Comments on: Are Customer Surveys a Waste of Time?

By: Tara

Tara — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:46:20 +0000

I think that the listening to the voice of your customers will allow companies to grow and prosper. Hasn’t anyone heard of the blind coke taste test. People blind folded preferred pepsi to coke so coke changed their product and people hated it, if they had surveyed and used the information they would have found that people who loved coke, hated the new product. I don’t think you should use one bad review but integrate the majority of feedback back into your business, I think it is crucial. Survey companies like Vovici make making your survey, deploying it and analyzing very simple and professional and it made for smaller to enterprise size companies. The web based survey companies now make it easy to manage necessary feedback!

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By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 17:04:48 +0000

Everyone is talking about the companies, but don’t forget about the survey takers. I personally have filled out 400hours worth of surveys, and have only recieved 2$. After that much time, and i’m sure there are many others’ you tend to give botched results, and yes i even participated in the gap survey’s. I tried to answer honestly, but most of the questions were just repetitive option boxes, placing them against their competitors. I believe greenfield online did them. You also tend to get the same survey multiple times so they can fill their quotas. Most survey companies don’t pay anything but give you about the same chance as getting struck by lightning than getting a prize/cash from them. You wan’t the best results, make sure you the survey takers get paid, even a small amout like 2$ will make 100% better results, and chose a few for online focus groups, chat rooms, direct response to another individual will get you better results than a piece of binary paper will. Last, leave you question’s open ended. Never force someone into answering the question the way you want them too, and give them plenty of whitespace to verify why they chose that answer if they wan’t too. I think up there I read someone talking about customers being satisfied, then giving you different results when asking why. oop, there goes my email, probably another survey that pay’s nothing. But just the chance I’ll fill it out anyway.

By: Adam S.

Adam S. — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 16:49:46 +0000

Yeah, I can’t help feeling that this question is ill-posed. Many surveys fail because many surveys are poorly written. Comment #1 is a case in point: asking people whether they will purchase is probably a waste of time. Tools like conjoint analysis are more appropriate for pricing studies.

And comment #2 is another case in point: don’t ask focus groups to write copy for you. Instead, do some testing and analysis of the campaign.

But surveys, particularly in this age of internet, can be quite useful and easy tools for getting quick feedback. Perhaps the fashion industry needs to rely more on guy, but in my business (tech), the customer’s opinion is all too often ignored.

By: Marc Stockman

Marc Stockman — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 02:11:14 +0000

Just like with any other marketing tool, surveys can be used correctly or incorrectly.

I would never give a blanket statement saying surveys are always good or bad because it depends on a variety factors including a) skill of the survey designer, b) purpose of the survey, c) skill of the survey analyzer, d) how the survey analysis is used and more.

In my experience, and as some have mentioned in this thread, surveys are a great tool to identify interest in a variety product ideas as to help actually create the content of the product. I’ve also had success asking deep emotional questions to get a 360 degree psychological view — awareness, emotions, imagery, jargon used, belief systems, common complaints, common desires, objections, etc. You’ll be shocked at what they’ll tell you if you ask. This is then used as additional fuel to HELP with writing copy…but not to be relied on completely.

You can’t rely on the survey only — you have to use intuition, gut, competitive research, market research, dry testing, etc. to confirm what you find in your surveys.

Price testing in surveys is difficult for the reasons other people have listed; likewise, although I’ve personally never done them, getting focus group feedback on direct mail packages seems to be ineffective because you’d have to have a focus group of 1,000 people just to get 10 people who might seriously buy. Sure, you could try to pull in only “potential buyers”, but that process itself has many problems.

Bottom line, I suggest using surveys as another weapon to add to your intelligence arsenal. Solely relying on it is probably foolish, but completely ignoring what your customers tell you is probably equally as foolish.

Life is full of shades of gray even though we always like to think in absolutes to make things simpler — that’s a hard lesson I’ve had to learn over the years…one I am still learning, in fact.

By: Justin Hitt

Justin Hitt — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 08:51:53 +0000

With my business-to-business clients I’ve had success with surveys asking customers to describe the results they want to achieve, or to ask the questions they want answered.

Picking top results and questions from a list on a very simple survey works well too, but beyond that get very mixed results from surveys.

I’ve had results with customer service surveys limited to a few questions on a single page, usually faxed back or presented on the web.

What you ask and what you’ll do with the information collected is important too. It’s good to solicit feedback from prospects and customers whenever possible, but you need well designed questions. (Which is probably a whole post in itself.)

Sincerely,

Justin Hitt
Strategic Relations Consultant
+1 (757) 282-7779