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Online Surveys? Get a life!
By Joseph Hunkins at June 04, 2008 2 CommentsSeveral new startups are trying to take advantage of using the internet to very cost effectively solicit and collect survey data. Vizu and Crowdscience are two of these new companies.
I’ve done a lot of surveys as part of travel research projects, and although online tools are cheap and efficient at collecting data they generally suffer from two flaws. The first is that you are measuring online people only. This is not as much of a problem as it was before because as millions pour online every month, the online population now more closely mirrors the entire population of the country and even the international demographic landscape. However it is still a challenge to suggest that online survey takers are the same as non-survey takers, and even more problematic to suggest they are the same as your offline customers.
What if you want to know what to do at your website to bring *new visitors*? You’ll obviously face challenges by only asking *current visitors* if you use a popup survey.
But despite the troubles online surveys generally offer much better information than nothing at all, and at a much lower cost than offline surveys which also suffer from many potential flaws.
So, use online surveys but interpret them with caution.
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2 Comments
Glad you brought up this issue, and as Voice of Customer platforms begin to evolve we begin to notice a trend of marketer desire to capture feedback, hear their customers opinions, and more. The problem with Surveys are these (and I am biased as I would like to open up a new platform for your review): Surveys are often detached from the real-time experience,they are often limited by the questions being asked that may have had nothing to do with their emotional state, and they are long. Remember the 80% of satisfied customers that went else where?
So here is my proposal. What if instead of popping a survey, I provided a user-invoked [+]Feedback icon, blended but noticeable.
What if the comment card that pops upon user choosing to voice an opinion, was short, page-specific, and allowed for open-ended text in their own words?
What if there were only a short few NPS, WOM, Web Related Ratings, and up to 6 page related Branded questions, to provide specific data applicable to the experience on that page, and overall site experience?
What if all the data, from all the pages, was simplified into one central platform, easy to use with no technical aptitude, and was at a cost of 1-2 focus groups, per year.
I can help.
Data integrity will always be an issue as long as surveys are posted online waiting for random users to give feedback. There is still value in such online surveys as indicated in this blog by an editor at eWeek:
http://feeds.ziffdavisenterprise.com/RSS/RashsJudgment
I work for a major hospitality brand that uses online surveys through an integrated process to survey every guest upon check-out. Each guest gets a unique link via email and there is no possibility of ballot-box stuffing. We only ask opinion questions while the survey systems can link their demographic and other information in our database at reporting time. It’s cheap compared to any other form of feedback and it’s priceless to our organization in terms of what it has done to how we make decisions.
Online surveys, done right, are valuable!