How to Determine Your Survey Medium
You know that survey is a key business intelligence tool whether you are a tiny, small, medium or large business. Surveys can be used to understand your customers better in order to increase sales and profits, convert more prospects to customers by engaging them, evaluate your employee perceptions about your business so that productivity can be increased, consult with patients to improve the quality of medical care, and collect opinions from your franchisees and channel partners to improve sales and customer service.
It was difficult to plan, design and conduct surveys without engaging research organizations and spending considerable amount of money even a few years back. However with the mass adoption of internet and invention of cloud based software technologies, anyone can plan, design and deploy surveys, and collect actionable data with minimal investment. Even free edition of online software programs such as LeadPro247 Survey Builder could be used for surveys with small audience sizes.
However, determining a survey medium involves more than signing up for the online survey software solution. You need to understand the survey requirements in order to determine the appropriate medium. You could employ Online Survey Software, Telephone Surveys, Mailed Paper Surveys or even Face to Face Surveys recorded on paper. Or a hybrid methodology could be leveraged with online as well as traditional survey taking methods.
If your survey sample size is relatively small and you have enough budget, you can go for telephone based surveys or face to face surveys. Obviously you need the telephone and / or physical addresses of the customers in these cases.
If you have only email addresses of the customers (or proposed survey audience), then there is no other way except going in for online software based surveys. Respondents can click on the survey links and answer the survey questions via the internet browser from their own computers.
When the email addresses are also not available, you could survey the visitors browsing your websites using a pop-up survey questionnaire. Obviously most of these responses will be anonymous as the visitors may not be willing to identify themselves.
Medium and large sized organizations and universities prefer to use a combination of methods with multiple media, so that all type of respondents can be surveyed to get more meaningful results.
Online Survey Software solutions such as LeadPro 24|7 Survey Builder supports employing multiple methods for survey data collection and consolidating the results in the system to get a unified picture. For example, telephone surveys can be conducted and the responses entered into the system as if the respondents are taking the survey online. Paper based survey responses (collected from events, trade shows, etc.) can also be entered into the system using the manual survey response entry collector method.
Though the traditional survey methods are slowly loosing their importance, these are certainly not deal yet. Hence employment of mix and match of methods and leveraging the modern survey software systems will provide best results.
Comments on this entry are closed.