In: General
22 Oct 2009So you have developed some great surveys. Now you need to determine the best way to distribute surveys and an easy and convenient way for respondents to return the completed surveys. A survey is useless if respondents do not receive the survey in a timely and convenient manner and if they do not have an easy and convenient way to return the survey.
Traditionally surveys were conducted either in-person, by telephone, or mailed to respondents. Each of these survey delivery methods has its drawbacks. Often the in-person surveys were done in the office or at the retail location for which the survey was designed to obtain feedback. A problem with face-to-face surveys is that often the time of the survey is not convenient for the respondent. Maybe when the potential respondent is visiting your office or store they are in the middle of a busy day or at the end of a long day and when asked to complete a survey they decline or they rush through the answers. There is also the concern that the responses in face-to-face interviews are not confidential and could easily be tied back to the respondent which, especially with employee surveys, could compromise the honesty of the answers.
Telephone surveys are a popular way to conduct customer surveys. Often however the call comes at an inconvenient time and once again the respondent would either decline to answer or would rush though the answers.
Mailed surveys are either thrown away or stuck in the corner to be answered at a later date and often are forgotten and never responded to.
Today the web and email has revolutionized survey distribution. Companies can easily and in a timely manner distribute surveys to employees and customers through emails or web pages. The internet makes the survey distribution process painless and inexpensive. The respondents can easily complete the surveys at a time and place convenient to them and easily return the survey with the click on their computer.
There are many survey software and web survey tools that allow you to easily design professional email or web surveys which meet your unique needs even if you have limited technical expertise. These tools allow you to send the survey via email or put a link to the survey on your webpage or in an email invitation. You can choose to have the responses sent by email or entered directly on your website. You can design reminder emails and automatic acknowledgements of responses received. Some of the companies offering survey software or web based survey tools will also distribute surveys for you.
Many of these tools include filers and cross tabulation features to help you easily analyze the responses without reentering the data. Some of the web based tools allow real time data analysis as the responses are sent the data is organized according to your specified criteria. Many include the capability to portray the data in charts and graphs or allow you to download the data into your own spreadsheet.
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In: Survey Types
20 Oct 2009An employee survey provides an organization or business with the information to understand employee perceptions of their work environment. How employees perceive their employer’s attitudes and actions is critically important to management if they want to retain a motivated and happy workforce.
Smart employers regularly utilize an employee job satisfaction survey, an employee exit interview survey, and occasionally use surveys to ask employees about their attitudes, suggestions, and preferences. Employee surveys are also useful to collect information or employee feedback as to the effectiveness and usefulness of employee training and informational meetings. Employee surveys can reveal unfounded and potentially dangerous rumors which are circulating among employees. Employee surveys should be considered to solicit employee input before initiating organizational change or changes in employee work rules, pay or benefits.
The data from an employee survey provides the employer with useful information to keep the organization on the right track. No one knows better the strengths and weaknesses of an organization and its management and then the employees who are responsible for delivering the employer’s product or service. The employees know what is working and what could work better. They are your greatest information resource. A survey allows an employee to share their concerns and perceptions with you in a safe environment. Employees who might never have the nerve to speak up in a large meeting or stop by your office to share an insight or observation will often be comfortable offering their thoughts in a well constructed survey. This is especially true if the employees know from your past actions that you will seriously consider their input.
Today almost every employer has a business email system and/or a business web page which makes doing an employee survey easier than ever before. If you are a small company without a lot of technical support there are survey software packages which allow you to easily design an employee survey, distribute it to employees and provide a convenient way for employees to return the survey.
Survey software often comes with employee survey templates and customer survey templates in one package. Survey software tools range from simple to complex and many software distributors offer simple survey software tools for the first time user that can be upgraded at a later date to include more complex survey and analysis tools.
When looking for survey software it is important that you are comfortable with the data analysis tools incorporated in the software. Developing and delivering the employee survey is only half the battle. It is important that you have the capability to easily sort, analyze and interpret the data. Information from an employee survey or job satisfaction survey is powerful but only if you understand it and use it to make changes or confirm current practices are working.
