Over the past few years, technology has really shaken up the polling world. It started with the revelation that more than 1 in 4 Americans have given up their land line in favor of mobile phones. In response, Rasmussen Reports (who pioneered the use of automated phone polling techniques) adjusted their polling methods to include both phone polling and online surveys to reach those who have abandoned traditional land lines. Other polling services adopted similar techniques.

And that’s just one of the many ways technology is affecting the polling landscape. So we asked ourselves – how can technology make the political data collection world more efficient? Here are a few ways we came up with:

iPad Surveys & Exit Polls

One way to make political polls more efficient is to simply change the method you use to collect data. The iPad has had a huge impact on the world of mobile surveys – it only makes sense that it could improve exit polling as well.

Currently, most exit polls are conducted via pen and paper, which has worked well for years. Interviewers phone in results three times a day, and note the demographic data of the voters who refuse to participate.

Today, by using an iPad survey app in place of pen and paper, you can quickly and easily record data to a server. Real-time data updates allow polling organizations to see what’s happening in the moment, rather than waiting on their polling staff to report in 3 times per day. Just set up an iPad with a quick kiosk survey, and you’re on your way.

But what about the demographic component that pollsters report? Again, there’s an answer in the form of an iPad survey. By keeping a tally on an iPad or iPhone (using a tool like our Gesture Tally question type), pollsters can easily keep track of different characteristics of the people polled (or not polled, for that matter).

Using iPad Surveys to Collect Digital Petitions

Additionally, ballot initiatives across the U.S. are on the rise…and in order to get on the ballot, you need petition signatures. Collecting signatures by hand requires careful validation of each signature, as well as the name and address of the signee (which is a tedious task – something that most petition collectors are all-too-aware of). So why not make your petition collection digital?

With an iPad, a SurveyGizmo survey, and SurveyGizmo’s awesome Signature Capture question type, organizations can collect signatures from people on the street. Respondents can either sign the iPad using their fingers, or you can offer an iPad Stylus (if your respondents feel more comfortable signing with that).

By using an iPad survey and an online survey tool to collect petition signatures, organizations gain tremendous efficiency. All responses will be automatically synced to the server, and can then be quickly scanned to remove duplicates. This streamlines the process, yields better data, and makes everybody’s job a lot easier.

As the election season progresses, technology will continue to affect polling and data collection in numerous other ways. From computerized voting to polling, what other ways can you see technology changing the political landscape in 2012?

Image courtesy of Denise Cross – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

Several of our customers use our survey software for internal surveys within their businesses – for years we’ve powered job application surveys, human resources surveys, and more for organizations around the world.

But lately we’ve been seeing one new type of survey a lot: IT surveys.

Why IT Surveys?

There are a ton of reasons your IT department would want to create an IT survey. Here are a few:

• Keep things documented. It’s good to have a record of how many support requests are coming in, and how many are quickly resolved.
• Analyze company-wide IT issues. You can set up reports to see how many problems are coming from different machines, users, etc, then take action on them.
• Make it easier for users to report IT problems. By creating a survey and embedding it (or posting a link) on your company intranet, users can easily submit their issues in one place. Having all your information centrally-located is much more efficient than trying to sort through instant messages, emails, and other channels.

What are some ways to make my IT surveys better?

SurveyGizmo offers a lot of features to improve IT surveys:

1. Use Show/Hide and Skip Logic to collect better data. By using survey logic like Show/Hide Logic and Page Jumping, you can ask specific questions that apply to specific recurring issues. Someone who can’t access the internet, for instance, would require different follow-up questions than someone who is having trouble with a virus.

By separating issues, you can also improve the processing of your IT support queue. It often makes much more sense to focus on several tickets you know are easily solvable and clearing them from the list before moving on to tackle bigger issues.

2. Auto-populate system information. Rather than ask your users to enter what sort of computer they have, you can pull that information automatically. The System merge codes let you include information on the user’s system configuration as part of your survey data.

