McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5 without updated patches contains a bug that will occasionally cause IE users to see a warning of “Exploit-ObscuredHTML” trojan after taking a survey.

This is a false alarm. There is no virus in our software or surveys.

In fact, this is a well known error that has caused problems across the Internet. McAfee fixed their software some time ago, but many people are still running an unpatched version. VirusScan users (and IT Teams) simply have to update their copy of McAfee VirusScan with a patch (not a DAT update, a real patch).

Thus far, we have not heard of any other cases of this problem. If you encounter it, please encourage your company IT department to keep their antivirus software fully up to date. It works best that way anyway.

We asked ourselves, what kind of outcome do we want for the company overall? The obvious answer is revenues and profits, but we took it down a level and looked at the key drivers of those metrics. The short answer: customers, but more specifically happy customers.

So that led us to decide that our profit sharing program should have five key features:

1. Incent employees to grow the customer base
2. Incent them equally to keep existing customers happy
3. Incent them to help the organization run efficiently
4. Be transparent and engender teamwork
5. Reward should be on-going and immediate

Growing the customer base, while satisfying existing customers

Second, we asked ourselves what we value as customers of other companies. Is it good service? An awesome product? All of the above? Obviously, it varies, but we felt that for a service like ours, both product and customer service are critical to success. The thing we valued least was salesmanship. So that means at a core level we value not just making the sale, but building a great product, and offering fantastic support to go along with it.

Each role inside SurveyGizmo contributes to the whole and we wanted to respect that. Our sales people aren’t commissioned and the wall between support and sales is a pretty small one — easily jumped over. It’s fun explaining this when we hire to either side. We wanted a plan that got everyone involved.

Efficient and Team Oriented

Finally, one of our core values is teamwork. As a small company we need to pull together and pitch-in without regard for who gets the credit. So we wanted our profit sharing plan to reward all employees, not just star performers. Based on those principles, co-founder Scott McDaniel came up with a simple, yet effective structure. So simple we can say it in one sentence. Here it is:

For every active customer we have at the end of every month, we place $2 into a pool to be shared equally by all employees.

And that’s it. New employees must be with the company for 60 days before they can participate, but that’s the only string attached. There are no complicated formulas or hidden agendas. We don’t hold back until the end of the year and hand out checks disconnected from the day to day effort. And most important, we are equally incented to delight existing customers as much as we are to get new ones.

Employee Feedback

Last week at our book club meeting we asked employees to give us their feedback on the profit sharing structure and it was overwhelmingly positive. Here are some of the reasons we like it:

• It’s very simple to understand.
• It’s transparent. Our admin console keeps a running tally of the number of customers, so all employees know at a glance roughly what to expect in their next paycheck.
• It rewards retention as well as new business. A lost existing customer is just as painful, perhaps more so, than a lost new customer.
• It serves as a natural break on hiring too far ahead of growth. Every new employee decreases everyone’s percentage slightly. So if we bring on new people and don’t gross up the difference in 60 days (when the new hire’s share kicks in), it affects everyone’s share. This forces us to ask, “How will bringing this person on help us grow our customer base?”
• It’s a terrific recruiting tool, particularly in this economy.

Of course, no bonus system is perfect. For example, you could argue that this one is flawed because it has a short-term bias. But this has worked well for us, so we’ll continue to let it ride.

How do profit sharing or bonus programs work in your companies?

So I called in and found out that apparently it’s “impossible” to use both and I had to choose one or the other. It hardly seemed fair to me that we couldn’t use both at the same time, when you can use their conference call line and VoIP at the same time. Which, I mean, we could use their conference call line, but it changes for every webinar and that just gets annoying, but I digress…

The real thing that irked me about the whole situation was how I was treated over the phone. First, I waited on hold for about 10 minutes (which wasn’t that big of a deal — time to catch up on emails!), but then when I was finally able to talk to someone, the girl talked to me for about 30 seconds, told me what I wanted wasn’t possible, and then hung up.

I don’t know about you, but that really left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I think I’ve grown so accustomed to what it’s like here (where our customer support team tries to help in any way they can imagine) that I kind of expect it from everyone I deal with in the outside world.

The girl that I talked to didn’t even think twice about my question. I mean, couldn’t she have thought of a work around or something?!?! Where was their creativity?? Where was my Mario, Marybeth, or Jonathan on the other end of the line?? I mean, couldn’t she at least think about how we could do some type of hack to get the system to work the way I wanted it to? It’s just a silly email invite that is automatically sent once someone signs up for the webinars — there’s got to be some way to change it. And not just say “No” and hang up.

Anyways, what I have realized is how much I really appreciate the creativeness of our customer support team and how much they actually do care about helping you with your problems. You can always tell when someone really enjoys what they are doing and is trying to help versus just giving you a “no” and hanging up on you. Not cool “Web events and online meetings” company — not cool!

OK, that’s the end of my rant about customer service for the day.

Wanted to give a shout out to all our Account Managers here — you guys rock! Keep helping everyone out the best you can, because trust me, the person on the other end of the phone really appreciates it!

So, in response to that, we asked some of our customers the top reasons why they’ve switched, and put that together into a handy-dandy (and darn good looking) pdf titled 10 reasons to switch to SurveyGizmo. Some of those reasons include the true ability to do branded surveys, multi-language survey creation and better reporting.

What exactly is a statistician and why is it important in Market Research? Quality Improvement guru, Bill Sherkenbach (a statistician) used to say:

A statistician is someone that likes to work with numbers, but didn’t have the personality to be an accountant.

I’m not sure about that, but statistics is the discipline that deals with turning data (numbers) into information. That’s why it is important for Market Research. Two major areas of statistics apply: theories and methods for data collection (design) and theories and methods for analysis. [It is worth noting that the design part is just as important as or more so than the analysis. This is a recurring theme with me, focus on the design, because no amount of analysis can make up for poor design.

When you embark on a survey project, it is worth thinking about the “statistics” part. Too often I find that people forget that there is a science to collecting and analyzing data. In fact many of the so-called “statisticians” in Market Research are not statisticians at all but just someone who learned the use of a few statistical tools on their way to an economics or psychology degree. My colleagues in statistics are probably the ones to blame. It seems trained statisticians always shy away from jobs in Market Research perhaps because the “statistics” isn’t sophisticated enough or for whatever reason.

It is easy to collect a bunch of numbers, anyone can do that, but it takes knowledge and experience (practice) to collect a bunch of numbers that ends up telling you something.

Do yourself a favor and your customers a favor and get some expert advice for your next survey (data collection project). And don’t forget to let me know if run into any trained statisticians out there doing Market Research!