Need help planning a survey? If you’re looking for more insight into your customers’ behaviors, pain points, opinions, or any other data that’s useful for your company, you need to craft a high-quality survey that’s user-friendly and asks the right questions. Whether you’re measuring brand perception, planning to launch a new product, looking to improve your overall customer experience, or hoping to achieve some other goal, a survey can help you discover how your customers really think about your brand and the products or services you provide.
Today’s brands can’t afford to conduct run-of-the-mill surveys. If you want quality results—data that you can trust—you need to plan a custom survey that engages with your target market. Here are eight simple steps for planning a survey that you can use to guide your brand and make better-informed decisions.
Outline your goals
Effective surveys are purpose-built, which means you need a clear vision of your goals for your survey as you get started. Consider the insights your business needs, whether your brand already has pressing needs, you’re creating a proactive study, or devising a campaign that’s designed to guide you as you make marketing or product design decisions. Use your objectives as a reference to craft the primary questions you want to ask.
Give every question a purpose
As you start planning your survey and brainstorming the right questions to ask, make sure each question plays a role in accomplishing your goals. Write questions that drive survey responses in ways that relate directly to your research goals. For example, if demographic information like a participant’s geographic location or age is relevant to your results, include those questions in your survey. If not, don’t waste time and skip such questions.
Keep it short and focused
Today’s customers have shorter attention spans than ever, and it’s challenging to hold your respondents’ attention and focus until the end of the survey. Remember that respondents are less likely to finish your survey if it’s too long, or if it bounces from topic to topic. As you organize your survey, try to follow a logical order, and make sure it doesn’t take too long to complete.
Ask one question at a time
Don’t try to pack too much into a single question—not only can this lead to survey fatigue, but it can also lead to nonresponse bias. Look for questions in your survey that contain the word “and.” Often, inclusion of this word indicates that your question has two parts. Separate your questions to make it easier on your customers and ensure they’re putting effort into answering your questions thoughtfully and honestly—even the ones that are near the end of the survey.
Consider collecting voice data
Surveys get a bad reputation for being time-consuming, tedious, and inconvenient, but voice surveys are changing customer perceptions for the better. Traditional text-based forms and surveys, on average, experience drop off rates up to 90%, thanks to poor engagement rates.
Voice surveys are simply more engaging for customers, allowing them to respond to questions in their own words. Now, you can collect responses that include contextual and emotional data. With voice data collection tools like Voiceform, you can collect survey data that contains unique customer nuances, giving you a better idea of how your respondents truly feel compared to textual, “hard” data alone.
Using Voiceform’s voice-powered survey and form builder, you can make it easier on your customers to share their opinions, all while collecting more insightful data.
Distribute your survey
Once you’re finished planning your survey, there may be several effective ways to distribute it, but the best methods depend on your target audience. Survey distribution should be considered at every step of the process. Consider where your survey will exist, whether digitally or tangibly (on paper).
Most surveys today are digitally distributed. You can share your survey on your social media pages or invite your target audience through email, SMS, links on your site, QR codes, and more. Consider your target audience as you choose the best way to reach them.
Organize your responses
Once you’ve gathered an appropriate number of responses from your target audience, you need to organize the data you’ve collected. The method you use largely depends on the survey tool you’ve used. For example, Voiceform’s voice survey data collection platform includes a Customer Intelligence Platform that aggregates data into new customer insights. Our robust analytics platform helps brands distil hundreds of survey response results.
By categorizing your data by Sentiment, Themes, Categories, and more, Voiceform allows you to understand trends and measure performance. The built-in data visualizer creates a complete picture of your customer feedback in Voiceform, and you can pass along these insights to warehouses, dashboards, consumer-facing products, and more, all via API.
Take action
Now that you’ve analyzed meaningful data, create a document of your findings. This should exist outside your dashboard, and it should include key findings along with more granular ones. Make sure your results answer the inquiries and curiosities that relate to your primary goals.
If you determine you have all the insights you need, make data-informed decisions to guide your brand. Whether it’s time to abandon a campaign or plan entirely, change a promotion you’re already running, establish new pricing, or anything else, your survey data is knowledge you can use for a whole host of decision-making that relates to your goals.
Today’s surveys demand today’s survey data collection tools—and Voiceform can help
Planning a survey can be a challenging endeavor, but using the right tools can help you make it easier on yourself and your customer so that you can collect worthwhile data that drives better decision-making for your business. Voiceform’s all-in-one voice survey data solutions are easy to use, can be embedded anywhere, and are highly accessible. Interested in seeing the process in action? Reach out to our team today to request a free demo and discover how voice surveys can help you collect and distill your survey response results with ease.
