Online surveys are a very important business tool that can preempt the downfall of business and sometimes even whole product lines. This is only possible when surveys are done regularly enough to know what the customer is thinking before he or she reacts in the market place. Ideally, your surveys should be able to capture opinions on what is wrong with your product, how to improve your product, and what new product lines the customer would like to see. If this practice is followed cyclically, then there is no reason to assume that things will ever start to go wrong from a sales perspective.
Surveys have three parts, the survey itself, where it is conducted and the respondents, and finally how the results are interpreted. Looking at these three individual pieces, one can figure out where to improve the surveying methodology.
The survey point covers the questions that you will ask in a survey. When you run a survey, the first few questions should be dedicated to understanding who the customer is demographically. Next comes the questions about the specific product or service. These should be presented in the format of rating, where the respondent has to only choose good, bad, or could be better. This may seem inaccurate but it is quite user friendly and a follow up question could be used to capture more details.
Online surveys are only as good as where you place it. Ideally, you should place your survey on your own website first to get the opinions of your own members and users. Moving forward from there, you can expand to polling and surveying the users of your partner sites or make special marketing tie ups with other online entities and figure out what people who fit the bill of your customers think about your ideas. You could even use the route of social networking websites by making a fan page on it and then using that as a base to start polling.
The interpretation of the results is the final piece in the puzzle and can be quite a show stopper if not done properly. Survey results may be absolute but numbers can be manipulated by some deft spin doctoring to make things look different. In surveying, this is usually done by attaching two variables that conveniently support a conclusion. For example, if your online surveys indicate that product X is not so popular as Y according to the 20 -30 age group, you might be tempted to kill off that product line; however, there might be many more considerations that need to go into such a conclusion but unfortunately, it would seem that someone has already made up one’s mind.
These are the general guidelines that one should follow to ensure that the exercise of surveying is done truthfully and implemented promptly. The key to success is to ensure that this methodology is followed regularly and at least once in every quarter.
