Training Evaluation

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.

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!

Cvent offers a variety of Pre-Designed Survey Templates you can choose from for your first online web survey. These internet survey templates contain default questions, email, welcome and thank you text which you can utilize when designing a questionnaire. You can also choose from over 50 different graphical templates to suit the look and feel of your survey forms. Here’s a list of the different pre-created survey templates that you can use to build the base of your survey:


Besides this vast list of pre-designed questionnaires and graphical survey templates, Cvent also offers you a Question Library, which is filled with Customer Service, Demographics, Event, HR/Training, Marketing/Sales questions that you can utilize in your survey.

So! Go ahead and Sign up for an online web survey free trial account now and enjoy these á-la-carte features absolutely free.

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

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

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

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!

In today’s world a lot of organizations from various industries conduct surveys to get the feedback about their products or services. Responses collected from survey respondents are used to further improve the quality of the products or services.

But do the survey writers and builders have enough time to spend creating the surveys, running the survey reports, analyzing survey data and sending the presentation to their bosses for the review?

There is a solution to this: Cvent's Survey Professional Services Group. Cvent offers a variety of online survey surveys to get your survey campaigns up and running with minimal time and effort on your part.

Survey Building: Let Cvent turn your paper survey or list of questions into a professional online survey. Web survey services team can review your questions and responses, as well as add conditional logic to make sure your electronic survey is designed to capture accurate, reliable data points.

Graphic Design Services: The skilled designers on our survey design services team can create professional looking surveys that can match a desired look and feel, be consistent with your organization's branding, and even feature embedded media.

Summary and Analysis Reports: Surveys create a lot of data - combing through it to find the meaningful trends is time-consuming work. Cvent's Survey Professional Services Group takes the pain out of analyzing survey data, because we'll turn your piles of data into eye-catching, boardroom-ready reports that highlight the business intelligence that matters to you. The report looks great, and so will you.

How to get most out of your project?

Most people conducting surveys today are not trained survey experts. A little help from our online survey professional services enables you to get the most out of your project - even if it's your first survey.

Strategy Consultation: Not completely sure how best to use web based surveys in your organization? Talk to one of our experts to learn what kinds of questions and responses you should include to accomplish your organizational goals.

Question/Response Review and Commentary: Before you send personalized email survey invitations out into the world, let our Survey Professional Services Group review it and make recommendations to improve the quality of your survey data.

List Procurement and Response Generation: Cvent can connect you to your target demographic and build your survey sample list, helping you capture accurate, meaningful data.

Turnkey Project Management: At times it's best to leave things to the experts - talk to us about letting Cvent run your survey campaign from start to finish.

Bring yourself back to that crazy geometry teacher in high school. You know, the one that taught you all about derivatives and integrals (a.k.a. calculus class). We’ve all been in a situation where we find ourselves in classes where the instructor seems to be teaching something completely irrelevant.

You’re disengaged, confused, and inefficiently using your time.

In a high school math class this may have not been as big a problem, but when that time means dollars, you start to pay attention. Almost every organization has (or should have) some sort of training program for their new employees. From culture, to processes, to competitors, these weeks and sometimes even months are some of the most valuable for your employees. Training programs lay the foundation for what they will use every day at work. Ensure they will apply the knowledge learned by conducting training evaluation surveys. If you don't use tools such as new hire surveys to ensure they understand, how can you guarantee they will add value to your company? By conducting course evaluations and post-training surveys, you are able to identify and eliminate key problems in the training program and harvest ideas for improvement.

Surveys are used for academic purposes all the time. You probably jump to thinking about surveys being used for teacher evaluation forms and end of course evaluation surveys. However, teachers will build quizzes using online survey polling software tools. Using a quiz creator tool actually saves time because all the formatting and scoring are done for you, unlike traditional paper based test and quizzes.

The adoption of technology in classrooms has been growing. Teachers and professors know that they are competing for the attention of their students. Using technology to facilitate quizzes and tests gives teachers more time for planning by decreasing the time they spend creating quizzes, formatting them and grading. And because technology is becoming more and more present in the classrooms, your classroom may already have computers in it for students to take the quiz. Depending on your teaching style, creating take home quizzes that are basically polls online work too.

I remember when I was in school, professors would always complain that transferring grades from paper to their grading system took a long time. Not only was that a pain for professors, but as a student, I wanted to see my grades as soon as possible. With the added web polling or survey software benefit of being able to automatically send out emails updating students on their quiz scores. To me, that seems like one more reason to switch to online quizzes. If you're using web poll or survey software, instead of having to transfer grades form paper to computer, you need to just export quiz scores and import them to the grading system.

Not all your online poll software uses have to be for quizzes, however. I mentioned before teachers are competing for student's attention with technology becoming more prevalent in the classroom. Why not make a poll and use it during your next lecture? Opinion polls keep the classroom engaged and help to make your point.

