Employee Surveys and Customer Surveys - 34 Survey Tips For Getting Better Results

Tips for avoiding common pitfalls when conducting an employee survey or a customer survey:

Employee and customer surveys enable businesses to gather important information, perceptions and insight from employees, customers and other groups (e.g. suppliers, shareholders, members, etc.) and then make better, more informed decisions. Surveys are the most effective way to quickly gather anonymous or identified feedback and suggestions from large numbers of people.

Some of the many types of employee and customer surveys that businesses conduct include employee satisfaction surveys, employee engagement surveys, employee opinion surveys, 360 leadership surveys, employee benefits surveys, IT customer satisfaction surveys, customer opinion surveys, customer satisfaction surveys and risk surveys.

Organizations sometimes fail to achieve the results they should be realizing from surveys due to several reasons. These reasons include poor design, asking the wrong questions, failure to conduct the survey effectively, difficulty getting people to respond, inadequate analysis of findings, failure to communicate and take action on the results and other reasons. The purpose of this article is to provide tips for getting more value from a wide range of business surveys.

34 Tips that will help your organization achieve significant value and a strong payback from employee surveys and customer surveys:

Tips 1-6 focus on specific types of employee surveys and customer surveys. Tips 7-34 will help you conduct any type of survey more effectively.

1. Employee satisfaction surveys, employee engagement surveys and employee opinion surveys - These employee surveys should be conducted annually to get the greatest benefit in terms of identifying new opportunities, problems and measuring progress since the most recent survey and monitoring trends. Employees have extensive information how satisfied they are and how engaged they are in their job. They also have considerable knowledge and insight about customer satisfaction and needs. Employee satisfaction surveys, employee opinion surveys and employee engagement surveys should include questions that get at key issues that drive employee and company performance. Don't be afraid to ask questions that you expect will gather negative responses, including satisfaction with compensation. When questions are worded effectively, they provide important information you need to know and act on. If you are not willing to ask the important questions, why are you conducting an employee survey?

2. Employee benefits surveys - Your organization may be providing benefits that are not in sync with what many of your employees need. Employee benefit surveys will tell you if employees are satisfied with benefits and what you need to change. Results from an employee benefits survey help your benefits decision makers to make better, informed decisions that can achieve greater value for benefits dollars spent by both your organization and your employees.

3. 360 leadership surveys - Many people believe that the most important driver of organizational success is its leaders. A 360 leadership survey provides feedback to individual leaders at any level of an organization about how they are perceived by their peers, direct reports and from leaders above them in the organization. When conducted for many of an organization's leaders at the same time, 360 surveys also provide comprehensive consolidated information about the organization's leadership strengths and weaknesses, and where leadership needs to be strengthened. Companies should consider conducting a 360 leadership survey every year or two. Hold leaders accountable for increasing their own leadership effectiveness and performance and that of their direct reports.

4. Customer satisfaction surveys and customer opinion surveys - Business to business customers and consumers have many companies that they can give their business to. Customers know what they want and expect when buying products and services. A customer satisfaction survey or a customer opinion survey gathers important information, opinions and insight from customers that can be acted on to make your company more competitive, increasing your ability to attract and keep customers. Depending on the types of products and services you sell, you should consider conducting a customer survey annually at a minimum and more often if you have large numbers of customers and a relatively high level of customer turnover. You need to find out why customers are dissatisfied, why they are going to your competitors and what you need to do to attract and keep more customers.

5. IT customer satisfaction surveys and IT User Surveys - Most in-house and outsourced IT service functions underperforms from the perspective of IT customer satisfaction. Poor or inconsistent performance on the part of IT help desks, desk-side support, application support, network support and data centers impacts IT customer satisfaction and IT customer performance. Organizations should conduct an IT customer satisfaction survey at least annually. They can also consider conducting ongoing IT incident follow-up surveys, asking a sample of IT customers to complete a brief survey after an IT incident has been resolved. IT surveys often identify hidden and recurring problems that will save considerable money when they are properly identified and resolved.

6. Risk surveys - Most organizations that have a risk management process in place focus on a limited number of known, high profile types of risks. Risk surveys typically include an extensive list of risks that organizations face. An effectively designed risk survey is customized to include all types of risks that the organization is facing. Managers from across the company participate in a risk survey, identifying and assessing the importance and likelihood of each type of risk, and providing suggestions for reducing risks and managing them more effectively. Organizations should conduct a risk survey annually and be prepared to take action based on the survey findings.

