survey tips

How to Share Survey Reports Across Your Organization

Survey Tips

You’ve done the hard work – you created, revised, tested and sent a terrific survey.

The results came in quickly and in great numbers.

You put together the data, looked at it and found that it’s high-quality, insightful and actionable.

The key word here is actionable because now that you’ve got the data, it’s time to do something with it. In this article, we look at how to share survey reports across your organization, so you can turn your data into action.

Allow Survey Access

For many businesses, it’s advantageous to have multiple users in your survey platform.

For example, Survey Town collects your survey responses and provides you with graphs and reports of your data.

Not only can you see the number of responses and view the aggregated statistics in charts, but your team can view them as well.

Allowing multi-users makes it easy for your team to manage and analyze your survey results, ultimately collaborating and deciding on action.

The bonus in Survey Town is that you can assign permissions on a per user basis. This means your team may have access to one survey but not another.

Share a Web Link

One of the easiest, most straightforward ways to share your survey results is to share a web link throughout your organization.

For example, you might send an email with a summary of your survey results exported into a spreadsheet and include a link to the data export of your survey.

This allows your employees access to the survey results and your analysis of it without giving them backend access to your survey.

Create a Presentation

Another way to share survey reports across your organization is through a presentation that you do in-person.

You can export your survey results into a presentation-ready format for presenting to your core team.

By creating an offline copy of your data, you can insert it into a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, so you can share the results to your team members.

This allows you to meet together, discuss the results in person and then brainstorm ways to take action on the data. When you provide data that is easy to read, it’s a great way to start the conversation with your employees and strategize using the data.

Now that you know how to share survey results, let’s look at why you should.

Why Share Survey Results?

One of the most important reasons you should share your survey results is because it makes you and your staff accountable to the data. It begins the conversation and encourages your staff to take action.

Another reason to share your results is education. With the data in front of them, your staff can begin an open and honest evaluation of your processes and how they affect your customers.

You and your staff can look at customer engagement and really understand how your customers view your company.

When you make the results available to your staff, you help them see the overall big picture. Everyone can begin to see and understand where your company excels and where there’s an opportunity for exploration and change.

Sharing survey results ultimately enlists buy-in from your employees and gives them a reason to improve. Your staff will feel more loyal to your brand as they all work together to change for the better.

It’s a good idea to share survey results because it opens up an avenue for a culture of continued improvement as your staff works to improve their survey data.

Final Thoughts

With several avenues available to you, you’re sure to find a way to share survey results across your organization that spurs conversation and change.

Find the way that works best for you and your team and move forward. You may even find that multiple ways are best for getting the data out to your staff.

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.

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How To Get Links To Your Survey In Front Of Your Customers

Survey Tips

You want to provide the best customer experience possible, and one of the best ways to do this is to find out how your customers feel about their experience with your company.

A survey is an excellent way to find out if your customer service, products and overall experience are meeting the needs of your customers.

But, what happens when your survey participation rates are low because you aren’t sure how to disseminate your survey?

In this article, we look at how to get links to your survey in front of your customers.

Send an Email

One of the most efficient and commonplace ways to communicate with your customers and get your survey link to them is through your email marketing channel.

Since email is a direct line of communication with your customers, you can easily send them a link to your survey.

Your email lands right in the inner sanctum of their email box, and because you can highly target your email list, you can decide just exactly who to send your surveys to.

For example, you might choose to send a survey to only the people on your list who made a purchase in the last year. Or, perhaps you want to survey customers who haven’t made a purchase in the last year.

You also might segment your lists by demographics. Another option is to survey people who landed on a specific page of your website and not made a purchase.

Finally, perhaps you’d like to survey those on your list who chatted with your customer service staff. The possibilities with email are limitless.

It’s worth noting that your emailed surveys will most likely show the highest response rate because these are people who’ve opted in to your email list and are receptive to communication from you.

As you send your email surveys, here are a few tips to follow for the best results:

Use a short and specific headline to grab your customers’ attention.
Make the subject line seem like an exclusive, special invitation.
Do nothing else in your email other than explain your survey and provide the link to avoid any distractions.
Be brief in your description.
Offer your thanks and explain the incentive if you’re offering one.
Make your call to action button (your link to the survey) big, colorful and visible.
Send a follow up reminder if you have a low initial response rate.

Host Your Survey on Your Website

Another way to get links to your survey in front of your customers is by hosting the survey on your website.

By placing your survey on your website, you can invite your website visitors to complete your survey.

This can be beneficial to you because while these people may not be your customers yet, you can still gain valuable information from them.

Even though you gain information about your website visitors through your Google Analytics, you can glean even more information by posing specific questions to the people who visit your website.

How might you do this? Here are a few questions for putting surveys to work for you right on your website:

Create surveys for specific pages of your website. For example, you might include surveys on your product pages or your blog.
One survey might ask them what brought them to your website or how they learned about you. Another survey might ask them what they think of your brand-new product or what they might think of a proposed product or service.
In addition, you could ask them if they found your content useful or enjoyable.
You could also use a survey as a means to gain their contact information. Just be sure to tell them that you are doing it. There are many possibilities.

Where you place your survey is of significant importance. While you might place it right on your pages, you could also put your link in a pop-up box as visitors either land on your site or prepare to depart your site.

You can also use a survey on a follow-up page. For example, you might add a survey on your thank-you page after someone downloads something, makes a purchase or signs up for a beta of your services.

Do be sure to use a strong call to action and a very visible button.

Create a Blog

Another way to get a link out is to write a blog article and add the survey to the article.

