Posts published by Dayne Shuda

How to Achieve Balance in A Survey

Survey Tips

The purpose of a good survey is to dig deep to learn what your customers really think about your products or services and your customer service.

You want to provide a survey to your customers that not only meets their usability needs, but one that meets yours.

The results you are looking for are in-depth and reliable. To do this, you must create a balanced survey that asks the right questions.

In this article, we look at how to achieve balance in a survey.

Watch for Bias

Your first step in achieving balance in a survey is writing open-ended survey questions that avoid bias.

This means staying away from questions that bias respondents towards one answer.

Biased questions ruin your survey’s reliability because the answers you receive aren’t accurate.

What does a biased question look like? Here’s an example:

We love our new cleaning solution. How wonderful do you think it is?

While this may be an extreme example of bias, you can see how this pressures respondents to come up with a positive answer.

This is not only off-putting to respondents, but it skews your data.

One way to fix this question is to write one like this: How does our new cleaning solution work for you?

This puts the focus on the cleaning solution, and leaves respondents able to answer positively or negatively.

By eliminating any biased wording, you take out your own opinions and leave the answer wide open for respondents.

Your other option would be to re-frame the question, while adding another option so your survey remains balanced. Consider these two questions:

How helpful is our new cleaning solution?

What about our new cleaning solution hasn’t met your needs?

On their own, these questions are biased. When set side-by-side, they provide balance.

Provide a Balanced Scale

Your next step is using a balanced scale when creating your closed-ended survey questions.

When posing questions on a balanced scale, you ask respondents to answer a question based on a balanced ratings system. For example, your question might be:

Rate your experience with our new cleaning solution:

The choices you provide are very dissatisfied, dissatisfied, neither satisfied or dissatisfied, satisfied, very satisfied.

This is a balanced scale because there are two options on each side of neutral – one moving in the positive direction and one moving in the negative direction.

In a balanced scale, both the negative and positive categories must be equal. If they aren’t, you might end up with survey bias because you are leading respondents to a particular answer.

The mid-point must be between to equal sides to avoid “forcing” respondents to answer in a way they don’t really feel. This can create a sub-conscious bias.

Keep your scale balanced so you don’t get inaccurate results or misleading data that ruins the accuracy of your survey. (tweet this)

How do you know what kind of scale to use? First, more categories aren’t always the best scenario. Give respondents too many choices, and you again run the risk of unreliable data because the choices are so overwhelming, the respondent just picks an answer.

When it comes to balanced scales, less is often better as long as there is enough difference between the choices, and the positives and negatives are balanced.

Your categories need to be distinctive to avoid data problems, but not so far apart that respondents wished there was another choice.

Final Thoughts

For the most reliable and usable data, keep your survey balanced.

Whether you take all bias out of your questions, or you offer two alternatives, one positive and one negative, you allow your respondents the freedom to answer truthfully about how they really feel.

To achieve balance in a survey, keep all of your own thoughts and opinions out of your questions so you can get true and accurate responses.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

The Pros & Cons of Letting Survey Takers Remain Anonymous

Survey Tips

You’ve created an engaging survey and paid attention to all the best practices. It’s time to send it out, and suddenly you aren’t sure what to do.

Should you require respondents to leave their names, or should you let them remain nameless?

In this article, we look at the pros and cons of letting survey takers remain anonymous.

Pros of Anonymous Surveys

You’ll often find that anonymous surveys can provide for more honest feedback.

The nature of a nameless survey means that respondents can answer freely without fear of reprisals or embarrassment.

Anonymous surveys work well for topics that are deeply personal and allow people to respond openly and honestly.

Cons of Anonymous Surveys

On the flip side, anonymous surveys may be less specific. You may find that if negative feedback is involved, it’s broad-based because you can’t follow-up to learn more.

In addition, if the survey is anonymous, you might not have a frame of reference for the respondents’ complaints, so you can’t be completely sure of the whole picture.

Another negative is that respondents don’t have to “own” an anonymous survey. If they have to give their name, they must also be able to stand behind their feedback and defend it.

Without ownership, your data may not always be accurate.

Final Thoughts

Once you’ve weighed the pros and cons of letting survey takers remain anonymous, you can decide which route to take.

If you’re on the fence, consider letting your survey takers decide. Give them the choice of answering their questions openly or anonymously. Do this at the start of the survey for the best results.

Finally, if you’re wondering about survey results, a university study shows that non-anonymous survey respondents are more likely to provide extra detail in their responses as opposed to anonymous responders.