7. Conduct online or Internet surveys where possible - Surveys conducted using the Internet are the quickest and most cost-effective way to conduct surveys. More often than not, employees, customers and other recipients of business surveys have access to e-mail and the Internet at work and at home. For employees that normally do not have access to computers and the Internet, companies can easily provide access to designated computers.

8. Have a clear purpose for the survey - The design and questions should stay focused on its purpose. By clearly wording the questions and structuring the answers, surveys can be used in many ways and for a variety of reasons.

9. Give the survey an appropriate title - The survey title provides an opportunity to summarize a survey's objective and encourage respondents to participate. A good title will encourage respondents that their time investment will be worthwhile.

10. When you are designing your survey, consider how you will analyze the results - The more complicated the questions and survey structures are, the harder it will be to display the data in useful formats and to analyze the data.

11. Give respondents an idea of how much time the survey will take - It is good practice to indicate approximately how long the survey is likely to take so respondents can choose the best time to complete it. Respondents may drop out if the survey appears long with no end in sight.

12. Tell respondents the survey end date - Encourage completion of the survey as soon as possible and inform respondents of the survey's end date so they are able to schedule the necessary time.

13. Ask pertinent questions - Only ask survey questions about issues that you really want to learn about and that you are willing to take action on if the results indicate a need to do so.

14. Ask pertinent demographic questions - Only ask demographic questions that will provide useful information that you can take action on. Employee surveys should identify department, location if your company has more than one location, and possibly other information such as gender, age range, race, years of service with your organization, etc. Likewise, customer surveys should include questions that identify demographic information about business customers or consumers being surveyed.

15. Make the responses anonymous - Unless you really need to know who responded and the specific responses provided by each employee or customer, ensure that all individual responses will be anonymous, with no ability to link responses to individual responders. Communicate that the responses are anonymous and that all individual responses will be aggregated. This encourages people to respond, and to respond honestly.

16. Organize survey with questions in logical categories - Group questions into clear categories as this will make it easier for the participants and it will also be easier to analyze and make sense of the responses.

17. Keep rating scales consistent - To the extent possible; minimize the number of rating scales used. This makes it easier for responders.

18. Plan for an appropriate survey response period - People are often busy, or they may be away and not available to respond to surveys when they first receive them. Three to four week response periods are recommended. Follow-up reminders should be sent out weekly during the survey response period.

19. Promote the survey to increase participation - Pre-survey announcements and follow-up communications during the survey response period help to increase participation.

20. Provide an opportunity to include comments and suggestions for all or most questions - Comments provide insight and information that explains why employees and customers are satisfied or dissatisfied. Comments often also include useful suggestions for making better, more informed business decisions. Themes and trends are often identified while analyzing the comments.

21. Keep the length of the survey as short as possible - Every question asked should be asked for a reason. Limit asking questions that will provide you with 'nice to know' information and instead concentrate on the 'need to know' questions.

22. Use plain language, avoid acronyms, maintain consistency and don't ask questions that may result in ambiguous answers - Word questions clearly. If questions can be interpreted in more than one way, the responses will be suspect and there is a risk that analysis of the survey data will be misleading and unreliable.

23. Avoid including long questions - Use concise sentences wherever possible. Long questions can cause a respondent to lose focus and possibly abandon the survey.

24. Proofread the survey carefully - Review it thoroughly more than once and if possible, have other people review it. Make sure the survey is grammatically correct and makes sense.

25. Avoid questions that provide 'nice to have' information - Do not include questions that will not provide useful information and insight for taking action if needed and for making better decisions. If you do, you are wasting the time of respondents and your own time reading and analyzing responses.

26. Create and implement action plans - Use survey results as a basis for making changes that will enable your company to perform and compete more effectively. Create action plans and get managers and employees involved in making appropriate changes.

27. Communicate survey findings - Share results with your managers and employees and communicate next steps. Share pertinent survey results based on managers' and employees' positions, and their individual need to know and act on results.

28. Keep employees informed about progress making changes - Communicate ongoing progress with action plans, linking actions and progress back to survey results.

29. Consider using a survey company to conduct cost-effective surveys - Survey companies have experience and expertise well beyond that available in most organizations, and they provide credibility. As mentioned previously, most employees and customers prefer to have their survey responses handled on an anonymous basis, and using a survey company rather than rather than using self-service survey services provides people with greater confidence that their responses will be handled on an anonymous basis.

