Survey Reports

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

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

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

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

I think I have always thought of myself as a "planner." While some people "fly by the seat of their pants," I am constantly thinking ahead to the consequences of my actions. The way I see it, this can be a good thing and a bad thing. Being a "planner" is bad because I am not as spontaneous as some of my friends. The "life of the party" is usually not someone who thinks ahead. However, it is a good thing at the same time, especially when operating in the corporate world, and specifically when designing online surveys.

I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about the importance of thinking ahead to reporting before designing a questionnaire online. I want to address a related issue: survey question logic. We on the Cvent Web Surveys Client Services team always strongly encourage our clients to use survey logic to their advantage. Lately, however, I have been getting lots of calls from clients who are having trouble with the logic they have applied. The reason for this is simple: too many clients do not plan or map out the logic they'll apply to their electronic survey. This lack of planning can cause numerous problems, most notably conflicting survey logic.

In the past two weeks, I have spoken with two clients who applied both branch logic and advanced logic to their online surveys. Both of these clients called because they were concerned there was a technical issue which was prohibiting the logic from functioning as it should. "But, I set up my branch logic correctly, and I know that my advanced logic should be working fine too, so what is wrong?" In both cases, the problem was the clients had applied branch logic which conflicted with the advanced logic, and the survey system therefore did not know where to send survey respondents when they answered a question a particular way. "If only these clients had planned ahead and mapped out the survey logic before launching their surveys," I thought, "then this problem could have been avoided."

Moral of the story: Please take advantage of the wonderful survey logic functionality available with Cvent Web Surveys software. However, at the same time, make sure to plan ahead. Even if you are someone who generally "flies by the seat of your pants," when designing online survey questionnaires, you should be a "planner" for once.

Yes, you read right; we’re not talking about cloning people. But wouldn’t it be awesome if you could clone your electronic surveys? The advantages are endless. If you have an internet survey that has to be sent out to people who attended different conferences on different dates, the headers and welcome pages would be different – as would the responses coming in, but the questions and emails would be almost exactly the same. Or if there’s an old online survey, closed and archived years ago, but you’ve realized you need to send it out again – clone it!

The best part about cloning surveys is that you can still make changes to them – so if you were designing surveys with similar content for five different groups of people, you could create a basic survey with all the questions, headers, templates, security settings, etc. and make minor changes to each of them so that each group gets a customized online web survey, but you only spend a fifth of the time.

When you clone a survey form, all information except the people added to its targeted list, gets carried over. So the next time you spend hours adding complicated branch and pipe survey question logic to an online questionnaire, worrying all the time that you will have to do it again and again, you can breathe a little easy. You always have the option to clone a survey irrespective of whether it’s in Test mode, Active, Closed or even Archived. Once you’ve done the work, you will never have to do it again.

So go ahead and clone your next survey – send it out to different people, generate different reports for each of them – you can even have one as anonymous and the other collecting contact information from respondents. As for cloning people, that debate will rage on.

Cvent provides you simple survey tips as best practices that you can follow while working on your electronic survey project to ensure that the project is flawless. Mentioned below are some survey form best practice tips that will help you achieve this.

Anonymous Survey: If you are creating an anonymous survey, please carefully consider the fact that you will not be able to link the responses that you collect to any of the respondents on your targeted list. As soon as a respondent clicks on a link in your online survey email, that person is removed from your targeted list and all of his or her contact information is removed as well. When you run survey reports for an anonymous survey form, the respondents will be identified by unique response numbers that are not linked to any respondent contact information. Respondent contact information is removed from the response for a particular anonymous survey, however it remains in your Cvent address book.

Removing Identity Confirmation Page: You can also create a collect respondent contact information survey and hide the identity confirmation page from your respondents so that the survey appears anonymous to your online survey respondents. However, for this functionality to work in your electronic survey, respondents must access the survey via a link in an email survey invitation. If the respondents are coming through the generic website link, they must go through the identity confirmation page, as there is no way to know who is responding.

Brand your company: As a valued Cvent Customer, we have activated the custom header feature in your account for a custom online survey design. Please take advantage of your ability to customize the headers on your welcome page and survey body pages to include your own images, banners and logos.

