responses will be meaningful.

This power of being able to control what responses you receive is not limited to open ended questions only; for multiple response questions you can determine the maximum and/or minimum number of options that respondents can choose.

Over the past year, I have run into many new Cvent Web Surveys clients with the same issues or problems with their employee satisfaction surveys.  Most of the clients have the same story: in the past, using a different online survey solution, they released an employee satisfaction survey and were not able to follow up in a timely manner. 

The workplace employee surveys were conducted in a number of different fashions: paper-based, with different online survey tools, and even website survey forms.  All of these previous methods had one tragic flaw: reporting.  The survey administrators waited untill the survey was closed to run survey reports or review the paper surveys.  The problem inherit in this approach is time.  They would wait weeks before pulling reporting and discovering an employee had a problem in the workplace or in the case of paper based methods, sometimes months before they scanned the surveys.

When they finally discovered a problem that needed attention they would act, but what they discovered was:

Both of these resolutions are horrible.  If the employee solves the problem themselves they feel the organization is powerless and does not care about their situation.  If they quit, we all know that it costs 10 times more to train a new employee than to retain the old one.

A simple solution to these problems is a feature that Cvent's online survey solution embodies: Triggered Email Alerts.  Most other survey tools out there do not contain this feature.

The beauty of this feature is the survey administrator can have an email alert sent to whomever they designate; Human Resource Manager, Employee Liaison, etc...  In this manner as soon as an employee answers the appropriate question and then clicks finish on the survey an email is sent to the designated person, who in turn can then immediately follow up with the employee and solve the problem.  Thus, boosting employee retention rates, making them feel like a needed part of the organization, instilling employee loyalty, and finally creating a better work environment.

The triggered email alert feature in Cvent's survey solution solved these client's employee retention nightmares and resulted in a better workplace and a more cost effective future.

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.

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.

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:


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!

We 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?

A survey conducted by research firm BIA/Kelsey found that 9% of small and midsize business use Twitter for marketing purposes. An earlier survey by online marketing resource, MarketingProfs, showed that 84% of small businesses expect they will increase their use of Twitter and other social media outlets in the future. That same report also takes a look at how large businesses - including Dell and Disney - are using Twitter to reach devoted fans and potential customers. Companies large and small have begun using Twitter. I find this list of companies, although old, to be quite impressive!

At Cvent Web Surveys, we often recommend the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets to reach a wider audience for your web survey. We've often found it to be most useful in monitoring and acted fast to ensure customer satisfaction. Bad news travels fast these days, and you have to be ready to react. 

If you are distributing your electronic survey in multiple channels (social media, your public-facing website, and through Cvent's email survey software platform) it is important to track where people are coming from. By analyzing where your respondents are coming from, you can more efficiently distribute your surveys in the future or weight responses. This is especially important if you are paying to advertise your survey - perhaps on traditional banner display advertising, website pop-ups, or search ads such as Google AdWords.

Cvent Web Surveys software provides two ways of tracking and analyzing this data. First, we have our "Reference ID". Reference IDs are a short string of text added to the end of your survey URL – "twitter", "yelp", or "google" – for instance, to allow you to track what other website "referred" the survey respondent to complete your online survey. These strings of text will then allow you to use the Cvent's built-in survey reporting to see, analyze, and slice and dice the information to give a clear view of where the survey respondents are coming from. 

Second, Cvent was proud to announce in our last quarterly product enhancement, the addition of Google Analytics integration. Google Analytics is Google's free tool for tracking visitors to your websites. The integration with Cvent Web Surveys software is extremely simple to set up and is a fantastic addition for our clients who use and love Google Analytics.

Now while I heartily recommend using social media as a tool to get your survey in front of more people, there is one thing that is crucial to remember: many businesses block social media websites. Robert Half International, an IT recruiting firm, reported 54% of companies completely block access to sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and even business-oriented LinkedIn. This means, if you're trying to attract those of us who work, you may be facing a higher hurdle than you imagined.

One thing that I think people often overlook when picking out online survey software is the team behind the product. Here at Cvent Web Surveys, we take pride in our customer care team. With today’s blog post, I wanted to share some great news – Cvent’s Client Services team is the winner of the 2009 International Service Excellence Award for Contact Center by the Customer Service Institute of America (CSIA)!