This also shows that feedback quality actually can improve once the anonymity is removed. (tweet this)

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Daniel Montiero

9 Of The Most Common Survey Questions

Survey Tips

Wondering what your customers think of your business, your staff, and your product and services? The best way to find out is through a survey.

Surveys help you gather data and analyze it so you can take action if necessary. They have the ability to help you increase your business while strengthening your relationship with your customers.

To help you make the most out of your next survey, we look at nine of the most common survey questions and review their effectiveness.

#1: The Open-Ended Survey Question

The open-ended survey question is perhaps the most effective survey question because it provides you with the most information. (tweet this)

With this question, the sky’s the limit when it comes to answers.

You use the open-ended survey question when you really want to dig deep into how your respondents feel about your company, your brand, your products and services, and your customer service and staff.

This question allows respondents to answer the question in as much detail as they want.

#2: The Dichotomous Question

Generally speaking, this is the common yes or no question.

For example, you might ask, “Have you used our products in the last year?”

Respondents are then given the option to simply answer yes or no.

As for the effectiveness of this type of question, it’s beneficial if the only answer you want is yes or no. If you want to screen respondents out and send them on or dump them out of your survey, this question works.

Many people use this type of question to make sure only “qualified” people are taking their survey.

In the above example, you’d respond to survey takers who answered no, they haven’t used your products, with a thank you message and the end of the survey.

Those who answered yes, they have used your products, would continue on.

#3: The Multiple-Choice Question

Another common survey question is the multiple-choice question that consists of three or more answer choices.

With this question, you might ask respondents which products or services they’ve used. For example, the question might be “What is your favorite product of ours that you’ve used in the last year?”

You would then give them three-ten choices and they choose one.

We recommend adding in an “other” category for certain questions to make sure you cover all your bases.

Like the dichotomous question, this is also a good question for which you can use conditional logic. Depending on their answer, you can send them off into various directions to answer different survey trains.

#4: The Rating Scale Question

A very common type of survey question, the rating scale asks survey respondents to rate their experiences.

It might be a product, a service or how the customer felt about something. The key to this question is a scale, usually from something that was very bad to very good.

This question is effective if you just want to know how your customer perceives your product or service.

The most common form of ratings question uses the Likert Scale. When responding to this question, your survey participants specify their level of agreement or disagreement.

#5: The Rank Order Question

You’ve probably answered this type of question many times.

With the rank order question, you might list five of the services you offer and ask respondents to rank them in order of their usefulness.

This question is effective in that it allows you to prioritize your marketing dollars into the services that people find the most valuable.

#6: The Demographic Question

Common and important, most surveys include the demographic questions.

Why do you want to ask these questions? They’re vital to the data you collect.

With the demographic survey questions, you learn the age, gender, income, race, geographical location, number of children, education level and much more of your respondents.

This helps you filter your results by demographic items.

For example, you might find that most of your respondents with children feel differently about your products than those without. Or, you might learn that people at a certain income level had a different experience with your service than others.

You have a more accurate view of your respondents once you have demographic data. This helps you understand your customer and in turn market to them more effectively.

#7: The Single Select Question

This type of question allows you to ask your respondents to choose from preconfigured options. In this instance, they only choose one.

For example, you ask, “What is your favorite food?” They can choose from pizza, burgers, steak and chicken fingers, but they are only allowed to select one.

Based on this answer, if you own a restaurant, you might add more of this type of food to your menu.

This is a closed or forced-choice question. It’s effective when you want very specific data.

#8: The Multi Select Question

This is just like the single select question, except your respondents can choose as many options as they’d like.

In the previous example, if you made it multi select, respondents could choose each one of your food items.

This question can be effective if a broad amount of data is acceptable.

#9: The Semantic Differential Scale Question

Another type of ratings question, this common survey question asks respondents to rate your company, service or product using a seven-point scale. At each opposing end is a completely opposite description.

For example, one choice would be very likely, while the other choice would be very unlikely. Respondents would choose on the scale of seven, from 1 being very unlikely to seven being very likely.

This question is perhaps not the most effective because the middle ground is very vague.

To Conclude

Now that you know nine of the most common survey questions and their level of effectiveness, you’re ready to start building your survey.

Before you do, though, here are a few more tips to building the perfect and most successful survey.

Know your objective. Narrow down what you want to know from your customers and what you’re willing and able to take action on. Then, tailor your survey around this topic only.
Keep your survey short. For the best data, keep your survey to no more than five minutes. This generally means asking fewer than 10 questions.
Include a balance of closed-ended and open-ended questions and make sure the question style fits your query.
Ask only one thing per question. If you ask two things in one question, you end up with skewed data, and you confuse your respondents.
Be careful of question bias. Have others proof your survey before sending it out to avoid leading and biased questions.