The point? Don't pigeon hole education survey questionnaires to only being for sampling student evaluations and course evaluation surveys. They have many other applications to the entire education process.

When schedules are rushed and the pressure is building, it is easy to breeze through the set up of an online survey without much thought.  Just add the survey questions that your boss told you to ask and send out the survey invitations as quickly as possible.  However, it saves you time in the end to take the extra time when creating your survey.  I can tell you from conversations with survey designers who have rushed through their surveys, they end up grappling with reporting on survey results.  Had 10 minutes been spent thinking about the organization of their questions, and 20 minutes spent runing through the web survey in test mode to check out reports, hours of work could have been avoided.  Here are three quick steps to ensure your survey set-up is correct:

First of all, take a few minutes to think about the questionnaire's design - including the organization of survey questions.  For example, if you are creating a training survey evaluation, it is best to ask all the questions regarding the presenter and then move on to questions about the material, what the attendees learned and end with an open text box asking for suggestions for improvement.  Organizing your questions will actually decrease responder fatigue because they are focusing on one subject at a time, rather than going back and forth between topics.

Once you have the questions in the right order, look for any questions that are not relevant to all respondents.  If you have any questions which should not be answered by everyone, add survey question logic to your survey.  Whether you just change the formatting to include a few sub-questions or there is an entire branch of the survey only seen by a portion of respondents, this will make the survey experience as short as possible for all respondents.  Adding logic to your survey also makes reporting easier on you.  When looking at the results, you know that the questions regarding the cocktail hour with the speaker were only seen by those who participated in the activity.

Lastly, and most importantly, be sure to test your survey fully. This means filling it out a few times, even asking a colleague to do the same.  The first goal of this step is to ensure that the logics you have set up are working properly, but there is so much more!  Once you have collected 5 or more responses, go into the survey reports section and test out the reports.  The whole point of running a survey for data collection.  So you have to make sure you are collecting the data you set out to collect!  As mentioned earlier, interpreting and analyzing the survey data you collected can be easier when working with logic.  If you are in test mode and find that a question format is not returning the information you would like; make changes.  That is what test mode is for.  You do not even need to worry about the data you have collected in test mode.  We make it so easy to remove all test responses when activating your survey.

Even when you are down to the wire, try to take an extra 30 minutes and follow the steps listed above. However, if you need one final fail-safe to make sure your survey is set up correctly – give us a call!  Cvent's Web Surveys Client Services team members are happy to review your survey to make sure your questions are well organized, you are utilizing any necessary logics, and question formats appear to be correct.  Now, this review cannot take the place of you testing out the reports ahead of time, so don’t try to skimp out on that one!  But if you would like another set of eyes to give your survey one last look over, just let us know!  You can give us a call at 866.318.4357 or send in an email request for a survey review and we will get back to you within 24 hours.  

When it comes to losing weight or saving more money, one of the most daunting aspects is simply wrapping your head around where to start. With hundreds of books and celebrity “experts,” it’s easy to feel overwhelmed before you even begin.

Administering, writing and creating survey questionnaires is no different. Ask questions, send them out and let everybody respond? Sounds easy, right? Not always. What survey questions do you ask? How do you know what’s important to ask versus what’s going to produce a meaningless data point?

Just as people turn to financial advisers and personal trainers, Cvent's Web Survey software tool offers more than 170 expertly crafted survey questions and survey templates to help you overcome the inertia associated with getting the ball rolling on your next survey research projects. Our question library helps users create customer service satisfaction survey forms, write employee questionnaires or staff attitude surveys, design marketing survey templates, and more.

From this extensive library of questions, we have created 20 fully built survey templates including customer satisfaction survey templates, training evaluation samples and employee exit survey templates.

Although Cvent won’t take those first steps on the treadmill for you or stash those first few dollars in your proverbial piggy bank, we are able to leverage our extensive experience to help you initiate your first survey project with pre-built survey templates.

In the past, I've shared survey best practice tips for writing survey introductions - like the fact you should have one. But just like writing unbiased survey feedback questions can be tricky, so can writing survey questionnaire intros.

Survey intros aren't just standard, they're necessary. Why? Because if you don't tell a survey respondent what they will be answering questions about, you may find you have a lot of unqualified respondents in your survey sample. Does it make sense to have lawyers filling out a health care survey? Probably not. If you include some sort of introduction to the survey, either in the survey invitation or the welcome page, those lawyers will know the web based survey is not targeting them. Since they'll avoid your survey, you'll lower abandonment rates and the data collected will be more accurate.