Rather than pass the system info through as a hidden variable, we recommend displaying the information to the user via a merge code & asking them to verify that this is the machine they’re having trouble with.

Again, you can later use this system information in reports to determine which browsers and system configurations are causing the most problems throughout your company.

3. Create a queue. In a recent blog, we showed how we used the SurveyGizmo API to create a queue for our weekly Pancake Thursday breakfast. By employing that same technique, you can create a page for your IT support team to go through and check off the problems that have been solved, then automatically send a follow-up email or a report.

These are just a few of the SurveyGizmo features you can use to create IT surveys – if you can think of other ways to go about it, leave them in the comments!

Image courtesy of Jamie – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blog.

I have to beg your pardon, I’m about to indulge my love of great customer service.

You might wonder how, at TMRE 2011, I got the inspiration to write about customer service. Well for one thing, at SurveyGizmo we’re insanely passionate about customer service and satisfaction. We fully believe that it goes well beyond the Customer Service team. We may be a DIY survey tool, but we know that nothing will truly wow our customers more than a great product combined with great service. Everyone at SurveyGizmo – from the customer service agents you chat with on the phone, to the developers who write the code, to the CEO – has the heart of a servant.

So when I saw a panel run by Sandra Kelly of 3M, I was really excited because she’s a market researcher who started in the Customer Service world. Her specific panel was about “Listening to the Voice of the Complaining Customer.” Obviously no product is perfect, so there will always be customer feedback to be gathered and complaints to be heard. She had several interesting case studies on products that were wonderful for a large number of customers, but unexpectedly caused complaints from others. How should a company handle that sort of situation? Sandra was very specific: “You cannot – and should not – tell the story of your customer without including the story of their complaints.”

In short, paying attention to your customers will let you know if you’re causing disruptive innovations…or just disruption.

At SurveyGizmo we love hearing customer feedback, good or bad. If you call up our Customer Service department or Sales Department to tell them what you think about our survey software, you can be sure that your feedback will be passed to the right people. But what about formalized data collection? What if your company has many locations, how do you aggregate that information? How do you get the best, and most complete picture of your customers’ complaints and other feedback?

Complaint codes are probably not accurately reflecting what your customer really wants to tell you. Talking to the customer is one great way to get the real picture…but isn’t necessarily scalable. Of course, our recommended solution to that problem is simple: create a customer satisfaction survey you or your cs agents can fill out as they’re talking to your customers, and have them engage in a real dialogue. You’ll find some surprising insights.

The other suggestion was to talk to your front line constantly. Rather than focusing exclusively on customers, you should be talking to your people. It was really neat to hear this because it was something Anne Mulcahy of Xerox had mentioned on Monday. It makes a lot of intuitive sense. If you’re researching customer experience – as you should be – rather than just building your product, you should recognize that you have a phenomenal and captive audience in your employees. These are the people who interact with your customers each and every day. Anne went as far as to say that your employees hold your most important qualitative data about your customers and what’s going on with them.

Your people are your army, and you should be constantly asking them what they think about the current product trajectory, their day-to-day interactions with customers, how they’re feeling about those interactions, and (most importantly) what your customers are feeling. As an added bonus, by engaging your employees and asking them what they feel, you are making them feel valued and important!

I apologize for being long-winded, but I absolutely adore this idea. If you’re not constantly surveying your employees about your customers’ satisfaction with your products and services, you’re wasting a treasure chest of data. Obviously, talking to your employees directly is wonderful, but for the sake of documentation, consider sending them customer satisfaction surveys asking them the questions above. You’ll be keeping important records you can use to help create a whole picture of your customers. Your front lines should be advocates for your customers, and you should empower them to be that.