The CSIA is the body delegated by the International Council of Customer Service Organizations (ICCSO) to manage the International Service Excellence Awards. These awards are the world’s peak customer service awards with leading customer service organizations and individuals around the globe being nominated in a variety in categories to recognize their commitment customer service excellence.

We are proud and honored to have received this award. Having been a member of the Cvent Web Surveys Client Services team, I can attest to the level of service we provide.

Cvent is not just a survey software company – we are consultative, and pledge every effort to your survey success and satisfaction. We want our clients to get the data they need, in the way they need to see it. We work with our clients – hand in hand – to ensure no question goes unturned!

To read more about Cvent’s Support and Training, visit our website. Cvent’s Client Services team is available by phone and email 24 x 5 – and we offer weekend support hours as well! In fact, 90% of calls into our client services line are answered in less than 90 seconds, and we have the highest ratio of service personnel to clients in industry.

When choosing an online survey application, customer care cannot be overlooked. In this economy, utilize expert advice to increase responses and data quality and demand more from your survey partner!

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!

There is sufficient evidence from prior studies suggesting it is a good idea to keep respondents informed of their progress during internet surveys.  Respondents may suffer from fatigue or irritation, and may abandon web survey forms – even if they have only a few questions left to complete the questionnaire.  This may lead researchers and project managers to adjust their online questionnaire design by reordering questions to include “important” or sensitive items earlier, possibly causing more survey respondents to abandon mid-stream.

There are various survey design techniques that can be employed to keep respondents informed of their progress, especially within electronic surveys.  One way is to design web surveys so the entire survey web form can be viewed on a single page; but while this allows respondents to scroll down and see the total length of a questionnaire, this setup is less than ideal. 

Another method is to include words or symbols in headers and transitions that notify progress (such as section numbers, the words "next" and "finally," etc.)  By far however, the most popular and effective method of keeping respondents in the loop is to include a progress bar. 

A progress bar is a graphic or set of words that let respondents know how far along they are in the survey process.  Progress bars are especially useful for shorter, instant surveys, since answering only a few questions will show that they are through a significant portion of the questionnaire.

Cvent Web Surveys software makes it easy to include a progress bar as part of an effective online survey design.  You can even select among three options (percent complete, page x of y, or a bar graphic that fills as respondents move through the survey).

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?

When it comes to marketing, understanding what information your audience wants to see is very important. In the Cvent survey management system, there is an option for Click Tracking. This part of the email marketing tool is great.

Here is how it works: When you create an eNewletter in Cvent, you can embed active links. These links can then be tracked through the Cvent Web Surveys reporting engine.  Unbelievable. Imagine being able to see what articles are important to your readers by running a simple report.  This gives you the insight needed to target specific groups more effectively.

Vocus, a leading provider of on-demand public relations management software, released the results of a recent public relations and marketing survey they conducted. The survey sample was made up of 1,800 marketing and PR professionals. Among Vocus's key findings was the response of 80% respondents that social media would be a key focus for them in 2010. Vocus shared that they believe social media has been a catalyst for the change in the PR industry, where PR is becoming increasingly more important.

How is the PR industry dealing with the fact they're being asked to do more with less? Investing in technology. Sounds like a familiar story, right? Marketers turn to email survey tools to send out email survey invitations instead of having to manually send all email marketing messages through Outlook. Accounting departments use software to help them manage finances instead of the old way of paper, pencils and ledgers. Technology is often used to help professionals manage their work loads, and PR industry is doing the same thing.

Here are some of the other key findings Vocus shared from it's marketing survey:


You can learn more about the survey results by viewing the recording of webinar Vocus hosted yesterday, PR Planning Considerations for 2010.

It is important not to post a survey online publicly if you need a response from a specific target group. There are several ways to do this. You can, and should, make the survey web site link a "hidden URL," meaning it's not linked anywhere else on your web site and not found through Internet searches.

Include the link only in the email to the targeted group. You can ensure survey respondents only respond once by using the survey security settings within your online survey software application. If you are concerned about the content of your survey being copied, it is simple enough to lock the code to prevent copying and pasting. It goes without saying that someone who is determined to copy the content will find a means to do so, but there’s no point in making it easy for them!

