How to Construct an Effective Survey and Get More Customers in the Process

How can you construct an effective survey and get more customers in the process?

1. Know the situation
2. Avoid bias
3. Do the necessary research
4. Establish your methodology

 

 

If you are a business owner, you have to keep asking the right questions in order to retain and even get more customers. These questions might include: What new services or features should you add? Where should you open your next location? Which new product should you offer? One way to find out the answers to these questions is to conduct a survey. Using WordPress survey tools can make this process easier for you. You just put together questions, ask your customers, and almost like magic, you figure out what to do next.

Conducting a survey might seem simple at first, but rarely are they that straightforward in real life. Just making a slight change with the types of questions and response options in your survey can significantly impact the value and quality of the results of your survey.

Getting the wrong results in your surveys can often lead to bad business decisions. This is the very thing that you probably wanted to avoid by making a survey in the first place. Asking the wrong questions or asking them the wrong way might lead you to develop products and surveys no one wants.

This is why it is important to put some thought into the design of your survey. If you want to get trustworthy and helpful results, here’s how you can construct an effective survey and get more customers in the process:

 

 

Know the situation

Much like anything in life, there is a good time and a bad time for everything. This rule applies to surveys as well. When it comes to surveys, you might suddenly find yourself in the right situation where conducting a survey is the right choice.

This scenario might include when you want the characteristics or motivations of your customers. Or maybe you are looking to expand your product offerings and you want to know what products your customers might like to see.

On the other hand, there might also be times when conducting a survey might not be the best thing to do for what you are trying to accomplish. Maybe your business is a sort of very personalized service with a small group of customers. In this situation, surveys can be perceived as impersonal. If you ever find yourself in a situation such as this, what you need to do instead is to conduct an interview which might make the customer feel valued and special.

 

 

Avoid bias

As much as you try to make it as objective and scientifically accurate as possible, without random sampling, your survey is not going to be completely accurate. By definition, random sampling is a subset of individuals picked from a larger set where each individual is chosen randomly and entirely by chance.

No survey is truly random; this is especially true when it comes to business. Chances are, you are only limited to surveying your audience or customers. Because you cannot force your people to take your survey, you are only going to receive responses from the people who want to participate.

Understand that the results of your surveys are going to be a measure of the perceptions of your respondents about your topic so build and analyze your survey with this in mind.

Once you manage to identify the more extreme sides of your target group such as the happiest and unhappiest customers, you can analyze the responses to the other questions separately. This may then lead to very helpful insights into why customers are behaving the way they do.

 

 

Do the necessary research

Use the knowledge that you already know which might help your research and formulate your research questions before you even start constructing your survey. Search for information from online review sites, third-party information industry trends, population characteristics, and past surveys because these often hold a lot of valuable insights.

You can then know what you want to find out based on the ideas your background research reveals. You can then determine what you plan on doing with the information you might gain through your survey.

Once you have established these through your research, this is when you should begin developing our research questions. Research questions are different from your actual survey questions. These should be something that you want to answer with your survey.

 

 

Establish your methodology

Two of the biggest problems in the methodology of your survey are: How will you find your responses to be solicited? And where?

Depending on the research questions that you have developed, it might seem obvious to you at this point who can tell you what you need to know. Ideally, for the number of responses, you want a lot, but a lot is relative. As for surveys with questions that are primarily multiple choice, you should have a large enough number of responses that even the most unpopular options for answers are going to receive some responses.

It is not uncommon to receive response rates on email surveys that are below 10 percent, so start with as big a list as possible.

 

 

Key Takeaway

Constructing a good survey can lead to good data. Asking the right questions using WordPress survey tools and giving solid answers is not going to be easy.

It is your responsibility as the designer of the survey to be unbiased and clear. Make sure that the questions you are going to ask will be informative. This way, the answers receive are going to be accurate and the insight you gain will lead to actionable results.