Finally I want to leave you with a quotation from Sandra Kelly’s presentation that really stuck with me. It speaks about the need for customer service in more than just your customer service team. It’s just a little something for your brain to chew on while you think about service and how to best understand your customers and their complaints:

“Researchers need to view themselves as chief customer advocates, moving their businesses forward by providing relevant and actionable customer insights that will reduce businesses’ risk and help drive customer-based innovation. They can – and should – serve as the chief quality control experts for customer information flowing in from many different sources for their organizations.”

Want to get the full story? Here’s a link to our first Market Research Event 2011 post. And here’s a link to Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

The first day of TMRE 2011 was a smashing success. A day full of meeting market researchers, listening in on breakout sessions, and traveling around the world. It’s true: we made it all the way around the world!

…or at least around the Epcot Center’s culinary tour of food and wine during a networking event. (Perhaps I was exaggerating slightly.)

One of my favorite panels was hosted by Annie Pettit of LoveStats. She spoke about social media research and how to accurately capture a whole picture of target audiences. Her main point was that, just like more traditional market research, it’s extremely easy to manipulate stats gathered from social media if you’re not vigilant. She proved her point by manipulating data to prove that people like bank fees more than they like cookies. The moral is, be extremely careful of your biases and expectations. The other moral is that if you never thought stats could be fun you should go check out her blog!

One common theme that I noticed during several panels was the idea that Market Research is in a period of change and needs creativity and fresh approaches. During the keynote Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, said “We are drowning in data and starving for insights.” This was said during her call for innovation in the market research field and for “Actionable, understandable insights.” This struck me me particularly because during a prior panel on Smartphone research hosted by Greg Heist of Gongos Research, it was said that “expertise works best when the history and the future are similar.”

In an age of DIY survey software one of the most important talents a Market Research professional has is perspective. Certainly I don’t think any of the speakers meant to devalue the value of researchers’ ability to collect data or the importance of proper market research techniques, but it’s undeniable that we’re living in an age of easy access to data. It’s easy for a company to embed a poll on their website and collect data in a matter of hours. This will only become more true as smartphone research evolves.

As Mr. Heist pointed out in his panel, smartphones are starting to allow us to start gathering responses that are more in the moment, and less rational. Data collection is becoming immediate: you can have a respondent submit feedback using a smartphone only minutes after an interaction with your store or product. What’s needed, Anne Mulcahy said, are market researchers who are willing to take risks and provide interpretations of data that can generate, shape, and enable ideas. This often requires great bravery on the part of the researcher as innovation is always risky and often goes against what experience counsels. I guess the point is, these are exciting times to be in the business of collecting and interpreting data!

Tuesday is another big day of research fun! Look for more updates coming soon.

After checking in this morning (and a word of advice to any TMRE attendees showing up tomorrow, check in early; the line was long), I got a chance to attend a couple Breakout Sessions. One was on segmentation for strategic product planning and innovation and the other was about using Panels to turn customers into advocates. Both got me thinking about the value data really has to a product. You have the survey software, you have the survey, you may even already have the data, but how will that data really help you?

In the first session we were presented with a case study of how Yum! Brands utilized their data to identify a segment they previously assumed they were reaching…but in reality were not. When it comes down to it, what you think you’re saying about your product or service isn’t important. The only thing that’s important is what your customers are hearing. Accurate and relevant market research data can tell you if there’s any disconnect in your perception of your message versus the reality. Are the words you’re using really reaching the markets you think they are?

By identifying gaps in your segmentation you can move away from product development-based planning to consumer-based planning. Why is this important? Because you’ll move from developing the product and then finding the market, to developing the product for the market. While this sort of approach is more expensive, it also provides better long term value and a bigger picture.

The second session really drove home another important, and often overlooked, value of product research. Often you think of survey tools just providing you data. You survey your respondents to learn about them. But surveys actually go both ways. The simple act of taking a survey about your product is actually educating your customers. Obviously you want customers who are better educated about your product for their own benefit, but also for yours. The more knowledgeable a customer is the more likely they are to be an advocate. In fact GE CareCredit, who ran the session, found almost a 1-to-1 ratio between knowledge and advocacy. Can’t get any better than that!

