An online survey is an efficient and easy method of generating feedback from prospects, customers and employees or researching potential areas for expansion or improvement. The creation of a survey however requires some ground work. You can not expect the customer to answer a whole lot of questions about every little detail! So you need to design your online survey in such a way that you get the maximum amount of relevant information from a few questions.
Before you design a survey, however, you need to ascertain if a survey is the best option to find out what you want to know. If you just want to find out the overall customer satisfaction for your business, you could just create a small poll on Linkedin perhaps. A survey facilitates a small amount of research at least; even if it has only 5 questions.
Here are couple of important factors to keep in mind about what you need to do while developing an online survey questionnaire. Of course, the basic principles can be used for designing off-line surveys too.
WHY are you conducting a survey? The Objective
You need to know what you would like to accomplish with the survey. For example,an insurance company may survey its customers to find out the types of surgeries undertaken by senior citizens. The results may be used to fine tune their insurance policy based on the most prevalent conditions. This type of survey is a research survey and is a proactive step by the company to enhance their product or create a new product altogether. Customer satisfaction surveys, on the other hand, are feedback surveys. These are mainly used to discover and correct faults in existing products and services.
Yet another purpose of a survey is academic research, and as the name suggests is used to assist academic studies. You need to keep the objective a survey in mind, at all times during the survey design process. The survey should be designed in order to achieve its objective.
WHAT are the characteristics of the target audience? Characterize Target
Selecting the right target audience for a survey is crucial to its effectiveness. For example,if a shopping experience survey is sent to someone who has not purchased anything but only signed up to receive offers, it is not going to reflect an actual “shopping experience”. It needs to be sent to frequent and heavy shoppers to be most effective.
You need to select a set of people who will be affected by your survey objective or who possess the most knowledge to satisfactorily complete the survey.
WHO are the target audience? The Survey Sample
After you identify the characteristics of the target audience, You need to identity the people who would may be part of our survey. You need to survey a large section of the target population in order to be able to generalize the results of the survey.
HOW do you design the survey? Survey Design Skills and Subject Matter Knowledge
With the advent of internet based survey software solutions such as LeadPro247 integrated survey tool, creating, distributing and collecting survey responses has become very easy for marketer and survey research professionals. Surveys can be created and deployed in a matter of minutes. Designing a survey requires the following two essential qualities:
1. Survey Design Skills – You need to possess a basic knowledge of statistical analysis and mathematical probabilities. These are essential in survey design and interpretation. These may also come in handy for choosing the target audience.
2. Subject Matter Knowledge – This is an absolute MUST HAVE! You need to know what information is needed to make a particular analysis. This depends on the subject of the survey and hence an in-depth knowledge of the domain can lead to better and focused surveys.
Distributing a Survey – The Channel
A survey needs to be sent ot or seen by the target audience. This may be done in a variety of ways. For example, you may use email based, web based, or a website based survey. You may also ask for surveys at events such as product launches, trade shows etc. The distribution channel depends on the subject of the survey and the target audience.
The survey must be present where it is visible to the target audience. The most efficient channels in today’s web-centric world are definitely Email-based surveys and Web-site based surveys. These methods provide a feature for tracking the survey better and faster. They also significantly reduce the cost of a survey.
But remember, the channel must be the one most likely used by the target audience!
Survey Response Analysis – Observation and Conclusion
Once you have the survey responses from your target audience, the critical step is to analyze the survey results and interpret the results. Online Survey software tools provide easy reporting and analytics for interpreting the survey responses. Key reports include TURF analysis (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency analysis) and Cross Tab analysis reports. You can also use the individual response and summary results reports in real time. The survey response can be downloaded from the online survey system for further analysis and research. If you have used the email as a survey invitation method, you can analyze the invitation delivery, clicks, responses and abandonment rate using the Survey Invitation Analysis report.