Knowing your customers is basic to planning to meet their needs. But many companies rely on gut instinct, occasional chats with customers, or unreliable and non-specific advice from trade magazines.
Running a survey is frequently regarded as far too challenging to undertake. Analyzing survey responses involves all kinds of mathematical and statistical expertise, for example: in fact, designing the actual questions is a much harder task, since you will find too numerous methods in which questions can lead a respondent towards the desired response.
Even selecting respondents can be problematical - many individuals refuse to participate, for numerous reasons, but the researcher has to assume that those who refuse are the same in every respect as those who participate, despite the reality that we already know they differ in one essential respect: they do not do surveys! There is, nevertheless, a solution at hand.
Survey Monkey is an online survey design system. The system allows its users to set up a survey using pre-prepared question templates, choosing from more than 20 various kinds of question. Surveys are carried out entirely online, so respondents experience the minimum inconvenience and can participate at any time they find convenient.
Easy surveys could be conducted for free, but bigger or more complicated surveys need to be paid for (at reasonable rates). Survey Monkey will automatically analyze and collate responses, again all online, so that results come back very quickly indeed.
All a researcher needs to do is direct respondents towards the Survey Monkey website and log in. This can be done by respondents at home, or on the company's premises: in the case of (say) a retail service like a fast-food takeaway or perhaps a hairdressing salon, the business could set up a terminal and ask clients to total the survey while they're waiting. Surveys can be made engaging and fun to complete.
Be careful when writing questions. It might be worth reading a book on research approaches before setting up your survey - after all, it's a bit late to find out it is wrong after you've run the survey!
Always pilot any survey. Let a couple of individuals fill in the survey first, and see what problems come up - ambiguous questions, leading questions, and questions that are impossible to answer will all be flagged up by piloting.
Get the style correct and the results will follow. Remember that the more respondents you survey, the more reliable the results - but the higher the price. Around 200 respondents should be fine for many purposes.
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