How to Turn a Good Survey into a Great One

Regardless of what industry you are in or the size of your business, you cannot underestimate the insight and benefit that comes from a well conducted survey. From business and education to the healthcare industry, there are many areas where getting more information on the experience of your audience can help to better your services and improve your organisation as a whole. Of course, not just any survey will do, and it’s important to create one that gives you the right information and the right way.

A great way to ensure this is to use advanced survey software, which can help you create employee satisfaction surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, products surveys and more that are administered on a range of devices including smartphones, tablets and PCs. So how do you ensure you are getting the most out of the survey you create? Here are four things you’ll need to keep in mind.

Before you get started, it’s crucial to put in the time to properly research who it is you would like to survey and what kind of information you would like to receive and why. Discovering your target audience is an important first step, and you’ll also need to think about the type of respondents that are going to be most helpful, i.e. people who care about your company, product, service etc. who will be more likely to give in-depth, truthful data.

 While it can be tempting to ask everything you are interested in getting the answer to, it’s important to value the time of your respondents and only ask the things that are going to assist you with your particular goal. The respondents are doing you a favour, so it’s a good idea to keep survey as short and sweet as possible – generally, they should not take longer than 15 minutes to complete. Let your audience know in the beginning how long it will approximately take and give them the choice of whether to continue and complete it.

Next, consider the actual wording and design of the survey. There are a number of question types to choose from, including single-response, open-ended, multiple choice and grid questions. The aim no matter what type/s you choose is to ensure each question is clear and concise, as leading and ambiguous questions could affect your results.

There are several ways you can choose to administer a survey, so it’s always a good idea to think which choice is going to be most convenient for your respondents. Options include email, mobile, online, social media, tablet surveys and more. You also should consider more traditional methods such as paper, mail and face to face if the situation permits.

After all the research and planning, you want to make sure you are getting the most out of the data you collated. Of course, the way you go about your analysis; in some cases, simple graphs, charts and tables will be enough where doing the analysis yourself is efficient. In other cases, you want further insight such as standard deviation and chi tests, in this instant survey software may be the way to go.