Here are some of the things we released this week:

• URL Variables added to Page Logic – * This is available in the new Editor only.* You can now pass URL variables in redirects set up in Page Logic!

Fixes:

• Offline Mode was ignoring right to left languages - How rude!
• Partial Offline responses were showing URL encoding when loaded after leaving & coming back to the survey – Fixed!
• Kiosk Mode button in Offline had funky formatting on the iPhone 4S running iOS6 – De-funkdafied.
• Double quotes in answer options caused Radio Buttons to break and become multiple choice – “Fixed”
• Files uploaded to Cascading Dropdown menus in new editor did not have any options – Sorted.
• A non-hidden by default question was required on a page in order for hidden questions to appear when triggered in an Offline survey - Not anymore!

We’re going to go outside & play this weekend (and you should too)!

Oh, a big congratulations to our own Survey Jedi Topper, who’s getting married on Saturday!

May The Force Be With You, Always!

Why You Should Clean Your Online Survey Data

Why clean data? It is always a good practice to clean your data, particularly if you use panel companies or you’ve used an incentive to increase your response rate. But, we recommend cleaning your data before deriving actionable results. Your purpose in data cleaning should be to remove any overt bias or invalid responses.

If you are not cleaning your data, or you do not know how to clean your data, you are not alone. But it is important for you to start taking this important step to ensure data quality. According to the SurveyGizmo Benchmark Guide Survey, 70 percent of online surveyors clean their data before analyzing.¹

This process can be time consuming, but it is well worth the effort to ensure that you weed out invalid and biased responses.

Removing Straight-Line and Christmas Tree Responses

When cleaning your data, look for these types of responses and then remove them from your data set to ensure data quality:

Straight-Lining – When a respondent answers the same option for each item without reading the question, we call it Straight-Lining. This would look exactly like it sounds; a straight line of responses to a set of questions. Before removing a response from your data set, you may wish to review multiple questions that they have answered, to make sure that this is an actual intentional pattern of activity and not valid responses.

Christmas-Tree Behavior – Christmas-Tree behavior looks like the respondent answered the options in a Christmas-Tree pattern without reading the question. You will have to turn your head to the left to see the Christmas tree design in this example, but any designs or ‘artwork’ that you see in the respondent data should be viewed with caution.

Both Straight-Lining and Christmas-Tree behavior are methods used by respondents to complete a survey as quickly as possible. This behavior can be motivated by incentives.

Straight-Lining is pretty easy to pick out in Excel. Christmas-Tree responses are a little more difficult to find, however, if you’ve used numeric reporting values, you should be able to easily spot ascending or descending patterns in Excel and remove these responses.

Take Your Time

Another method for deciphering invalid responses is to look at response timers; that is, the amount of time it takes a respondent to complete a page of your survey, or the entire survey. Most survey software will allow you to export this information to Excel with your survey data. You can then evaluate if a respondent took to short of a time to read and complete their responses.

Don’t know how long it should take someone to complete a page, or the entire survey? There is a quick way to evaluate this! Time yourself reading the survey, but be sure to read out loud, as this will simulate what it is like for someone to read your survey as if they were seeing it for the first time.

Other Signs to Look Out For

When evaluating your complete data set, there are a couple other items to look out for:

• Review any checkbox questions with all of the answers selected, including “Not applicable”, “Other” and “None of the above”. This is a sign that a respondent has not read the question, and just selected all possible responses.
• Nonsense answers to open-ended questions. This can indicate that a computer bot is responding to your survey, and not a human being.
• Duplicate responses by the same respondent. Sometimes this can be to get duplicate incentives, or this can be a person accidentally taking your survey more than once.

Finally, when cleaning data, take care not to introduce your own bias. When looking at your data you might start interpreting results as the answer to a question you didn’t quite ask. Resist the temptation to tweak the question or answer options after the fact to make the results make more sense. It is perfectly fine to speculate about possible misinterpretation of the question on the part of the respondent and editorialize in your report or presentation, but changing the actual question is just not ethical.

Now that you have cleaned your data, you are ready for the fun parts: Analysis and Action! Stay tuned for article on these items.

¹Source: SurveyGizmo Market Research Benchmark Guide: 2012, Survey Techniques Survey, Do you clean your data before reporting on it?, n=1,070 Total Sample

Tatiana and I have been trainers for SurevyGizmo for quite some time. We both teach a whole slew of webinar classes through the SurveyGizmo Online Academy and we have both been trainers at the SurveyGizmo Unconference, so when a customer request came in asking us to come to their site to train, we were both excited!

Some background on SurveyGizmo: We were literally built on customer requests. Customers would ask us to add a feature, and that is just what we did—we added that feature. As we have grown, we have continued to make innovations to SurveyGizmo based on customer requests, but just in a more scalable manner. So, why wouldn’t the same be true for training?

So, when one of our dear customers, Priority Health asked us to come to their offices and conduct a training for their staff on just the topics that they were interested in, we were really excited!

While our fabulous Queen of Customer Training worked with their Manager of Market Research on all the logistics like time, date and exact location, Tatiana and I customized our training materials to just the topics that they wanted to focus on.

How did we know what topics to focus on? Well. Naturally, we fielded a survey! We expected 20 folks to join us for the training, so we asked them to select which trainings they were most interested in from a list of topics. We then used a TURF report to see what selection of topics would make the most number of participants happy. So, you see, we really do us our own tools!