Finally, do take action on your survey results and let your respondents know what you learned from the survey and what you intend to do about it.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Ken Treloar on Unsplash

9 Tips For Creating An Engaging Survey

Survey Tips

Let’s face it, most surveys are boring, and many aren’t created with the respondent in mind.

Many companies want to learn something quickly, and they don’t often spend the time to create an engaging, thought-provoking survey.

This means higher drop-off rates for the surveyor, and this isn’t a good statistic for the endgame.

To help you make surveys that are attention grabbing, and attention holding, let’s look at five tips for creating an engaging survey.

#1: Be Relevant

What’s relevant to you might not be relevant to your survey audience, so you want to make sure you know exactly who you’re sending your survey to.

For example, if you are crafting a survey about swimming pools, and you want to know why people would or wouldn’t put a pool in their backyard, you don’t want to send the survey to apartment dwellers.

Your relevant audience is homeowners.

Another way to stay relevant in a more upbeat, hip way is to research trending hashtags that have some relation to your business. Then use that information to craft a survey title and/or questions that hook your audience and makes them want to complete your survey.

#2: Be Timely

Your customer purchased from you two months ago, and you wait to send a survey about their checkout experience.

Most busy people aren’t going to remember your checkout process (unless there was something memorable – good or bad) two months afterwards.

Stay in the moment and be timely with your surveys for the best engagement.

#3: Be Visual

The digital, social media age means that visuals matter.

You can bet your respondents are going to drop off if your survey is visually unattractive.

Things to think about include your background color scheme, font colors and font choice and any embedded images.

#4: Be Mobile Friendly

Mobile usage is significantly higher than desktop usage, and Americans spend nearly 90 hours per month on their smartphones.

This is why the most engaging surveys are mobile-friendly. Make it simple, fast and easy for your respondents to complete your survey from the comfort of their phones.

Make sure your survey functions just as well on the mobile phone as it does the desktop computer.

Your mobile surveys can help increase engagement and response rate.

#5: Be Thoughtful

When creating your engaging surveys, make them convenient to complete. This means emailing them, posting them and/or embedding them on your Facebook pages, adding them to Twitter and including them on your website.

Making the survey convenient for your respondents shows you are thoughtful and concerned about the usability.

#6: Be Shareable

Once you’ve got your creative, unique and engaging survey, you want to make sure its shareable. (tweet this)

Include social sharing links at the end of the survey so your respondents can share the survey and their results.

Allowing people to share their results on social media means you’ll get even more responses.

#7: Be First

Another tip for creating an engaging survey is to use the first person in your questions. This immediately draws the respondents in and subconsciously keeps them going.

Using the first person creates a psychological response, and makes the survey easier for people to complete because they can immediately imagine themselves in the question.

#9: Be Logical

Our final tip is to use conditional logic.

To really engage the respondent, tailor subsequent questions from answers to earlier ones.

You can skip questions, add questions based on answers and even route your users to different URLs based on their answers to survey questions.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re sending surveys to multiple audiences that might include your customers, target audience, employees or industry leaders, your goal is to get valuable data.

This means you need to create an engaging survey that keeps respondents looking towards the next question.

Try some of our tips today and see if it increases your survey engagement response rate. Test your questions and fine tune as necessary.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: rawpixel.com on Unsplash

The Art Of Asking The Right Questions

Survey Tips

Interestingly, to get the answers you seek, you first have to ask the right questions. In fact, this is the goal of effective communicators and data collectors.

To help you get the best survey responses, we look at the art of asking the right questions.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

One of the best ways to ask the right question is to pose an open-ended question to your survey respondents.

If you really want an honest answer to your question, you want to ask a what or a how question. For example:

What do you think of product x after you’ve used it for several weeks?
How do you feel our team met your service needs?
How can we change the product to better meet your needs?
What do you think of your interaction with our sales team member?

You don’t want to ask leading questions that prompt a respondent to answer in a specific way. Instead, use the open-ended question to elicit the most honest, thoughtful answers.

Ask Purposeful Questions

Another trick to asking the right questions is to be purposeful in your survey.

Don’t just ask questions for the purpose of asking questions or filling your survey. Sometimes asking one-three questions is enough, especially if you’re asking the right ones.

You should only ask questions that provide you more information and a better understanding of how your products, systems and team are doing.

It’s imperative that you only post questions that you intend to take action on.

Final Thoughts

To master the art of asking the right question, simplicity is a good rule of thumb.

This helps you communicate effectively and gather the most useful data.

