Online Survey as a Powerful Tool to Measure Customer Satisfaction

A few decades ago, conducting customer surveys needed a huge investment of money, effort and time. At that time, you only had options of interviewing your customer in-person, over telephone and by dropping a mail, which was not only expensive but was also ignored by most of the customers. The scenario has undergone a dramatic change in the last few years.

The internet has now changed the way surveys work. Today, more and more number of businesses is going for employing online surveys to interact with their customers effectively, know their expectations from the products and services of their company and their complaints about the products and services. Online surveys have an edge over the traditional method of surveying and are relatively cost-effective too.

Let us have a look at the major advantages of online surveys over traditional ways of surveying:

Shortened time for response collection:

There is no more necessity of sending researchers to the field for interviewing people personally. It is also no more required to have a team which enters the individual responses obtained into the program conducting statistical analysis. When a questionnaire is posted online, it is possible to collate and collect the data automatically. These facilities reduce the timeframe between the launch of your survey and actions being taken on the responses obtained. Traditional surveys, earlier, used to consume weeks, but now it is possible to accomplish al the tasks involved in surveying within a mere few days, using online surveys.

The design has more flexibility now:

The questionnaires employed in “real world environment” are not flexible enough. For example, you are conducting a customer satisfaction survey using traditional surveying methods. If you have a broad audience participating, many people within the participants would find questions that are irrelevant to them. Then, an interviewer or researcher has to carry out the task of identifying which questions are relevant to which participant.

Online surveys employ logic like branch, pipe and skip for personalizing the items included in the questionnaire. Skip logic enables the respondents to pass over questions automatically depending on the responses they provided to the previous questions. Branch logic enables the surveyor to send the respondents to different routes depending on the previous responses obtained from them. Such technology saves considerable time, and also makes the survey experience much fluid and better for the participants.

Better targeting of specific profiles:

Online surveying allows you to target specific profiles too. For example, suppose you are the owner of an online bookstore. By accessing your robust customer database, it is possible for you to send invitations through email to specific customer groups. It is possible for you to target customers on the basis of the books bought by them, the average size of their order and how recently they have ordered. Better targeting of customer profiles yields data of more value.

Conclusion:

Online surveys can make your surveying process more simple, easy and cost-effective. It strengthens your surveying strategy and brings the desired results. Online surveys help you to read the mind of your customer better and the detect issues concerning them.

James Patrick is a popular author writing articles on customer service survey and more related topics. In this article he has given information regarding the survey software system.