So that was my morning so far. Pretty exciting stuff! We’d love to hear from you. If you’re at TMRE, what does it have you thinking about? If you’re not, what aspects of Market Research or the conference would you like to hear about? Another update soon!

So I wanted to set the record straight.

Below are some of the most interesting things I heard. Some of these bad ideas probably seem like common sense when you’re starting a business…but it’s my experience that they will just get in your way in the end.

Myth #1: You need to have a written business plan and for a 3-year financial analysis before starting a business.

Hilarious. You do not need to have a written business plan. You certainly don’t need to do a three-year financial plan. These are things you would do if you were chasing startup capital to convince a bank or a venture capital firm to “bless” you with cash.

Having an idea about how you will run a successful business is important. Here’s the short version of your business plan:

A) Do you have an idea, a service or product that people want?
B) Can you personally provide this service or product?
C) Are there people or businesses willing to pay enough for this service to cover its costs?

Once you have an idea for your product, spend the time you would waste on a written business plan to go find some customers (or prospective customers) and listen to what they have to say.

But how will you keep your business afloat? Just use some common sense in terms of spending. Don’t buy anything you can’t afford in cash, and don’t float your company on your credit card or a home equity loan. Spend within your means – and save enough to pay your taxes.

Which brings us to…

Myth #2: You need money to start a business (Angel Investors, Venture Capital, etc)

You do not need to raise money to start your business. Period.

To be successful, your business needs five things: opportunity, resourcefulness, creativity, selflessness…and sheer willpower. Money early on will not help you develop any of these key traits. In fact, chasing after money will do nothing but distract you when you should be listening to your customers and developing your product or service.

(Yes, this does mean that you will not have a sky-rise office with 20 employees – all with Director titles – in your first year.)

You should still be working a day job as you get your business started during your weekends, vacation time and evenings. This will let you pay the bills, hedge your risk and give you the modest resources you’ll need to get going with your business.

This is not just academic advice. SurveyGizmo is now a multi-million dollar business with 46 employees and hundreds of thousands of customers. We started our company out of my checking account, spending $79 a month for our first server – and we were profitable from our very first year (…only 14 dollars in profit, but honest profit)!

How? Both Scott and I worked our regular jobs and built SurveyGizmo at the same time for the first 2 years. When it came time that we could afford salaries – we didn’t take them. We hired our very first employee and kept working those day jobs!

The lessons we learned from growing within our means have had a dramatic impact on how we look at business and growth. Looking back, we believe taking on venture capital would have ruined our business and long-term viability.

Myth #3: Believe in your product and don’t let anyone sway you form your path.

As entrepreneurs we think of our products as our children: we love them and we think we know what’s best for them.

We really don’t.

Our customers know what’s best – or at very least, what they are willing to pay for. This is one of the hardest lessons for product-based startups to learn:

Your business is a partnership between your great ideas and the needs of your customer base.

I highly recommend you involve your customers in the development of your product from the very beginning. Not only will this tune you in to exactly what your customers want; it will also create a sense of ownership and evangelism among your first customers. This evangelism is the best free marketing you could ask for – actually it’s the better than paid marketing too.

Again, I am speaking from experience. The first company I started in 2000 was a marketing automation tool. It was revolutionary, it was ahead of its time – and it failed. Not because of the dot-com bubble; instead it was the way I went about developing the business.

I spent all my time developing a product that would be “perfect” and didn’t listen to my would-be customers. In the end, I had a good product – but I had no customers. (The product was also too far ahead of its time.) If I had listened, I would have launched a simpler product with several dozen customers behind it, then developed it into what is now a booming industry.

Myth #4: You need a business degree to start a business.

I am a huge advocate for education and continuing your education. That does not necessarily mean going to school for a degree for business.