Ask only what you really need to know and explain your question in the most succinct way possible.

This ensures you end up with actionable data so you can use your survey responses to improve your business.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Ashes Sitoula on Unsplash

Harnessing The Power Of Regular Feedback

Survey Tips

Do you know how your customers feel about your services and your products? Do you know what you’re doing right and where you can improve?

By building constant feedback into your processes, you can learn more about how to fine tune and increase your business.

Through regular customer feedback, you have the opportunity to improve loyalty, retention and sales.

In this article, we look at harnessing the power of regular feedback so you can learn more about your customer’s satisfaction levels.

You’ll find there are several ways to gain customer feedback and use it to improve your business.

Use Surveys for Regular Feedback

When it comes to surveys, you have several ways to reach your customers and at different times in their journey with your company.

Survey After First Purchase:

For example, you can survey your customers after their first purchase, their sign up for your service, or their sign up for your free trial.

It’s important to find out what your customers thought of their first experience with your company from your products and services to your checkout process and the ease of using your website.

You’ll find out from this survey where you can improve your processes.

Survey After Subsequent Purchases:

Each time your customers make subsequent purchases, you can also survey them. Once they’ve used your products and services and come back for more is a great time to ask more in-depth survey questions.

Survey At Specified Times After-Purchase:

Another time to survey your customers is at specified times after their purchase. You might consider three months, six months and one year afterwards.

For these surveys, you want to know what they think of your products and services long-term, if they’re still using them and if so, why.

If they haven’t made a purchase in a while, you also want to find out why.

Customer Satisfaction Survey:

Yet another survey you can send is after a customer has an interaction with your customer support team.

For example, someone calls in and has a question. After the phone call, you send a survey to find out your customer’s satisfaction level.

This survey helps you learn about the quality of your customer support. This is highly important to your business as you’ll find your customers will not shop with you if they receive poor service.

You can harness the power of this feedback to create employee training manuals and training sessions to help your staff learn more about providing great service.

Having this feedback helps you continue to monitor your service staff and make improvements or changes as necessary.

Engagement Survey:

You’ll find that gauging customer engagement is helpful to know as you grow your company. (tweet this)

By learning how engaged your customers are, you learn why they stay or why they leave. You’ll gain insight into your customer churn rates and the reasons why they are high, normal or low.

You can then make improvements in your products and services to try and increase retention.

For example, perhaps your items always arrive broken. At this point, your customers may disengage from you and decide they’re better off without your product because they don’t want to wait for a new shipment.

Learning this from a survey, you can then find a new shipping company that won’t consistently break your items.

You should send surveys after each interaction your customers have with your staff as this is highly useful regular feedback for your business.

Leverage Review Sites

Claim your social media business pages and review site listings.

Why? You want to do this so you can monitor your online customers reviews. By taking ownership of these profiles, you can respond to all positive and negative reviews.

While you didn’t necessarily ask for the feedback, you can still harness it by responding appropriately to each review so when others search for your business they see you are empathetic, appreciative and involved.

Track Your Reviews

Sites like Google, Yelp, Yellow Pages and more can affect your business by the sheer number of reviews that are possible.

It’s vital that you track your reviews and monitor your feedback as they affect your business.

Now, let’s look at how to use your regular feedback as a tool in your marketing arsenal.

Feature Feedback on Your Website

Once you’ve got the feedback, not only can you use it to improve your business, products and services, but you can use it as a marketing tool.

The easiest way to highlight your feedback is on your website. Take a look at these ideas:

Create a page for your reviews. Highlight the positive ones so visitors from your website can see what others think of your company.
Add reviews on product pages and also have a spot for people to leave reviews of their own. Adding reviews to your product pages means people don’t have to leave their shopping experience to read your feedback.
Create customer feedback videos. These pack a real punch because they are real people talking about your business in a visual manner. Video is a top marketing tool today, and one you should use.
Highlight customer stories on your blog. These could be testimonials written by your clients that also include a photo and/or video.
After you send out online surveys, you can feature the results on your blog along with a synopsis of your findings and what you plan to do with the results.

Feature Feedback on Social Media

We live in an age of social proof – it seems most of your customers want to see what others think about your business before making their own purchase.

Use your social media platforms to invite your customers to leave reviews. Highlight these reviews in your email marketing and send people to your social media review pages.

Showcase Feedback in Other Places

You’ll find other arenas are the perfect place to showcase your feedback, whether it’s from a survey or an online review site.

Use the feedback in your email marketing. Highlight it in your eBooks, white papers and other downloadables.

Don’t forget to include blurbs in your print marketing as well.