30. Make sure to get comprehensive reports - Survey companies typically have reporting capabilities that are much more powerful and flexible than the survey reports available from using self-service software and self-service web surveys. This can save days of costly and error prone hands-on time preparing graphs, data tables and comments reports sorted by demographics.

31. Commit to taking action on survey findings - Do not conduct surveys if you are not prepared to take action based on survey results. When you ask people to complete a survey you are creating an expectation in their minds that you care about their opinions and that you will take appropriate action based on their answers. Failure to take action sends a signal to employees and customers that you cared enough to ask their opinions, but not enough to really listen to them and make changes based on their feedback.

32. Make sure benchmarked survey data provide valid comparative data - Some survey companies can provide comparative benchmarking data from their other customers. Be cautious about using external normative comparisons for benchmarking your survey results. There is a very high probability that comparison of your survey results with survey benchmarking data from other companies will result in invalid comparisons due to many possible reasons including different industry, different products and services, different customers and employees, different customer/employee demographics, different business strategies and plans, surveys done at different points in time, reflecting different economic conditions, and survey questions worded differently and/or in different order.

33. Conduct follow-up surveys - Conducting annual, semi-annual or quarterly surveys is an effective way to monitor progress on actions taken as a result of previous surveys and to identify pertinent changes since the last survey.

34. Include survey measurements as part of your company's ongoing metrics - Survey results can be an important part of a balanced scorecard or other companywide measurement process, providing critical employee and customer data. Surveys measure how well your organization is learning, performing and executing.

Earn Extra Money Online Legitimately With Paid Online Surveys

Paid Surveys are a legitimate way of earn some extra money from internet. Actively participating in paid online surveys can make a good amount of money with a sense of satisfaction. One thing that we should clearly understand is that participation in paid online surveys alone is not going to make us rich. Paid Online Surveys only help us to make some extra income from internet. Surveys help us to express our views and concerns ethically and companies conducting the surveys reward us for our time and sincere opinion.

Today there are a number of online survey companies that pay us for expressing our opinion. These survey companies reward there online survey participants in a number of ways like gift voucher, redeemable survey points, entry in a draw and cash. One thing that must be understood clearly is that every online survey is not open to everyone for participation. Survey companies have a per-planned criteria for there survey participants. Only those participants who fulfill these criteria based on age, sex, demography, interests, occupation, qualification, living standard are allowed to participate.

This per-qualification for surveys also means that participants at some specific place like USA, UK, and Canada etc are automatically qualified to participate in a large number of online surveys then those who are participating from countries where markets comparatively less developed. This per-qualification also applies to other criteria like interests, occupation, age group etc. Every online survey allows a fixed number of participants fulfilling each criterion, so after a limit nobody is allowed to participate in the survey. This doesn't mean that all slots for participation are already filled and there is no scope for new participants. No, this is not the case, actually companies allow everyone to provide there profile for participation in paid online surveys. When a survey suitable to a specific type of profile is available, survey companies invite each registered participant in that group to participate, those who participate before the survey reaches its limit are allowed and rest who try to participate in survey after the survey has reached its limit are denied participation.

Paid online surveys are a legitimate and ethical way of making some extra money online. In order to participate in surveys one has to register with a survey site. If one wishes to make good money from paid online surveys alone then one should get registered with almost all legitimate survey companies available to him. One thing to consider before joining and participating in each and every survey is to ensure that the survey company is genuine and has a clean track record of paying survey participants, for example Global Test Market is one such company which has a clean and flawless record. There are some popular paid online survey sites which charge a small one time fees to allow access to there well kept database of high paying legitimate survey companies.

There are a number of online survey companies which are only interested in conducting surveys and are reluctant to pay the participants; some survey companies don't even have a visible payment policy. Then there are others which are outright scams as they are only interested in collecting personal details in the name of surveys and later they sell these details to third parties and these third parties spam the survey aspirants with all sorts of offers. When we encounter such a survey company which we've got FREE from a website or blog, one really repents using FREE listing and joining such surveys, truth about them is only discovered when its time to get paid after participating in a number of surveys on there invitation, but by and large there are more legitimate and honest companies conducting paid online surveys.

Online Surveys - Best Practices

Creating an online survey might seem simple at first. The latest internet survey software makes it easy to construct an online questionnaire and chart the responses. But this process is not really as simple as it seems. To get the most useful results, you need to become familiar with online survey best practices.

