Best practices for surveys
How to make the most of the surveys you create
Every business, no matter the industry, is always wondering what’s on the minds of their customers, partners, and other stakeholders; and they often turn to surveys for answers. However, depending on the medium of administration, survey responses can be as low as 6% or as high as 68%, depending on how the survey is administered, and let’s not talk about the accuracy of responses.
To ensure you make the most of the surveys you put out, here are some best practices to help you design surveys that yield the best responses.
While it may seem obvious, defining why you’re conducting a survey is of paramount importance. Folks with a background in research may term this as their ‘Hypothesis.’ The goal here is to define a specific, clear, and testable statement about the possible outcome of the survey.
For instance, you may wish to understand customer impressions. The hypothesis here could be “Do my customers have a favourable impression of my business?” You may test this hypothesis by running an NPS® survey and asking customers “How likely are you to refer my business to your network?” and analysing the responses.
During this stage, it’s also important to decide if the survey is going to be a one-off or a recurring one, and if it’s a recurring one, whether it should be linked to recent interactions or whether it should happen periodically. NPS® survey best practices suggest that you run the survey at set intervals and measure your progress over time.
With the goal in mind, the next step is testing the hypothesis by asking questions. Getting this right, could be the difference between a fair presentation of facts and confirmation of any biases a researcher may have.
For instance, let’s take the example of a customer satisfaction survey. A researcher could open with a question asking customers to rate their level of satisfaction on a scale. While this question may present an objective picture, researchers may wish to dig deeper and ask a follow-up question.
The follow-up question could be open-ended or
closed-ended.
According to Pew Research, people respond very differently to open-ended and closed-ended versions of the same question. Respondents were more likely to choose answer options in closed-ended questions when compared to mentioning them in response to open-ended questions. To prevent this kind of bias, researchers often conduct pilot studies with colleagues and focus groups to ensure the data collected is free from bias.
In addition to bias, researchers also have to keep a close eye on survey completion. A 2004 study confirmed that longer surveys have a detrimental effect on survey completion.
Building trust with your customers is also an important aspect of sending a survey simply because anybody can create a survey and reach out to customers and collect their data. Ensure that you use your logo and brand colours in your survey to ensure that the customer experience is a familiar one.
It also helps to configure DKIM if you’re sending your survey via email. DKIM or DomainKeys Identified Mail is an email authentication system that verifies that the email actually comes from the sender and not an impostor.
Hosting your survey on your domain also helps boost the legitimacy of your survey.
Once you’ve sent out your surveys, the responses should start coming in. The first thing you could do is take all the data and make graphs and charts. While basic, this step is an easy and immediate way to make sense of the responses and serves as a foundation for any qualitative studies you may wish to conduct.
While NPS®, CES, and CSAT surveys may require looking at the big picture, segmenting user responses and analyzing them may be beneficial. Think about it, if your product or feature is targeted at a younger demographic, but your responses are from a more mature one; you can’t take the feedback at face value.
It also helps to revisit past data and see how things have changed. With NPS® surveys, it’s recommended to look at past data, use it as a personal benchmark, and observe how the scores change over time.
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Finally, something that businesses miss is also responding to customers. Ensure that you go over customer comments and take their feedback seriously. Respond to customer suggestions, keep them posted about developments and show them that their words matter by making changes to your processes and policies.
Knowing these best practices may be one thing, but implementing them may be easier said than done. To ensure your surveys are effective, a purpose-built survey tool could be the answer. Here's a short list of what a survey tool can do for you:
At the end of the day, its important to remember that what we’ve covered are really just good practices. Applying them in the context of your business is the only way to turn them into best practices for your business.
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