No business degree will teach you everything you need to know to start and run a business. With or without experience or educational resources you’re going to do a lot of learning on the fly. If you are resourceful and confident you can do just fine without it.

Remember, many successful businesses were started by entrepreneurs without a business degree. They were just people with good ideas, great instincts, opportunity, resourcefulness and incredible drive.

Now, there are a few things that a formal degree would teach you that are good for everyone to know. The most important are basic accounting and basic marketing skills – luckily, these are easily learned by experience and online. Just remember to keep it simple in both cases when you get started.

Business structure and business legal matters are also taught in these courses – but again, you can learn quite a bit online and by talking to other business owners. “Tax” and “Legal” are frightening words, but don’t let them concern you too much at the start.

Quite frankly, you need to grow a bit as a business and employer before those concerns really start to get sticky. At that point, you’d need to hire an expert with more than a business degree anyway!

There are several great books and online resources to help keep you from making egregious mistakes.

Learn a bit every day, and spend some time researching what you need for tomorrow. If you make a proactive choice and make the commitment to learn, you’ll do just fine.

Myth #5: You need an exit strategy.

Oh boy! You’re just starting a business and you’re already looking for the door? Maybe you should ask yourself why you are starting a company and if it will make you happy.

Are you doing it for fame, ego or recognition? You have a better chance making it in Hollywood – and at least there you are only risking yourself. Starting a business is not the best way to become famous (or even well-known), and think about it – how does this goal lead to a successful company?

Start a business to run a business. Not just to get rich. If growing a business is not your goal, you’ll likely be unsatisfied and make poor decisions based on it.

Most of all, I think everyone who wants to start a business should know that it’s one of the most rewarding and wonderful experiences you can have. Like all things rewarding, it’s not easy and it’s occasionally very frustrating. Just keep at it and if your first business or two doesn’t do as well as you’d like – dust yourself off, rest up in a regular job for a bit and try it again!

The folks over at iPad Wall Bracket designed a very clean iPad wall mount that takes a lot of the trouble out of the installation. With space for the power connector and more importantly, protection of the Home button to ensure users can’t change the running application (Safari), the wall mount makes it very simple to leverage the built-in AT&T wireless access to ensure real-time survey data collection is possible without opening up a business’ local WiFi. We had a talk with the folks who built this $99 mount and came up with some great uses:

• Newsletter sign-up form for a local restaurant
• Out-patient surveys for clinics and private doctor’s offices
• Booth mounting for trade shows
• Conducting kiosk surveys
• Automotive service feedback
• Contact update form for local real estate office

I’m sure you can think of a ton more uses. Combining SurveyGizmo surveys, the iPad, and this wall mount makes a great combination for businesses to get valuable information from their customers with a very clean installation.

We’ve pitched 6 ideas to the organizers:

• Speed Dating for Coders and Designers: Find your Business Mate. Are you entrepreneurially minded? Do you need to find a talent to match against your own? They say partnerships are like marriages, but how do you find one and make it successful? This session is half tips, strategies, and experiences from the presenters and half interactive session to meet and greet other attendees and make connections.
• Conquest Through Integration: Building Partnerships Via API. APIs are not just a tool for developers. This session demonstrates how to create partnerships and business opportunities centered around integration through open APIs. Learn how to partner with Fortune 500 companies ten times your size and establish marketing partnerships centered around integration.
• GTD for Startups: Getting Things Done in the Real World. We’ve all heard about processing your Inbox, proactive instead of reactive, and ‘Next Action’ lists, but how do you put this into real and varied workflows. We’ll share the actual tips, apps, and collaborative tools that help us implement GTD practices in when managing web development, publishing, customer service, and employees.
• Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid! When Not to Use Frameworks. Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails have received a lot of hype and press in the Web 2.0 community. However, frameworks are not always the best choice for a project. The session focuses on successful products that don’t use frameworks, or did… and wish they hadn’t.
• Startups and Workflows: Tools, Tips, and Strategies that Work. What collection of development, design, and collaboration tools make up the workflow of different roles in a startup? What’s in the bag of tricks that help a designer, developer, and serial entrepreneur get through their day-to-day?
• Blitzkrieg! Rapid Fire Tips on Design, Dev & Business. Experience a whirlwind of pointers as each of our four panelists compete to get 30 action-ready tips in out in under 15 minutes each. Each panelist shares tips from their experiences covering topics that include: Development, Business, Marketing & Design.