If you are afraid that content of your online web survey will leak, you need to take every precaution to prevent it. Selecting a web survey company who houses their servers in a SAS-70 environment will give you the highest level of security. If security is important to your organization or your client, make sure to ask your survey company about data security. There may be times when a client wants a completely secret survey, and therefore online surveying may not be the best choice. However, there are high-level security features like encrypted connections if you decide to forge ahead with an online survey. For most surveys online, the standard security precautions will prove more than enough for your purposes.

Some people still believe in using paper surveys instead of designing online questionnaires, sending personalized email survey reminders and utilizing electronic survey methods. Sometimes I have to wonder, Why? Some of the reasons people claim they want to use paper questionnaires instead of web survey forms is because they think it's cheaper. That's not usually the case.

Consider this: Online survey response rates are typically hire than response rates on a direct mail survey. Online survey research designed well will yeild response rates from 20-40%. Let's be conservative and say the paper survey you plan to send out will get a 20% response rate as well. I looked up the cost of a ream of standard multipurpose paper (500 sheets) on Office Depot's website: $7.09. A black ink cartridge for a laser printer is $77.99 and will print on a maximum of 2,200 pages. Most printed surveys will be kept to three to five pages, longer than that your survey form looks over whelming from the very beginning and is going to lower your response rate. This is how that cost quickly adds up:


Keep in mind these costs don't include the staff time of stuffing envelopes to send out the direct mail survey, or the staff time of manually entering in all of the responses into some sort of data collection software, be it Excel or a survey software tool. You can figure it will take an intern a week to send out 5,000 survey responses and another week for them to do the data entry for the 1,000 responses. So that's an additional cost of $600 to $800 for one survey campaign. What if you want to do a quarterly customer satisfaction survey? You're looking at an annual cost of over $25,000.

For me, that would be enough reason alone to look into an online survey software application. With a web survey tool, you have the ability to not only send one invitation, but reminders survey emails as well. Sending reminders, as we've mentioned before, can drastically increase your survey response rate. My suggestion: don't fall for the myth that paper surveys are cheaper than online surveys. It's definitely the other way around.

The benefits of online and email surveys are numerous. This is not to discount other survey methods but merely to point out the advantages.

1. Cost savings. It is fairly inexpensive to email survey questionnaires, once you have the email addresses of your target audience.

2. Ability to attach pictures or sound files. You can attach or embed necessary files in the online web survey – you cannot show someone a picture over the phone, or send an audio file easily through direct mail.

3. More honest responses. It’s been shown that respondents are more likely to reveal truthful information online than to an in-person interviewer. Think about how much people reveal through personal blogs and web sites, and this makes sense.

4. Limitless possibilities. With certain kinds of survey software, you can control what types of questions survey respondent can access, show additional questions if they answer a certain question in a particular way, and more. This can be done with paper surveys but it’s a bit more cumbersome and requires written directions: If you answered 'No' to the above question, please explain.

5. Fast results. As I discussed yesterday, the results of online surveys are very rapid, which saves researchers time and money.

Technology has come a long way – ten years ago, the majority of surveys were not online, and that has certainly changed. Now market researchers are using this format more often than not for at least one aspect of gathering feedback. Whether you're looking to conduct a product enhancement survey or an internal business survey of employees, web survey forms have their place in your internet research process.

Designing survey invitations so that they render correctly in the person inbox is critical. However, with every email client, from Hotmail to Gmail to Lotus Notes to Outlook, have their own rules for rendering HTML email. In the past, I've given you updates on changes Gmail has made that's effected email rendering. Today, I wanted to share some tips to ensure you're creating emails that will look good in Outlook 2007. With Outlook 2003, the general rule of thumb is if it looks good in Internet Explorer, it will look good in Outlook. Outlook 2007 doesn't play by that rule.

Depending on your target market and who you expect your survey respondents to be, you may care more about these email survey design tips. If you are a business-to-business organization, most of your email marketing list is probably going to have business emails on it as opposed to freemail domains. If you're a business-to-consumer organization, you may care more about the rules Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail use to render your emails.

Next time you're sitting down to work on your email survey design, keep these Outlook 2007 tips in mind:

Keep styles in line: This is a general email marketing best practice because a lot of email clients don't support embedded CSS. Outlook 2007 does support embedded CSS, but not all properties work the way they should when their rendered. To avoid running into these problems, just keep your styles in line.