What Do You Need to Know?
The first step in creating an online survey is to decide what you want to know. What is the main thing you want to discover? Start by brainstorming everything you hope to learn from the survey. Then prioritize the topics you have listed. This process will help you decide how much attention to devote to each item in your online questionnaire.

In deciding what you want to learn from your survey, you need to think about how you are going to use the data you collect. There is not much point in gathering information if you don't plan to do anything with it. What actions are you prepared to take to address the responses you receive? Will you create new procedures, start a new training program, and change your marketing plans? To make the most of a survey, you need to ask about subjects you can do something about.

In some rare cases, you might decide that the best response to what you learn from your online survey is to do nothing at all. For example, if you learned that all your employees were completely satisfied with their current health care benefits, you would probably decide to leave well enough alone. Unfortunately, such situations are rare. If you thought everyone was happy with the way things are, you probably wouldn't have bothered to conduct a survey in the first place.

Brief is Better
People have a limited attention span. Ideally, an online questionnaire should take no more than five minutes to complete. In a typical online survey, people answer an average of five multiple-choice questions a minute. This means that you should probably limit your survey to no more than twenty-five questions. (In building online surveys, remember that one open-ended question equals three multiple-choice questions.)

People are more likely to complete a lengthy survey if they are expecting some kind of reward for making it all the way to the end. For example, people might be willing to answer a long list of questions about their health if they expect to be told at the end how long they are likely to live.

To determine how long it will take to complete your survey, try it out on five or six people. Don't tell them they are being timed. If you do, they might run through the questions faster than they normally would. If some people take much longer than others, ask them if there were any questions they didn't understand.

Make Every Question Count
To get the most out of your survey, you have to make every question count. Don't be satisfied with your first draft. Once you have written a question, try asking the same thing in three or four different ways. This exercise forces you to decide if your first attempt is really the best way to get at the information you want to know.

Once you have written a few different versions of a question, you can either pick one or combine parts of several to create the best question possible.

Your questions should be clear, brief and easy to read. Avoid unusual vocabulary or jargon that some people might not understand. Keep sentences short and simple.

Beware of Bias
If you really want to know what people think, you need to be careful not to steer them in a particular direction with your questions.

The most obvious example of biased questionnaires is the "push polls" used in some political campaigns. A push poll question might ask, "Do you think that Candidate X's plan to raise taxes will place an unfair burden on the middle class?" The intent here is not to solicit anyone's opinion on the candidate's tax plans. The intent is to suggest that the candidate's plans are unfair.

Push polls are obviously slanted, but bias can sneak into your online questionnaire without you noticing it. Sometimes "loaded" words can have a strong influence on how people respond to a question. For example, if you ask people whether the check-in procedures at your hotel "should be improved," they are likely to say yes. But wording the question this way doesn't really tell you how happy or unhappy people are with the current procedures. Instead, you might use a rating question, such as, "Please rate the convenience of our check-in procedures." Possible responses could range from (1) "Inconvenient" to (5) "Very Convenient."

Be Specific
Sometimes questions are so general that they are not really useful. For example, consider the question, "Do you like salmon?" What does this mean? Do you like the taste of salmon? Do you like the health properties of salmon? Do you like the price of salmon compared to the price of other fish? Do you like salmon more or less than other fish? The question is so general that the responses you get will not really tell you much.

Also be careful to avoid "double-barreled" questions, such as, Which of these vehicles do you consider to be the safest and most economical?" Here you are really asking two questions. People might consider a particular vehicle safe but not economical, and vice versa.

Try Different Question Types
In building an online survey; don't limit yourself to a particular type of question. The types of questions you choose will depend on the subject and the kind of information you want to collect.

Multiple-choice questions are common in online questionnaires. They can be answered quickly and they make it easy to collect and compare data. But sometimes you don't want to limit responses to four or five choices. In those cases, you might ask an open-ended question, such as, "How can we make visitors to our facility feel more welcome?"

Sometimes multiple choice questions allow the respondent to choose multiple answers. For example, "Which of the following products are you likely to buy in the next year?" These questions can give you more useful data for marketing purposes because they are a more accurate reflection of actual consumer behavior.

You might also try using ranking questions, such as, "Rank the following five vehicles in terms of overall value." These questions can give you a useful picture of how a product or service matches up with the competition.

Rating questions typically use a tool called a Likest Scale to create a picture of how people feel about something. For example, a Likest Scale question might ask, "How important do you think it is to have a fingerprint security reader on your laptop?" Possible responses might range from (1) "Not Important at All" to (7) "Very Important."