Final Thoughts

You want to harness the power of regular feedback because your customers’ opinions are important to the success of your business.

Asking your customers what they think, using customers surveys, shows them you care and are dedicated to improvement. The same can be said for monitoring and responding to online feedback.

Make regular feedback part of your daily processes and watch your business grow.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Osman Rana on Unsplash

How To Interpret Negative Feedback On A Survey

Survey Tips

No business likes to receive negative feedback. It certainly doesn’t feel good.

But, instead of getting defensive and angry, you can turn it into an opportunity for growth and change.

In this article, we look at how to interpret negative feedback on a survey so you can use it to improve your business.

First, let’s look at some steps you can take to evaluate your data.

Interpret the Data

First, you want to read through all of your survey data. Don’t make immediate conclusions because that comes later.

After the initial reading, you can begin organizing the results.

Next, you want to look for patterns in your data. Your online software can help you do this. See which responses were the most popular and note the outliers.

You should start to see a pattern. For example, perhaps more respondents were happy with one of your products, but not another. This is where you’d find what you needed to fix.

For some people, it helps to view the data in a visual format like graphs or charts. Make sure you’re looking at the data in the way that best helps you understand it.

Finally, decide what responses necessitate action from you and make a plan for taking care of the issues.

Really Listen

Your first step in interpreting any negative feedback is to really listen to what your customers are saying. It’s hard to do this right after you read the feedback.

So, take a step back, breathe and return to review it after you’ve calmed down.

Read the response carefully to make sure you understand exactly what your customer is telling you.

Respond to the Customer

If you know the name of the customer who responded negatively, you should contact the respondent within 24 hours.

It’s usually best to respond with a phone call, but if you don’t know the number, you can send an email.

It will mean a lot to your customer that you took the time to call and make things right.

Your goal is to do everything you can to remedy the situation with your customer. This isn’t the time to be defensive or angry. You want to turn an angry customer into a loyal one by the service you provide.

Make sure your customer knows how much you appreciate his/her taking your survey and providing you with feedback. Ask him to give you more information, then apologize and provide solutions.

Make Changes

Once you’ve analyzed your survey data and compiled both your positive and your negative feedback, you are well-poised to make some changes.

Take the negative feedback and discuss it with your team. Brainstorm ways you can prevent this type of feedback in the future while providing the best customer service possible.

You can also take this one step further and craft an email to your survey respondents, thanking them for completing the survey. Then, you want to let them know what steps you are taking to remedy their issues.

This lets all of your customers know you are serious about the survey and truly value their thoughts and opinions.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps the most important thing about your survey is that you do something with the results, both negative and positive.

It does you no good to send out a survey and ignore the data.

If things are going great, congratulations. But, don’t stop there. Ask yourself how you can make things even better.

When you get negative feedback, you must respond and take action. This shows your customers that you value their comments. It lets them know that as a business, you intend to improve your service and products.

Once you’ve taken the steps necessary to correct your mistakes, consider sending a second survey.

You can ask your customers specific questions that focus on the negative feedback you received from the first survey to find out if you’ve improved.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Jordan Ladikos on Unsplash

How to Create A B2B Client Satisfaction Questionnaire

Survey Tips

Is the satisfaction of your clients important to your company?

If so, you want to survey them to make sure you’re doing things satisfactorily. You want actionable insights so you can make sure you’re providing your B2B customers the best service, delivery, management and more. (tweet this)

The business-to-business (B2B) survey is a bit different than the regular customer satisfaction survey. You may have thousands of customers, but you most likely have far fewer business partners.

Additionally, with the B2B questionnaire, you might even consider surveying more than one person at each business because multiple people might interact with your company.

In this article, let’s look at how to create a B2B client satisfaction questionnaire.

Questions to Ask

To help you create your survey, we’ve put together a list of questions for you to choose from.

Pick the ones that most pertain to your business, refine as needed and create your survey. Be sure to keep your survey short and succinct for the most responses.

Are you currently working with us now?
If not, is your work with us complete?
How well did we handle your needs?
Did we stick to your timeline?
Did we meet your expectations?
How likely are you to work with us (use our services) again?
How likely are you to recommend our company to other businesses?
Tell us about your experience with our billing department.
Were you satisfied with our online ordering?

You can even get more specific asking questions about the ease of using your website, their telephone or email communications with your company, delivery issues and how they felt about their customer service representative.

To Conclude

To find out what your B2B customers think, ask them. Find out about their experience with your company and how they felt about your service.

Once you have those answers, you’ll know where you excel and where you have room to improve.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Olu Eletu