10 Steps to Creating More Effective Surveys

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10 Steps to Creating More Effective Surveys

By Steven Ray
2007-06-18

10 Steps to Creating More Effective Surveys

Surveying your customers, clients, staff and visitors can be incredibly useful in terms of providing information you need to further develop products, services and relationships. By asking the right questions, in the right format, you provide people the opportunity to give you feedback on a host of topics. You can then use the feedback to move forward. The difference between success and failure in survey creation is a matter of ten simple steps.

Step One – Know What You Need to Ask
If you’re going to create a survey, the first thing you need to establish is an objective. So, start by asking yourself what you need to find out – then work to frame a survey packed with questions designed to get your respondents to give you the information you need.

Step Two – Ask Effective Questions
Once you’ve set a course for your survey, you’ll need to choose your questions carefully to get the right responses. Choosing the wrong format for your questions can lead to inaccurate information, making your survey results less helpful than they could be. Ask questions that give your audience scope to respond adequately, but don’t leave so much leeway that it’s confusing. If it’s a yes/no question, only give yes and no as answers – on the other hand, where there’s room for maybe, be sure you include it.

Step Three – Choose The Right Respondents
Targeting the survey appropriately is an important step in gleaning the most from the exercise. You’ll need to be sure you choose the right method of survey deployment – whether it’s a survey link on your website, an email inviting past customers to participate in the survey or a random pop-up window asking visitors to take part. Choosing the right deployment for your survey can make a big difference to the quality of respondents you have to work with, as well as the data you receive.

Step Four – Screen The Audience, If You Need To
In addition to deciding the best method of deploying your survey, consider if it is worth screening the respondents at the beginning of your survey. For example, if you’re interested in learning what your shoppers think of a new shipping service, you don’t really need 50 responses from customers who only pick items up in a local depot.

Step Five – Estimate The Time Required
As a courtesy, tell your survey participants how long the survey will take to complete. Obviously, you don’t know how fast or slow people read and tick boxes, so you can only guess based on how long it takes you. But providing a rough estimate of the time, a number of questions, and even progress meter along the way can go far in terms of keeping customers engaged in the survey process. An engaged respondent is far more likely to provide good data.

Step Six - Keep Your Audience Interested
Whether you’re assessing your customer base for a new product or service rollout or trying to get a gauge of customer satisfaction, it’s important that you keep your audience engaged in the survey process. This is best done by asking a variety of distinct questions and using a number of different question types. If people think you’re just reusing the same question over and over, they’ll click away or just randomly respond to get done with the process rather than provide the data you need.

Step Seven - Keep Your Survey Tidy
Another key point in keeping your audience engaged is avoiding a massive scrolling survey. Try to keep page breaks at logical intervals, so that like questions are grouped together. You should aim to keep questions, and answers, to the point – spell check these as well to avoid appearing unprofessional.

Step Eight – Try Your Survey
In addition to taking the survey yourself, get a few other staff members in your organization to run through it before it goes live. This can help you proofread the questions, to avoid typos or grammatical errors. More importantly, it will ensure someone else has read through it and that the questions make sense to a third party. Have a look at the results your survey generates based on the sample responses to determine whether you need to fine-tune your questions.

Step Nine - Interpret The Results
Whether you use an online survey software provider or organize the survey and receive the results yourself, you’ll need to find a way to make sense of it all. Generally, your survey results can be displayed in all manner of formats – how you choose to do this is largely up to you. In any case, making sure the information you collect from your survey respondents is easy to interpret is a key to the final step in survey success – making use of the data.

Step Ten – Make Use of the Data
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for those using surveys is making use of the data they receive. It’s all well and good to design a great online survey, and it’s even better to work with an online survey software company that can collate the data and present you with an easy-to-understand battery of results. However, if you don’t actually have a plan for using the information received, the exercise is fruitless. So, when you’re planning your survey, include a mechanism for making use of the results.

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