What's the catch? Well, sometimes you can provide too much information in the introduction that will result in biasing your survey sample. Believe me, no survey creator wants that to happen. They spent a lot of time on questionnaire design and question writing, they don't want to bias their data. However, if you give too much information, it's the same as writing leading survey questions. You can also think of it as ruining the end of a book for a friend, or accidentally telling someone that the guy dies at the end of the movie. You don't want to ruin the end of the story any more than you want to share too much in the introduction.

It doesn't matter if you're conducting product feedback or consumer satisfaction surveys, this even applies to restaurant questionnaires and course evaluations, your survey should include a brief explanation of the project's purpose. Are you asking survey questions that measure customer experiences to improve employee training? Does your bank customer satisfaction survey aim to identify new services customers feel are missing? What about your professional development questionnaire, are you gauging the effectiveness of the training programs?

Always remember to keep your survey introduction short, no one wants to read a novel. But more importantly, you don't want to give away the cow. If you give away the cow, you may find your survey findings are less reliable than you'd like because you provided too much insight and basically led survey respondents down a specific way of thinking.

Most students these days have seen an education survey or completed a course evaluation or teacher evaluation form after a class, but are universities paying attention to what the results of the survey data collection means?

Tuitions have skyrocketed, suggesting student satisfaction levels should have increased as well. Are universities aware of how poor classrooms, faculty, staff and administration ratings can truly effect the return on the student, and more likely, the parents' investment? Perhaps universities should consider this part of their own investment.

Universities should use academic surveys and course evaluations as indicators to estimate the likelihood students will talk about their school in a good light, suggest their school to a friend and even... the likelihood of future donations as alumnus. Schools can literally calculate the possible ROI of education surveys. Here's an education survey example:

A private institution of 2,000 students with an average tuition is $20,000 roughly equates to a $40,000,000 business. Why risk the losing the potential for even more down the line with a poor university student experience survey that student believe will never be acted on? How much would you pay to protect that size business and make it part of your organizational culture?

Last week I explained the differences between branch logic and advanced logic when it comes to using Cvent's Web Survey software solution. What I didn't mention was our new link logic feature. This is probably my favorite of the new features we rolled out with our August Release. Here's how it works:

You're updating your training survey template and have always felt you needed separate sub-questions because you wanted to show different options based on which class someone took. If they took a professional development course on how to use excel versus a class on delivering effective sales pitches. Instead of having the same question twice with different options, you can now have a single question and tell the survey software which options to show based on a previous response.

Another good example of where you can use link logic is when you're asking demographic survey questions. If it's important to know which county someone lives in, you now have the ability to create one question and show only the counties that are applicable to the state selected.

Link logic is an addition to the advanced logic screen. It's very simple to set up. Here's a quick sample demographic survey question I set up with link logic:

Do you have a class of new hires starting soon? During the summer, many companies will bring in a class of recent college graduates and do all the training at once. Makes sense. It cuts down on training costs because you only are doing it once, not several times a year when you have one-off hires. But how do you evaluate those trainings? Depending on your organization, the structure of the training and the positions you're hiring for the answer to that question may be completely different. Some organizations may judge a training's success based on how much the new hires learned through tests and evaluations, other might judge training in six months based sale numbers.

These are good ways to evaluate training courses, but what about asking those being trained? Universities do it with end of course evaluations, professional development courses ask participants to complete professional development surveys after the class, even industry workshops ask attendees how they did.

A lot depends on your new hires, do they have the experience to recommend better training methods? Do they have enough industry knowledge to point out things you forgot? Chances are if you hired them, you think they have the smarts to answer these questions.

If you do this every year, you might think you have it down to a science, but there's always room for improvement. The best people to tell you how your training is going is the people you're training. People learn differently, and with changing technology, this is becoming even more true. Your training methods may work, but they could work better - you wont know unless you ask.

If you've used employee training surveys to evaluate your training programs, what insights have you learned to improve your next training session?

People argue for and against using progress bars in online surveys all the time. Personally, I think the length of the survey determines whether a progress bar is a good idea. I should point out here, length of the survey means total questions, not just the longest possible path a respondent may take. Sometimes when people use skip, branch and other advanced logic they forget the total number of questions matters when it comes to the progress bar.

Think about these three scenarios:

Scenario 1: Your cable provider sends you an email survey invitation to complete their customer satisfaction survey. You click through to the survey. At this point, you have no idea how many questions you're in for (unless the email invitation told you), but most likely you were given an estimate of how long the survey should take. You begin answering the survey, because of your responses, you're taken down a specific question path. You begin to wonder how much is left in the survey and notice there's a progress bar! This survey is rather complex on the backend and has several paths and over 120 questions, but any given respondent can only travel down a path of 20-30 questions. If your path was the first path, it will look like you have a lot more pages to go through before the end. At this point you're close to done, but unfortunately, the progress bar makes you think you have many, many more questions left. You bail. You don't have time to complete their long feedback form and will think twice about participating in one of their "short" surveys in the future.