Matrix questions combine two or more variables. For example, a matrix question might ask people to rate five different online travel services on a scale from (1) "Inconvenient" to (5) "Very Convenient."

Basically, the type of questions you use will depend on what you want to know.

Question Branching
Question branching allows you to build flexibility into your survey. Here's how it works. A question might ask, "Do you own your home?" A "yes" response will take the person to a new set of questions about home ownership. A "no" response will take the person to a new set of questions about renting a house or an apartment.

Branching simplifies questionnaires because respondents don't see questions that are not relevant to them.

The Online Advantage
Online surveys offer a number of advantages over surveys done over the phone, by mail, or in person. They can include a larger sample size at a reasonable price. They make it easier to collect, analyze and present data. And they allow you to use video and images in a way that is just not practical in other types of surveys.

In recent years internet survey software has become very sophisticated. It can help determine proper sample size and evaluate the statistical significance of responses. It can also make it easy to write new questions or modify existing questions from a library of online questionnaires.

The best online survey software makes it easy to create attractive, user-friendly formats. You don't need a background in web design or graphic arts to create a polished, professional questionnaire.

What Kind of Response Can You Expect?
The response you get to your survey depends mainly on the type of survey you are doing and your target audience. For example, if you are doing a customer satisfaction survey, you are likely to get more responses from people at both ends of the satisfaction spectrum - people who are very satisfied and people who are very dissatisfied.

In surveys aimed at a broad population, your response profile will probably mirror the profile of internet users in general. In broad terms, internet users are younger, somewhat more affluent, and more tech savvy than the average adult. They are about evenly divided between men and women. In terms of residence, approximately 54% of internet users are suburban, 30% are urban and 16% are rural.

If you are interested in narrowing this profile, you can include in your survey a few simple questions about age, gender, residence, etc.

Analyzing Survey Responses
Internet survey software makes it easy to analyze responses. The best packages offer a broad range of statistical analysis tools that are simple and easy to use. Advanced users can customize the analysis by modifying the default options to suit their needs. Here are some of the analysis tools that are currently available.

Frequency Distribution simply tells you how many people chose particular responses to a multiple choice question.

Survey Cross-Tab Analysis allows you to see how responses to one question affect another. For example, you could see how what percentage of people who responded "college graduate" also responded "employed at the same job for more than five years."

Average by Category lets you compare the average response for different categories of people. For example, you could compare the average annual income range for men and women, or for high school graduates and college graduates.

Cross Tab Means is a more sophisticated measurement that allows you to see the relationship among three variables. For example, you could see how highly SAFETY is rated by WOMEN who own a FORD.

Post-Stratification allows you to adjust results to reflect the true population. For example, suppose that 25% of respondents say that they own more than one computer, but you know that the average age of the respondents is 27. Using Census data, post-stratification can give more weight to the responses of older people, so that your survey will be a more accurate reflection of the true population.

Segmentation identifies groups of customers who share similar needs and who demonstrate similar buyer behavior. This allows marketers to target different campaigns to different groups of customers based on their survey responses.

Gap Analysis allows a business to see how large a gap there is between what it is currently offering and what its customers want. For example, a survey might ask customers of an auto repair chain to rate four different things: service, quality, value, and reliability. Survey results show that "service" is consistently rated lower than the other factors, so this is the area that offers the greatest opportunity for improvement.

The results you obtain with these tools can be presented in tables, charts or graphs. These displays can be customized to present data in a way that will be most meaningful for everyone who needs to use it.

A Survey for Every Purpose
Online surveys are used extensively for marketing and market research. The online approach works particularly well for marketing surveys because it allows a business to reach a large number of respondents easily and economically. Market research software also makes it easy to analyze responses and adjust marketing plans accordingly.

Online questionnaires have also proved extremely effective for customer satisfaction surveys, advertisement effectiveness surveys, and product evaluation surveys. These tools give businesses a wealth of information about who their customers are, what they want, and how they decide what to buy.

Businesses also use online employee satisfaction surveys to learn how their employees feel about everything from pay grades to parking.

Online Survey Best Practices Yield Best Results
To get the most out of online surveys, follow the best practices outlined here.

• Begin by giving some careful thought to what you need to learn from your survey.
• Keep your survey brief; make every question count.
• Beware of bias.
• Experiment with different kinds of questions.

Utilize the powerful analysis tools available with online survey software