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Getting
the Most from Online Surveys – 5 Key Considerations
by
Paul Schwartz
The
growth of online surveys has been impressive over the
recent years and new tools have made online surveys
relatively easy to implement.
Online surveys are attractive for their
flexibility, affordability, and speed.
However, if you want all your work to produce
high quality, useful results, be sure to implement
your survey with the following practices in mind:
1.
Determine what challenge you are attempting to
solve or what questions you want answered.
Be
specific, surveys that are too broad may provide
you with little actionable information.
As an example, a vague customer satisfaction
survey will give
you general information and some benchmark data, but
it may not provide useful insight from your customers on ways
to improve your product or service offering. Perhaps your company recently implemented some
changes to your customer service department's
policies and procedures and you want
to know how the changes are impacting your
customers. You now have a question that can be
answered. Next you need to focus on how to get answers
to that question.
2.
Decide what information you will need to help
solve the challenge or answer the question.
You
want your survey to be concise and focused.
Continuing with our example, you will
want to know what specific features of customer
service are important to your customers.
Then it will be critical to get customer
feedback on how well your company performs those
specific features.
A small company that only does
business online may want to know how important live
customer service is to their customers.
They should also follow that by asking customers how
satisfied they are with their live customer service.
3.
Design the survey as a dialogue.
To
improve completion rates, your survey should have a
natural, logical flow.
Design it as if you were interviewing or
getting to know your customer. Start with some easy, quickly answered
questions to put them at ease.
Then move on to more complex questions, and
finish with your demographic questions.
Our online company may want to
ask customers what type of Internet connection they have
and how they first heard of the company. They would then move on to specific questions about customer service
features and importance, and
end with demographic or segmentation questions.
A mix of question types (yes/no, multiple
choice, matrix, and open ended) will also keep it
interesting for the respondent.
Don't neglect the open-ended questions as they often
contain fantastic gems of valuable feedback.
4.
Be sure to test your survey prior to a full
release.
Once
you have written your survey, test your survey with a small group of customers.
During this phase you are looking at two
criteria. First,
you will want to see if the questions were answered
appropriately.
Second, you will want to assess completion
rates, both overall and question specific. If the questions were answered
inappropriately, or a particular question was not
answered as frequently as others you can re-write or
re-design the survey. Remember; keep questions simple and easily understood. If the
overall completion rate was poor you may want to
look at the length of the survey or consider
offering an incentive upon completion of the survey.
The highest completion rates for online
surveys are seen with surveys that take between 5-15
minutes to complete.
With a recent client of Congruity, we were
able to generate addition revenue and more than double the completion rate from
the test group to the full group of 125,000
customers by offering an incentive in the form of a
coupon.
5.
Make sure you address privacy and questions
about the survey.
Keep
in mind if you want feedback that is as open and
honest as possible you will want to include a
statement insuring that your customers feedback will
be kept confidential.
It is also a good idea to include a contact
name, number, and email address at the end of the
survey if customers have any questions, problems
completing the survey, or feedback about the survey
itself.
There
are many other tips and tools for creating effective
online surveys, to find out more please visit us on the web at www.congruity.biz
Copyright © 2003
CONGRUITY.
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