If you have a perception that conducting surveys can be a useful exercise but are far too time consuming to prepare, cumbersome to deploy and require considerable resources to process the responses into a meaningful report it is perhaps time to think again.
Online surveys turn what was once a time consuming, resource hungry, cumbersome process into a low cost, quick, easy exercise that delivers real-time reporting.
The Ease of Design
Out with the word-processor, now there is a quick and easy way for almost anyone to create surveys using a simple menu system that allows surveys to be created in minutes and with the ability to add additional questions and modify and move existing questions around.
Ease Of Delivery
After preparation a survey is deployed through the internet or organisation’s intranet making it instantly available to anyone with access to the internet.
Ease of Promotion
There are a number of easy ways to invite respondents to participate in a survey such as sending an email that contains a link to the survey or linking to the survey from a suitable website.
The Ease of Participation
Online surveys don’t just make it easy for the publisher, most respondents find that completing a survey online is quicker and easier when compared against the traditional pen and paper survey and from the publishers point of view a lot less prone to mistakes such as respondents missing out questions or multiple responses being entered against single response questions.
Ease of Survey Management
Publishers of online surveys can see in real-time the response rate, summary and detail results.
Ease of Analysis
At the end of the survey the response data is ready for detailed analysis, the information can be loaded into a spreadsheet or third-party analysis program where the respondent data can be sliced and diced.
Recognizing the Ease
Once business managers have appreciated the ease of the total life cycle of conducting a survey online they will then recognise the multitude of new opportunities that exist.
The costly annual employee satisfaction survey can now be done quicker and cheaper allowing the exercise to be conducted bi-annual or quarterly ensuring any employee problems are identified and dealt with early. There is now also an opportunity to conduct smaller and more targeted ad-hoc surveys on a departmental level or a niche area of the business improving communications between the employee and employer.
A survey can be central in allowing management to deliver a message and measure the employee support and concerns of introducing new initiatives, something that can’t be done using a simple one way memo style directive.
A survey can be used as a marketing tool by explaining the benefit of a product or service and gathering the response from potential customers.
Return of Investment
Technology too often delivers better ways to perform certain tasks but with a Return on Investment that often requires ‘investment’ first and the ‘return’ later. Many of the available hosted online survey services have not only turned a cumbersome task into a cinch, but reduced the cost down to a pinch, giving you a return on investment from day one and opening up a world of possibilities and further savings.
With the many opportunities that online surveys bring to a manager it is a tool that is always useful to have to hand in their personal tool box.