Be clear about privacy protections: People are more comfortable sharing information on the internet if they know how it will be used. The welcome page or the first page of the survey is the place to include information about how you will be using people's survey responses. Are they anonymous? Confidential? Shared with others? A university human subjects statement, if needed, would go here.

Use Page Breaks: We recommend putting a maximum of 5-6 questions on each survey page in order to keep the page lengths short. Not only does keeping each page short help reduce the likelihood that a respondent will time out, but adding page breaks helps you to collect partial responses. Anytime a respondent clicks on a "Next" button, the responses entered previous to that button are saved. This ensures that any respondents who exit the online web survey before hitting the "Finish" button will be able to go back in and answer the remainder of the questions to complete the survey.

Progress Indicator Bar: Use a progress indicator bar to allow your respondents to see where they are in the survey and to inform them when they have completed the survey.

Survey Logic: Where possible, drill down for more information. The logic in the Cvent Web Surveys system makes this very easy to do. If someone selects a negative answer choice, add a sub question to probe them for details. Use branch logic to create paths within your survey that are only applicable to one group of respondents. Pipe logic allows you to personalize your survey by pulling an answer from a previous question into the question text of a follow-up question. Lastly, advanced survey question logic can be used to make a question visible to a respondent when specific criteria are met. These criteria can be based on respondent contact information, custom contact fields, or questions in the survey. When you are applying advanced logic, you can also turn on link logic, so that respondents only see certain answer options for one question, depending on how they responded to a previous question in the survey.

Have your respondents market your survey: Activate the survey invitation forwarding feature to allow your online survey respondents send an email invitation to friends or colleagues at the completion of the survey. The contact information collected will be automatically added to your address book for future surveys.

From Name in the emails: Always use a recognizable From Name in your emails as this drives your respondents to open the email. This is very important because without opening the email, your respondents will not be able to take the survey.

Use Multiple Email Campaigns: Send targeted email marketing messages to your audience in order to help increase survey response rates. Within one survey, you can send out different messages to different groups of people by segmenting your invitee list. This functionality allows you to specify the From Name, From Email Address, Subject Line of the email, and body of the email. Take advantage of this functionality and manipulate these variables in order to increase the open rate of your survey emails and your response rates.

We often get asked, "What is a good survey design?" All of these survey best practice tips are components to keep in mind when designing a questionnaire to ensure quality survey data. Watch out for more tips coming soon...

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

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

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

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

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

When performing a market research study for clients in certain marketplaces, it is important to remember the competition. If, for example, you were doing a customer market research survey for a fast-food restaurant, Burger One, you would want to gauge survey respondents’ feelings about the competition as well as your client.

You might ask restaurant customer satisfaction questions like:


If respondents frequent Burger One and four other fast-food restaurants, that gives you insight into the survey data provided. If respondents only frequent Burger One, that is helpful to know as well. Take this example of how survey results can be applied to the restaurant's over all marketing strategy:


On the other side of this equation is what Burger One's loyal customer base thinks. If customers who only eat fast-food at Burger One express no interest in the new sandwich, it may not be the best possible sandwich to launch. However, if respondents who frequent competitors more often than Burger One express high levels of interest in the new sandwich, it could spell an opportunity for Burger One to gain new business.

It’s best to analyze market research from all angles when launching a new product – there are multiple factors at play.

If you follow the bloggers on the Cvent Web Survey blog, you know we emphasize survey reporting concerns throughout the entire questionnaire project life-cycle.  This post outlines five general sections that comprise a good report or presentation for a survey research project.  By following this outline, you can be sure that you have a thorough summary of your research objectives, processes and results all in one place at the conclusion of your survey project.

Executive Summary
This is the "drive-by" version of the entire survey project.  It contains a brief summary of your main points, and predominately consists of broad research findings.  You can also think of this as the audience takeaway section: imagine if people had just five minutes to hear your results, and then had to make decisions based upon what they heard.  Include essential, bottom-line insights from your survey project here (and not much else).

Introduction/Background
In this section, you introduce your study, including its purpose, concepts, rationale and variable descriptions (where appropriate).  This is also the place to provide all the background information, as well as any prior research findings/citations upon which your current study is based.  If you have specific hypotheses, they can be placed here after you’ve established rationale.