Avoid animated files: Animated .gif files are not going to work in Outlook 2007. Instead of animating, the email will just render with the first image in the animation. As long as you're happy with this first image of the animated .gif file, then it's not going to detract from your email message. Just know that when you go to test your email survey invitation in Outlook 2007, nothing's going to happen.

Specify accurate table widths: This is another email marketing best practice for designing online survey invitations. You should use tables to design HTMl emails. If you have multiple columns and your column widths don't add up to the width you specified for the overall size of the table, you're probably going to run into issues when someone tries to read your email in Outlook 2007. To avoid this, just make sure you're doing your math correctly, or use percentages instead of pixels (just make sure you're adding to 100% not 101%).

Use Alt tag: In Outlook 2007, images are blocked by default. While some users may chose to turn this off and have images automatically show up - you shouldn't count on this. To avoid survey respondents from having no idea what your email says, be sure to include alternative text for all images.

No Forms: If you're trying to embed a survey form in an email message, it's not going to work. Outlook 2007 disables embedded forms. Instead of embedding the form, include a link to your electronic survey hosted either on your website or your survey software company's website.

For the most part, these email survey design tips shouldn't be that hard to follow. In fact, if you're using Cvent Web Surveys software, our email survey tool will keep some of these tips in mind for you - and you don't need to do anything. What do I mean? Our easy-to-use HTML editor automatically codes the email for you, so when you insert a picture, it's going to ask you for alternative text. When you are changing background colors or applying different rules to headings, it will make sure to code the in line style versus embedding CSS. If you're not using an email survey software tool that keeps email marketing design best practices in mind, you're going to need to do the research yourself to find out what different clients allow - or don't allow - in emails.

So, it is clear that Cvent Web Surveys software is always getting better. Remember that 80 percent of the changes made in your accounts with our quarterly product releases are enhancements that were requested by current clients. However, it is not only the online survey application that is consistently changing for the better. Here at Cvent, we are also constantly rethinking and revamping our training classes to serve our clients the best that we possibly can.

I wanted to write a post today just to let you know we recently rewrote the script used for the Survey Creation and Management training class. Another member of the Web Surveys Client Services team and I spent about a week meeting with the Senior Vice President of Client Services and Relationship Management to completely revamp this training class in order to better suit your needs. Although the material covered in the training class is by and large the same as it was before, it is our firm belief that the Survey Creation and Management class is now easier to understand and follow than it had been previously.

Just to reiterate, if you recently signed a contract with Cvent, it is highly recommended that you sign up for this class. Survey Creation and Management is offered every Wednesday from 2:30 PM EST to 4:30 PM EST. We also offer separate classes for our clients in the UK and Australia. The class for UK clients is every Wednesday from 8:30 AM to 10:30 AM GMT. The Australia class is offered Thursdays from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM Australian Eastern Time. Finally, you can also listen to our recorded training classes if your schedule does not permit you to attend the live training.

In summary, if you are a new survey client or a new user of the Cvent system, please attend the Survey Creation and Management training class at your earliest convenience. Since this class goes over how to set up your first electronic survey in Cvent, how to import your contacts in bulk into the system, and how to send your survey invitations with the Cvent email survey tool, it is extremely beneficial for you to take as soon as possible.

Just because you find correlation in your data when analyzing survey results does not mean there is causation. I find this is a common mistake in lots of survey reports when someone is new to survey research or conducting data analysis. Take this example:


Some people see this connection as a causation. Customers are satisfied because you contact them frequently to make sure everything is going well. The problem is, it's not a causation. Causation are extremely hard to prove because you cannot control every factor. For example, you may split your territory by industry and your solution suits some industries better than others. Or clients who are really satisfied simply use the product more often so the customer success managers reach out to them more frequently, because they are more likely to have questions. While those who use the product less have less to be satisfied about and may feel they are wasting those budget dollars.

To be able to prove causation, you need to be able to rule out all other possible explanations for the connection. As you can imagine, that's almost impossible to do since we do not control outside factors influencing the survey respondent or even the greater survey sample. Instead, when situations like these occur, we're seeing a correlation between two things. In my customer survey question examples, there's a correlation between how satisfied customers and how often they are contacted.

This principle does not only apply to customer survey research, it also applies to analyzing employee feedback forms, product surveys, market research and any other type of data collection and analysis.