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

Pick Your Tools

When you have picked one or two goals for your survey, the next step
is to consider tools. You either can host the software yourself or use
a vendor. My recommendation is to start with a vendor. This will reduce
the complexity of your first survey and help you to focus on your
goals, the quality of your questions, and other issues more important
than technology.

There are at least two robust online survey vendors, SurveyMonkey
and Votations. There are a number of services that offer polling but
these two vendors offer a broad range of question types, data output,
and ease of use for small amounts of money. SurveyMonkey is free, for
example, if your survey has five questions and under 100 responses.
I've used SurveyMonkey for $20 USD/month for a complex survey and found
their service to be an amazing bargain. Votations has been used at
least once by the Pew Internet Project, a group that I would consider
reputable and educated about research tools.

The criteria for choosing a tool or vendor should depend on your
goals. While it is great to have a wide range of question types
available for use, for example, too many types of questions will
overwhelm your customers. So a broad range of question types does not
mean you should use every one. It simply allows you to pick the types
you'll need when you set up your survey.

In addition to checking for a broad set of question types, you
should ensure that you can control your data by downloading it at any
time day or night. You should ask the vendor how they secure their data
so that your questions and results are not shared with others. Ideally
your data should be stored on a server seperate from the survey
application and it should be isolated through firewalls and other
techniques. The vendor also should have a daily backup for your data
and the ability to roll back to a previous version if needed.

You also might ask if your survey vendor software allows branching,
automatically leading your customer to the next question if they answer
a certain way on one question. If the customer answers "yes," for
example, they would be jumped down to the next question and not
confronted with questions related to answering "no." That said, while
branching is useful and cool, it can be a sign of poorly worded
questions, as described below. Needless branching can confuse your
customers and waste their precious time.

Other criteria to consider with tools is the ability to define
easily the text that appears before, during, and after your survey. You
also want to control where your customers go when they complete your
survey. Ideally, you want to send them to a thank you page on your
website rather than dump them at the home page of the survey vendor.

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