Methodology
This is the part of the report where you get dirty with the details of how you went about designing and conducting your survey.  Descriptions of survey sampling procedures, survey question and response option/scale design, data collection activities and timelines all belong here.

Results
In the survey results section of your report or presentation, you provide all the survey findings.  This includes detailed tables, charts and other selected graphics that clearly explain what the data say, and can be quite extensive depending on how many survey questions (and research questions) you have.

Conclusion/Discussion/Recommendations
These sections can of course be listed separately, but I’ll group them together here for our general descriptive purposes.  This is where you take the step from findings to decisions.  You’ve detailed your results; now you draw conclusions, discuss anything that might have affected the research or your path forward, and make recommendations about where to go next based on the data.

Using Cvent’s Web Survey tool, you can choose to send your survey emails manually or setup a specific date and time for the emails to go out.

Manual Send is ideal to send emails to specific invitees from the target list. As you get the option to select:

1. Respondents by choosing which Contact Group the email needs to be sent to
2. Respondents that have not received the email before.
3. Manually enter the search details to search for particular respondent(s)
4. You can click on the Search Button to search for all respondents that have been added to this targeted list
Auto Send on the other hand is ideal to send out mass emails to every contact in the target list on a specific date and time. This feature is perfect to send out reminder email survey invitations to respondents who have not yet completed the online questionnaire or send confirmation emails to completed respondents thanking them for their time and feedback.


Along with these options, there are various other features that you can choose from in the Cvent email survey tool:

1. What format do you want to use to send this email?
Choose from both HTML and plain text or only plain text. If both HTML and plain text are selected, an invitee will receive either the HTML message or plain text message, depending on their email settings.

2. Click Tracking
A way to track which links are being clicked in HTML emails. You can run reports to determine which survey invitation emails and links are getting the most traffic. Turning on Click Tracking enables tracking in your HTML emails.

3. CC Option
Sending to a CC email address is available in all survey email templates. When the CC email recipient takes the survey, the primary contact’s information and email address will be pre-populated within the survey.

To use all these features for your organizations benefit. Sign up for a Free Trial Account now!

Increasing survey response rates is a major goal of most survey builders and market researchers. There's an art and a science to increasing campaign response rates whether it's an email marketing campaign or an online market research study. I wanted to share some of my tips for how to increase survey response rates:

• Make the email survey invitation from names easy to recognize. You can do this by including an individual's name within the organization that's well known (such as the CEO or if it's a client survey, the name of their sales rep). You can also use the organization's name, or both. For example, I'm subscribed to a few MarketingProf's newsletters. When they send out emails they include the same person's name and their organizations name so it looks like this: Anne, MarketingProfs. I recognize it everytime, and since I enjoy their newsletter, I made sure to open the email.

• Keep subject line's compelling, but short. The subject line and the From Name are the two most critical pieces to get your email opened. Try to keep your subject lines to 35 characters or less. You don't need to put the entire email in the subject line, but you do need to include enough information to make the recipients open the survey email.

• Create an attractive survey invitation. Studies have shown that well done HTML email messages get better response rates than plain text emails. With HTML you have the opportunity to include images, change font sizes, bold text, etc. Take advantage of this chance. It's one more way to get people to click through to your survey!

• Send personalized survey invitations. Personalizing your emails, even something as simple as including the recipient's name in the greeting, will return a higher response than a generic message. It creates a personal touch, and makes the recipient feel like someone took the time to send them a personal message (even though your email survey tool did it for you).

• Introduce the survey. Let the participants know why they should participate in your survey. If they don't understand why their opinion is important to your survey findings, why would they want to take the time to fill it out?

• How long will the survey take? Not setting expectations in the beginning for survey length leads to low response rates and high abandonment rates. Not what you want to see. If you don't let people know how long it will take to fill out your online survey, they're going to assume you're hiding something about how long it is. Tell them it will take X minutes or the survey is only Y questions long. Definitely be honest, if you lie here, you're going to hurt your future chances of getting those respondents to complete your next online survey questionnaire.