Scenario 2: Your cable provider sends you an email asking you to complete their customer service questionnaire. You click through to the survey, answer several questions and notice the progress bar at the top has hardly moved at all. You begin to think, "uuuuuugh this was a mistake!" Then suddenly the progress bar shows you're almost done. Because you're curious, you go back and change your answers to see what other questions the cable provider is asking customers (after all you may want to add your two cents). Suddenly, without meaning to you've messed up their data by not respondent honestly.

Scenario 3: Your cable provider sends you an email invitation to complete their market research survey. You click through to the survey. You answer several questions begin to wonder if the survey will be over soon, but you keep going. A few questions later, you've finished the survey in the amount of time the cable provider's email marketing said you would. Even though it was a little annoying to complete the survey, it was a good experience, and hopefully it will improve your service! Furthermore, they kept their promise on the time and haven't lost your trust.

If you're conducting a business survey, whether it's an employee feedback questionnaire, course evaluation or client survey, which of the above scenarios would you like your respondents to experience? I'm hoping you're thinking to yourself "Scenario 3, of course!" I certainly want my respondents to finish (not abandon) my survey and give me honest feedback (not change their answers to see what else I'm asking).

That said, progress bars wont discourage people from finishing a short survey with honest answers. As part of your survey design, you should consider whether a progress bar will add to the respondent experience or take away from it (and your results).

Before you start writing any survey you need to define clear project goals. I mean it. Before you place pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard to design a questionnaire, clearly defined project goals is a must. With out goals, your survey project is going to be worthless. Well, not quite worthless, you'll get some facts out of it, but they wont mean anything. They'll be single pieces in a 1,000 piece puzzle. To make sense, puzzle pieces need to fit together to form the whole picture, and survey data is like that as well. Each piece fits together to give you the whole picture.

Defining your goals for the project will help guide you when creating the survey, whether it's a customer satisfaction or client survey, staff opinion questionnaire, market research, or course evaluation. Once you begin writing questions and designing the questionnaire, if cannot answer the question "what will I do with this data?" then the question does not belong in your project. By defining a goal at the beginning, the survey writer is forced to eliminate unnecessary questions - hence keeping the survey short.

This rule applies for both qualitative and quantitative research. Read my past post to learn more about the six steps in the market research process.

Are you interested in seeing Cvent's Web Survey software in action?  We recently added a new section to our website: Sample Web Surveys.  We have three online survey examples allowing visitors to see how different features look or function.  It also gives a sneak peak into three of our graphical templates and how easy it is to customize our templates to match your organization's branding.  Each survey example shows off various features, including:

Course evaluations can be an essential part of improving your educational and training programs.  Many higher education institutions already implement course evaluations to rate the curriculum and professors.  When developing an evaluation form make sure to include some key questions such as those included in this survey example:



These sample training survey questions can be customized to different types of courses, workshops and trainings.  Even if you are not an educational institution but host trainings either for employees or customers, consider using training evaluations to improve future courses.

Using online surveys to gather business intelligence may not be always be an automatic instinct for your organization. However, customer survey questionnaires are in fact a great way to evaluate your competition and gather insights about the business value propositions your clients rate high.

If you employ surveys to prospects and leads who leave the sales funnel, you can discover even more valuable information about why prospects chose another product or service. Were their features better? Did they they prefer the competition's follow up during the sales process?

When creating a questionnaire for competitive research, it's important to set goals. As with all surveys, whether it's a business survey, customer service questionnaire, employee evaluation or course evaluation survey, you should always "begin at the end." Define what the organization wants to get out of the project. Setting a goal before beginning the questionnaire design will better guide you through the survey creation process.

If you run web surveys and use email marketing to solicit responses, you may encounter deliverability issues. The common myth surrounding "Undeliverable" is that ISPs and organizations block messaging at the server level. We're not suggesting ISPs and organizations aren’t the cause for some of your undeliverables, but they can’t shoulder all the blame.

There are some things marketers should be doing to boost deliverability, especially when your customer research, training evaluation or employee satisfaction surveys rely on it. Here are a couple quick tips to improve email deliverability:

• Clean your lists. Following best practices to increase open rates and survey responses through email marketing doesn't matter if you ignore bounce backs. Using a web based survey company such as Cvent helps keep contact lists clean by automatically cleansing your database. It marks undeliverables so that those contacts never receive another email. Beyond that, you should have a monitored email address for bounce backs.

• Monitor results in real time. As a best practice, we suggest testing any survey before launching it to your entire list. This should include message testing to a segment of the list you plan to use. If you have the wrong messaging go out to your contacts, you're going to be hurt by spam complaints. Monitoring results in real time helps you identify and fix small problems before they ruin the integrity of your entire set of contacts.