The Power of Surveys
Surveys are one of the best ways for businesses to derive actionable insights into their current performance and future opportunities. When designed correctly, a survey can lead to a wealth of quantitative information that can help companies, investors, and consultants design the best possible strategy for a business. There are four main steps to creating a high-performing survey, including the planning, authoring, execution, and analysis stages. Each must be conducted with a high amount of care and preparation to yield the best results.
The first stage is the planning stage, which is all about designing what is going to be important to ask during the survey. This means determining a research objective and then figuring out ways to find the answer. Considering the five W’s is the most helpful way to construct the right questions, which consists of asking who, what, where, when, and why. All of these questions lead to very important tasks such as creating a basic survey outline, creating an ideal respondent profile, designating a timeline, and determining where the survey itself will take place.
When entering the authoring stage, it is very important to focus on writing understandable and objective questions. There are three types of questions to mainly avoid, including leading, loaded, and double barrel questions. Leading questions influence the respondent to respond a certain way, introducing a level of bias to their answers and ultimately skewing the results. Loaded questions present a lot of assumptions instead of allowing the respondent to create an answer naturally. Double barrel questions present two questions at once, which can be confusing to a responder and also muddle the results. Avoiding these types of questions can make sure a survey is accurate and fully representative of the target demographic.
After creating the survey’s questions, it is time for the execution and fielding stage, which is all about preparing the survey for its debut. This stage involves testing it to make sure it works and has no glitches. Next, the survey must be launched so that it can begin to collect responses. Some early analysis can help businesses tweak the survey to make sure it is collecting the optimal results. Once all of these results are in, the analysis and reporting stage begins. Data can be exported to Excel or other analysis tools, where the data can be converted into a visual format.
These visual tools can help a business easily spot trends in the data that can help them make decisions. Line charts help track data values over time, such as the number of in-app purchases year after year. Bar charts help to compare specific values, such as comparing different age groups’ purchases of a company’s streaming service. Finally, pie charts help to break down a whole into separate components, which is perfect for seeing how a company’s revenue is broken down among its product mix. With all of these visual tools on hand and plenty of reliable information from a well-executed survey, a business is sure to make the most business-savvy decisions.