• Remind your survey sample that their responses will be kept confidential. This is particularly important for surveys about uncomfortable topics. For example, you created a poll for a public opinion survey to see how your population feels about an emotional topic such as abortion. If you don't keep the information confidential, you probably will not get honest feedback. Same thing goes with employee questionnaires, they should always be kept confidential and anonymous. Not keeping responses confidential will definitely hurt your response rate, as well as the validity of the data.

• Offer an incentive. Offering incentives is a proven method for increasing survey response rates. But this method doesn't work if you don't let people know about it up front. Put it in your email, put it on the welcome page of the survey, then make sure to follow up. Again, if you drop the ball here, the chances of that survey respondent completing your online survey form in the future is drastically reduced.

• Always say Thank You! Remember when your mom always made you write thank you notes when you got presents or cards from people for holidays and birthdays? It was because people like to feel their effort is noticed and appreciated. Same idea here, it's nice to just get a short note thanking them for their time. After all, survey respondents are doing you a favor.

• Don't over email your contact list. This is very important. You shouldn't be inviting the same people to complete your online surveys every month. It's important to segment your list using whichever survey sampling method that works best for your surveys to avoid email list fatigue. Make sure that you're coordinating with other campaigns as well. Just because you know they're different initiatives you're emailing about, your contact's wont necessarily see it that way. If you begin sending emails too frequently, contacts are going to just delete your email and never open it, opt out or report you as a spammer.

Have a tip that I missed? I'd love to hear it!

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!

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.

I’ve written in the past that it’s best to use probability-based sampling techniques for your employee, market research or consumer survey samples whenever possible.  One of these techniques is called stratified sampling.  It is used when you expect that your population is heterogeneous (different) and that the survey results could vary greatly based upon certain subgroup characteristics.  If you are particularly interested in subgroup analysis within your survey sample, using a stratified sample can increase the accuracy of your results and reduce error estimates.  Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you are interested the television watching habits of American citizens, and you know (from anecdotal evidence or previous theory) that television watching varies widely by gender.  Since you know that males and females have disparate television watching habits, you want to select a sample whose results will accurately reflect the habits and responses for males and females independently.

What you do is first divide the population into mutually exclusive subgroups (or “strata”), and then take a random sample from each of the subgroups.  Using our gender example, you would divide the population into two groups (male and female), then take a random sample from your male and female subgroups, respectively.  You will be able to be more confident in what you say about your results than if you used a simple random sample from the overall population.

Private businesses tend to guard findings from their research efforts very closely.  In some instances, where significant investment dollars and time were spent on sampling frames and reporting, this makes sense.  It's nice to have proprietary research at your disposal to impress clients and customers, and internal employee survey results, for example, may be reserved for senior leaders.

But in most cases, I suggest sharing your survey results with as many people as possible.  The benefits outweigh the perceived drawbacks.  After all, most survey research comes from of a specific point-in-time sample, and whatever narrow edge you may get from keeping the results private will be short-lived.

At minimum, you should share the results of your survey with respondents themselves.  People like to know what they're a part of (and why).  In fact, offering to provide respondents with survey results has been shown to increase response rates! 

It's a great idea to set up partnerships with community leaders before you even send out your community attitude survey.  Publicize your organization and your efforts toward being proactive.  Let your community know that you value them and are interested in feedback and suggestions about the process.  Create anticipation and eagerness to both complete questionnaires and receive the results after the survey is completed.

You can also organize a press release highlighting selected findings from your survey.  This can be posted on your website and in other locations (external websites, community hotspots, etc.).   Call local news organizations if you think the results would appeal to their audiences.  Tell all who will listen how you've made original contributions to the knowledge of your industry, and how you will improve business practices based on your results.

At the beginning of the week, I shared the first 10 tips from the Meetings & Convention article, Survey Science: How to craft more effective attendee evaluations, in Part I and Part II of this post. The first ten event survey tips include several of your typical online survey best practices: set clear survey objectives at the beginning, create clear survey questions, think about question flow, vary your question types, etc. While the last five tips shared in the article are still good online survey tips, they do focus a little more on event and conference surveys.

11. Avoid the spam folder. Once upon a time, spam folders weren't something paper survey designers worried about. It's a different story now with email survey invitations. Nat Estes, an account executive here at Cvent, shared his tips in this article: Avoid using all caps in the subject line, avoid the word "free" and the use of lots of dollar signs or exclamation points. These tips apply to both sending reminder survey invitations as well as the initial invite.