If you think any of these are good ideas, you can help make them reality. SXSW wants your feedback. Just head to the SXSW Panel Picker, where you can rate any of the hundreds of potential panels. (Hint: The easiest way to find our panels is to type “surveygizmo” in the Search engine.) Just click on a panel’s title to get the detailed description. You’ll have to register before you can rate the panels, but it’s a free, quick and painless process.

We encourage you to get out and vote!

Not being a Blackberry person myself, I didn’t even know this was possible. We have known for months that a growing number of people are using mobile devices (like Treos) to take surveys. But until now, we didn’t even know the Blackberry had a web browser (blush).

We will post more information about how well the surveys work (and look) on the Blackberry as soon as we test them ourselves.

If you have one, try one of your surveys and see how well they work! Post a comment about your experience and any tips we can use to make sure surveys work well on this platform.

As always, we look forward to your feedback!

Update: 9/17/2007

Just a quick update. Having struggled with the cellular carriers to get my number ported I was forced to get a whole new phone (long story). The good news is that I am now a proud owner of a Blackberry 8830! I can confirm that, yes, our surveys work and look darn good on an Blackberry device. I suspect this is largely due to all the accessibility work we have done.

But that’s okay – our survey software is now iPhone & iPad-enabled! At any account level, you can now optimize your surveys for iPhone, iPad, and other mobile platforms.

Enterprise and Dedicated accounts also have the ability to auto-detect mobile browsers and serve up an appropriate mobile version of an existing survey. This means you can show different versions of the same survey to someone on a desktop and someone on an iPad or iPhone.

Lastly, you can manage your online surveys from your iPad or iPhone. Our site is optimized for mobile browsers, so whether you’re using an iPad, iPhone, or something else, you can still get realtime updates on the go.

Creating and managing iPhone and iPad surveys is now easier than ever. Grab your iPad and give it a try!

Like thousands of other people across the US, the team here at SurveyGizmo got a bad case of iPhone fever last Friday. We didn’t intend on actually buying the iPhone ourselves — but it was too slick to resist during our visit to the Apple store.

To celebrate the iPhone (and convince our bookkeeper that is was a business expense), we created our own iPhone Application, called iPoll. You can use iPoll to create short one questions polls on your iPhone and send them out to your friends, co-workers and iPhone contacts. It’s totally free.

Do you have an iPhone?

You can try our app by browsing to http://ipoll.surveygizmo.com (don’t forget to bookmark it). This app is *very* lightweight — you can use it over AT&T’s network without getting old and gray waiting for page loads.

For those of you without iPhone, you can still use the application. The iPhone image below is actually a working copy. (The only difference is that the iPhone itself never displays scroll bars.)

One caveat: This was written for the iPhone — so you’ll need Firefox, Safari, or IE 7 to use it. IE 6 users should be upgrading anyways ;-)

COOL! What can I do with iPoll?

Here are some ideas!

• Build your poll on the fly. You can use an iPhone, a web browser, and quite possibly other web-enabled cell phones. You can visit this page or go to http://iPoll.SurveyGizmo.com
• Email your poll to friends, family, coworkers, customers, etc.
• Watch the will of the mob, possibly change your mind, or help make a decision

Here are some examples of what you could do with a mobile poll

• Decide where to go to lunch?
• Who will win the next presidential election
• Where should we meet for happy hour?
• What feature should we build into iPolls next?
• Who will win American Idol?
• Who should be prom queen?

Happy Polling!