How To Conduct An Online Survey and Engage Customers In A Dialogue

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How To Conduct An Online Survey and Engage Customers In A Dialogue

By Tim Slavin
2006-08-08

Define Your Goals

When you sit down to plan your survey, your first task is to
determine whether or not you need help. If you need to ask hundreds or
thousands of customers about their preferences and you want accuracy
within 5% or less, then you should spend money to hire a good research
firm. There is enough complexity and skill involved in running this
sort of survey that experts are needed. This article will help educate
you about the process but it is not a substitute.

However, if you sense that customers are responding poorly to some
part of your business, for example, customer service, and your goal is
to get your customers to vent in useful ways, then running your own
survey probably will work fine. The question is what level of precision
you need from your results. In many cases, extreme precision is not
required. It is enough for you to offer your customers the opportunity
to speak out about existing or new products and/or services.

Once you have an idea about whether to do your survey yourself or
hire experts, the next issue to address is what you want to achieve
with your survey. If you don't know, start by writing down what you
would like customers to tell you about your business, products, and
services. Then prioritize that list. On another sheet of paper, write
down a list of questions you have about your business and prioritize
your list. If you have time, you also should write up a list of
customer ideas and complaints that you have heard in the past year. Put
these lists side by side and look for commonalities in subject and
priority.

This list writing process often will pull out ideas and issues that
lie just under the surface. For example, a customer comment might give
you an idea about how to improve a product. If that product is
extremely important to your business, a survey might help you
understand how to improve it. (So would paper mockups as part of
usability testing but that is another article.) Or you might decide to
use periodic surveys as a way to add a customer feedback channel and so
your list might be a series of small topics. Or you might realize that
a competitor product is your biggest worry and you wonder if your
customers care about their features (and which features, and with what
priority).

Article Pages:
» How To Conduct An Online Survey - Introduction
» The Survey Process
» Define Your Goals
» Pick Your Tools
» Write Your Questions
» Test Your Survey
» Deploy Your Survey
» Measure Your Results
» Final Thoughts: To Pay or Not To Pay For Participation?

Related Articles:
» User-Friendly Surveys in 5 Simple Steps
» 10 Steps to Creating More Effective Surveys
» Build Better Surveys - Survey Question Types Explained
» Understanding Single Choice Survey Answer Types
» Doing a Corporate Culture Survey
» 14 Tips For Writing An Effective Online Survey