In: Survey Types
18 Oct 2009Customer satisfaction is the most critical aspect of any business. How do you know if your customers are happy with your product or service? The best way to find out if your customers are satisfied is to ask them. The most systematic way to collect customer satisfaction information is a customer satisfaction survey.
The key elements you need to think about when designing a customer satisfaction survey are: what are the right questions; is the survey in a format that is easy for the customer to answer; and how will you compile, interpret, and using the data you gather from the survey to improve your customer relations.
Traditional customer surveys were conducted in person while the customer was at your store of office or by telephone or a mailed survey after the customers had concluded their business with you. Today email and online customer satisfaction surveys are more popular choices.
Once you collect your customer’s email addresses an email or online survey is easy to deliver and easy for you to create and update. The email or online surveys are convenient for the customer to respond to, and the information provided is easy to compile and sort for your information and use. You can even set up an automatic response thanking the customer for returning the survey.
There are customer satisfaction survey software products available that allow you to easily create customized customer satisfaction surveys and to analyze and interpret the data with built in cross tabulation and filtering tools. These customer satisfaction software products range from basic to sophisticated and variations of the customer satisfaction survey software is used by small business owners with little or no technical support and Fortune 500 companies.
Regardless of the method you use to deliver the survey you need to keep it simple. A good survey should take the customer only a few minutes to answer.
Ask the customer what you need to know. Don’t load the survey up with esoteric questions. Ask relevant questions like:
You will get a higher response rate if you offer incentives to those returning the customer satisfaction survey. Maybe a coupon, cash or offer to enter the respondents in a contest or drawing.
Regardless of the delivery method you need to ask these questions in a timely manner after the customer receives your product or service. If too much time elapses between the time the customer makes the purchase and the time they answer the survey the responses will be less reliable. As time passes recollections fade and the customer may even be confused as to which company or product you are asking about making the customer’s answers totally useless for your purposes.
In: General
2 Sep 2009You’ve been asked to conduct a customer satisfaction survey so that you can see if there are any changes in how your company’s sales department, which you are a part of, can help improve their service offerings. No one knows your department better than you because you’ve been doing your job longer and better than anyone else. You’re very comfortable with how things are run and you would prefer not having to do things any differently because you don’t want to adjust how you spend your day. After all you put in a hard nine, settled into a routine you’re comfortable with, and you’re not sure what to make of grumblings around the office about changes that are on the horizon.
In: Uncategorized
17 Aug 2009A non comparative scale can also be variously referred to as a monadic or metric scale. Respondents evaluate only one object at a time and the resulting data set is either interval or ratio scale. An example of this would be if you would take an object such as an iPod and ask each respondent the degree to which they viewed the iPod favorably. This technique includes continuous rate scales and itemized rate scales such as Likert, Semantic Differential, and Stapel Scale. This type of scale is favored in market research due to the fact that more can be done with it. These scales can be used when characteristics of physical objects are being compared but they are most often used when attitudes, perceptions, or other psychological characteristics are being measured.
In: General
16 Aug 2009One thing that really amazes me about the Internet is the level of value it’s brought to information. Just look at Google: one of the most recognizable and powerful companies in the world. Based on what? Possession and leveraging of information. It’s an information economy, and the more information you have, the more leverage you can wield. And yet, how many businesspeople do you know, even in the world of web business, who chronically undervalue the information available to them? Chances are, you’re one of them! Read the rest of this entry »
In: General
14 Aug 2009A survey is a method of gathering information from a number of individuals, known as a sample, in order to learn something about the larger population from which the sample is drawn. Although surveys come in many forms, and serve a variety of purposes, they do share certain characteristics. In order for the objectives of a survey to be met, the results must reliably project on the larger public, from which the sample is drawn. A sample can be scientifically chosen so that each individual in a population has a known chance of selection. This ensures that a sample is not selected haphazardly or uses only those eager to participate. The sample size for a survey will depend on the degree of reliability necessary and how the results are to be used. A properly selected sample should be able to reflect the various characteristics of a total population within a very small margin for error. There are many surveys that study the total adult population but many others that focus on selected populations: employees, academics, industry experts, computers users, or customers that use a particular product or service.
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