Tips on Improving Your Survey Results
Some hand out small sheet of paper with your bill at a restaurant and tell you to complete a survey online.
Others are sent to your email box—asking you to take the time to answer a survey to “better serve”.
Some offer a chance to win a prize—others don’t.
The two key questions are:
1) Why Are You Doing A Survey?
2) What Are You Planning To Do With The Results?
Is it a feel-good poll to show management that things are sailing along just fine, like “70% of our customers say we’re doing a good job”?
Or are you looking to get to the crux of a serious matter? Matters of importance –perhaps whether a price increase can be justified, or if a change in a delivery module will scare off customers.
Are you looking to see what area s of customer support can be changed to make things easier for your customers?
Are you taking a survey to eliminate redundancies in your procedures or to find new uses for your product or service?
Survey results can be very useful, inspiring new ways of thinking, leading to new ideas, changes in procedures, money saving tips and ideas – or they can be a complete waste of everybody’s time.
Before churning out our next survey or questionnaire, ask yourself: What are you trying to learn from this survey?
Make your questions thought provoking. Simple ”Yes”, ” No” or “Maybe” choices or a 1-5 scoring system will not usually yield the most solid results.
Your questions should be asked with purpose — each question having some meaning in gathering new perspectives or in reaching a management conclusion.
When finished, upper management should read each survey to get a better understanding for what people are writing in—don’t just look at the finished complied scores. There are usually hidden gems in the blank fields that customers fill in.
A survey can yield a wealth of information that can help organizations make better decisions –both in the short term and long term.
The key is to ask the right questions.
Is your survey yielding answers that can help your organization improve – or are they yielding pretty lame results?
Isn’t it time to get better survey results? Rework your survey to yield answers that can help shed a new light on potential problems or possible opportunities.