This allows you to briefly explain why you want to conduct a survey and what you hope to gain by it. You can also return to update the blog post once you have your results.

Your blog allows you the ability to really connect with participants and encourage them to complete your survey.

Again, you want to use a strong call to action as well as a button link to your survey and text links to your survey within the blog text itself.

Use Social Media

Another premier spot to get your survey links into the hands of your customers is through social media.

While you can link to the blog post that includes your survey link, you can also create posts that share direct links to your survey.

The benefits of social media are many. Namely, social media allows you to start a conversation and encourage feedback in a friendly, low-key manner.

When utilizing social media, include a direct link to your survey. Consider using bitly to shorten the link as a best practice.

You can also use others on social media to share your link as well. Capitalize on your influencers to share your survey link.

You might also add a drawing to your social media link to encourage more survey participation.

Final Thoughts

The value of the survey is quite unsurpassed for finding out what your customers think about your business.

In fact, a survey by the Pew Research Center says that online surveys are one of the most convenient and cost effective ways to collect data from your customers.

Yet, it can be difficult to get responses for your surveys. The best way to combat this is to have an effective plan for distribution, and then to follow up and make sure it’s working.

Use your existing digital channels and brainstorm a few others. Then, promote your survey and distribute it to elicit a higher response rate.

Finally, the most important thing to remember is to make your survey about your customers, not you. You want to learn how they feel, so tailor your questions so your customers know how much you value their opinions.

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.

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Rewarding Managers For Good Survey Scores

Survey Tips

Should you reward your managers for providing a superb customer experience by managing their employees well and setting the tone for improved customer encounters?

In many cases, the answer to this question is, “Yes.” While you expect your managers to excel at leading their teams, you also want to reward them when they’ve done well.

How will you know when they’ve excelled at their job? When you’ve received positive survey scores.

In this article, we look at rewarding managers for good survey scores.

Customer Service is Key

In today’s digital world where reviews are everywhere on the internet, it’s never been more important to provide the best possible customer service. It’s what separates your business from the competition.

One way to encourage your staff to provide top notch service is to reward them, and this starts with your managers.

Since you recognize the importance of providing excellent service, you want to use your surveys to find out if your customers agree that is what is happening.

By surveying respondents to learn how they feel about your service, you are immediately putting your staff on notice. This may be a cultural shift for some of them, but one that’s immensely important to your overall success.

As your managers and ultimately your entire team see that customer service is your top concern, and they note that you are going to use surveys to gauge it, they’ll soon jump on-board.

So, by rewarding managers for good survey scores, you send a strong message that customer service matters, and that you’re willing to reward staff members for helping you excel.

Tips for Succeeding with Rewards

Before you decide to reward your managers for good survey scores, you want to have the following in place:

Set up a training program for your managers as well as your staff so they know how to serve your customers best.
Create some parameters for measuring customer service through your surveys. Decide what you’d like to benchmark and what you consider good enough for rewarding your managers. They must know what’s expected if they’re going to reach your goals.
Make sure your surveys reflect what’s important to the customer and not necessarily to you. For example, what the customer wants out of the experience might not be what you think they want.
Once you receive the surveys, go through them with your managers. You want to communicate the feedback you receive so everyone understands it and places the same value on it.
Use your Net Promoter Score. Let it drive the change you want to see in your business. The NPS tells you the value your company has in the eyes of the consumer. This is a good way to measure the customer experience, so you can reward managers when it’s positive.
If the surveys aren’t positive, do you have a structure in place to identify problems and effect change? Talk to your manager and implement the proper procedures.
Make sure your managers have ownership of the survey results and create a plan with your team for managing the customer experience throughout the year.
Outline the reward program so it’s official. Give them a target to reach for and encourage them to share the “thank-you” with their staff for a job well done.

Final Thoughts

It can be beneficial for your company to reward and incentivize your managers for good survey scores.

Not only will it help your company excel at customer service, it let’s your entire staff know that a culture of “customer first” is important to you.

On the flip side, you do want to set out in writing what you’re going to do when surveys don’t come back with good scores. It pays to make your staff aware of what happens when you receive good survey scores and when you receive not-so-good scores.

Ultimately, the goal of rewarding your managers is to encourage their strong participation in your customer service goals and to improve your bottom line.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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How To Use Uploads As Part Of Your Surveys And Forms

Survey Tips

You’ll find there are many different types of questions to ask in a survey, and they each serve their purpose.

The dichotomous question is generally a “yes/no” question.
Users are encouraged to type their own response in the open-ended question.
The multiple-choice question allows users to pick from a variety of answers.
The rank order and ranking scale questions allow users to rank items.

But, what if you need more information than this?

This is where uploads come in. You can use uploads as part of your surveys and forms.

How to Use Uploads

When you use uploads, you give respondents the ability to attach data that isn’t usually available through the above standard survey questions. (tweet this)

For example, a customer purchases your product, and you want to see it in action so you ask them to upload a photo. Or, perhaps you want respondents to upload a document like a resume. They could also do this with the file upload.

Even better, they can upload documents and photos through the survey on their phones.

Final Thoughts

With the extra feature of being able to use uploads as part of your surveys and forms, you can now collect additional information from respondents.

You make it easy for them to send you information they have in a digital format. This is especially helpful for respondents because they don’t have to type the information into your survey – they can just upload a file.

This survey question type is particularly beneficial when using mobile surveys. Your respondents can simply upload a photo or document from their mobile device to the survey.

It makes it easier for respondents to provide you with information while engaging them in the process.

You’ll find the files easy to access in Survey Town for your review. You now have access to even more data in your survey results.

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 via Visual Hunt.