12. Offer incentives. We've talked about how incentives tend to boost survey response rates in the past. Offers can include free products/samples, cash, gift cards and drawings, or it can even go the route of sharing the survey report after the survey is over.

13. Use pre-meeting surveys. Post-attendee surveys are no brainers at this point, but they don't always tell the whole story. Think of this survey questionnaire example, the post-seminar survey shows that the majority of the attendees have a positive impression of a product. The planner doesn't know if their impression was changed because of the seminar, or everyone already had a positive impression before the event. The reverse could be true as well. The majority of registrants may have had a positive impression before, and after the event had a negative impression. Something went really wrong! But if you don't ask pre-event survey questions, you're not going to be able to track the change. Not to mention the benefits of asking other pre-event survey questions about what they want to get out of event, etc.

14. Use regret event surveys. As a leader in the event management space, this tip is near and dear to our hearts here at Cvent. Most people make the mistake of just forgetting about those people who say they can't come, "They don't matter." This is definitely the wrong approach. Every planner should want to know why people aren't coming to their event. Regret event surveys should be kept short, only a few questions. The questions should try to find out if the invitee is still interested in the topic or product, why they can't come (schedule conflict, not in the budget, etc.).

15. Conclusions? Don't Jump! Lots of us look at survey results and draw conclusions about the entire target population based on a small survey sample. If your event survey has low response rates, don't make drastic change's just because that's what the survey data pointed to. Think about how representative the sample was, and if the changes make sense.

Hopefully everyone will consider asking attendees to give feedback through survey questionnaires or comment cards after the event. If you get really adventurous, you can set up survey kiosks at the event using a kiosk survey system (My suggestion? Cvent.) to catch attendees while your event is still top of mind.

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.

Yes! You read it right! You can use Cvent’s survey tool to conduct online quizzes and tests. What makes it possible is our fantastic feature called "Scoring."

The online survey scoring feature allows you to assign scores to individual questions and answers within the online poll. As a survey designer or quiz builder, you can decide the maximum score you want to assign to a particular question and further divide it to different answer options. 

 
That’s not all! Within the Cvent online survey platform you can also run reports to pull up average or individual survey respondent scores. We have two reports dedicated solely to Scoring.

1. Scoring Details by Respondents: This report returns scoring details by respondent for completed responses within the specified date range. Each online survey response is on its own page and identified by response number, name, and email address. For anonymous surveys, only the response number is displayed. The total score of the response and the total possible score for the survey is listed at the top. For each respondent, the question, answer, and score is listed.

2. Scoring Details for All Respondents: This report returns scoring details and a list of all responses for selected questions within the specified date range. The question number and the survey question text are listed at the top. The average score for each column is displayed at the bottom. Each response is identified by number, name, total score, and the score for each selected question.

This feature is equally useful for educational institutions as well as business institutions. In today’s times, all organizations want to retain the best and most efficient man power; and constantly conducting training surveys and course evaluation tests for employees. I do not recommend any different. But why waste paper, when the same can be achieved online!

Say you want to send out a particularly important website link in your survey emails leading to your website, a sponsor’s website or any other page on the internet with information you really want the respondents to visit. Now, you’ve designed different emails, but are wondering which one will be most effective – how do you find out? Click Tracking.
Here's another scenario. A sponsor is funding your online survey and wants to know how many people are actually clicking on their image and going to their website. They want to be able to track the ROI on their sponsorship – how will you do this? Click Tracking.

Click tracking is a powerful new feature in the Cvent email survey tool that is of invaluable importance to anyone who puts in website links in their survey emails. How does it work? When someone clicks on a link in an email, the information is first sent to Cvent and then the respondent is directed to the URL for the link.  Using click tracking, we can track how many times a link was clicked on uniquely, or in total, and at what date and time. Use any of the reports below to get exactly the data you want about who clicks on the link, when they click on it and how many times they clicked:


So the next time you decide to put in a link into a survey email, remember, it is not just a link but a vast source of information that lets you know your survey respondents' preferences, interests and usage. Happy Tracking!

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

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

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