We worked directly with our Priority Health contact to make sure that our agenda was right on target and then we headed to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Lucky for us, it snowed in Boulder. Again. In Spring. Yeah! Well, the snow pack is up and wildfires in our backyard seem much less likely this year, but our plane was also delayed several hours.

After arriving at what the locals called “the smallest airport ever”, we picked up our economy rental car (a Town and Country minivan?) and headed to our hotel to get just a couple of hours of sleep before our trainings began.

With the help of some chocolate covered espresso beans we were bright eyed and bushy tailed at 8:30 am when we arrived at the Priority Health offices. We settled in to the training space, set up the overhead projector and waited with much anticipation for our participants to arrive.

And arrive they did! All 20 of them showed up with smiles on their faces. After quick introductions, we moved into a riveting morning all about Great Survey Design. We talked about:

• Determining the need for a survey
• Outlining learning objectives
• Designing a survey that meets the survey goal
• Developing questions
• Avoiding the pitfalls that can harm surveys
• Building a great survey
• Collecting data
• Reporting on the data
• Communicating results
• Acting on the data

It was a lot of information to share with the Priority Health team, but they seemed to absorb it, offer some exciting examples of how it was relevant to the projects they were working on, and ask some great questions!

After a quick lunch break of pizza and salads, everyone was ready to get back to training. The afternoon was dedicated to learning as much about the SurveyGizmo application as possible. Most of our attendees were beginners and they wanted to learn it all, though several more experienced folks took the time to learn even more.

New SurveyGizmo employees usually spend two weeks focusing on learning the nuts and bolts of the application, but we only had a couple of hours to transfer the information. Inline with what the attendees had told us, we focused more on what you could and spent much less time on how to do it. We all agreed that once you knew what you wanted to do, you could just simply call the SurveyGizmo customer support team and they could help you make it happen.

We went through so many topics, it makes my head spin just thinking about it. To mention just a few:

• SurveyGizmo Dashboard
• Building a survey, poll, quiz and form
• Adding a question
• Editing a survey and a question
• How to use the question library
• Basic logic
• Distribution Methods
• Basic survey customizations
• Summary Reports and Exports

We saw that folks were getting tired from information overload, so Tatiana led everyone through the banana dance (Don’t know what that is? Come to one of our trainings to find out!). After that, we all seemed to have the energy to finish up for the day.

While we answered some individual questions and wrapped up our training session, we made sure to hand out some quick surveys about our performance. We believe in the power of surveys, so we like to survey our participants after every training interaction.

We had a blast working with the folks at Priority Health and are excited for our next training adventure on the road. If you would like to find out more about SurveyGizmo training opportunities, please visit the SurveyGizmo training page.

Happy surveying!

• We made a change to how scheduled Email Campaigns work - There is now a link inside the invite where there used to be the option to schedule the invite that says “Need to set up a scheduled send? Click here to apply for approval.”
  Once your list & messages are approved, you’ll then see the option to schedule the send. In the past, if it was scheduled & we approved the campaign, the message would go out upon approval (ignoring your schedule).
• Table of Radio Buttons or Checkboxes were registering as “not compatible” in Offline Links – Fixed but we recommend creating a new Offline Link to ensure it works properly.
• “None of the Above’ special setting & ‘Max Answers Selectable’ validation did not prevent an Other textbox from being edited – Works as expected now!
• Accented characters in answer options were showing up decoded in the View Responses > Browse Responses section -  Fixed!
• Only 50 teams could be viewed at a time in Users, Teams & Roles > Teams – You can now view 150!
• Cookie based Duplicate Protection wasn’t working in Settings – Fixed! Mmmm, cooook-ies!
• Piped Rows into tables wouldn’t hold onto table validation – Hold me now. Fixed.
• Hover Over Alt Text was including HTML in textbox questions – No more.
• A redirect action would redirect immediately upon loading an Offline link – Now they dont
• Page logic was triggering when using the Back button – Fixed!
• Multiple Image Choice questions were showing up as Single Image Choice questions in the Editor, causing confusion – All cleared up!

As always, thank you so much for using SurveyGizmo & we’ll see you next week!

(And don’t forget to stay hydrated, graduates.)

High fives from SG Support!

• Copying a survey from Recent Projects revealed code – Concealed!
  
• Required Hidden fields in Custom Groups were still triggering validation so survey takers could not move forward in survey – Fixed!
• Premade answer lists with different Reporting Values in Add/Edit in Bulk did not work – Works!
• Slashes appearing in Custom Contact Fields for email campaigns – Go away Slash!
• Page piped container wasn’t working with piped textbox questions – Pipe away!
• .sg-language-list was left aligned instead of right – Straighten up & fly right! 
• Clicking “Plan:Enterprise” took you to a page that didn’t exist – Like the basement at the Alamo.
• The “Full Application” link when accessing SG via a mobile device didn’t work – It works now… HOWEVER, the Javascript we use on the Dashboard isn’t supported by most mobile devices (including up-to-date iOS). You can still search for surveys to find what you’re looking for.
• Autocomplete didn’t work on iOS – It does now!

We’ve got new features, fixes & changes to announce.

Features:

• We’ve released the Danish translation of the SurveyGizmo application today! This is first of many planned translations of the SurveyGizmo application. Next up are Spanish, French, German and Portuguese! If you would like learn more about our application translation plans or would like to assist us with the translate visit: https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/23598226-SurveyGizmo-Application-Translation. If you want to know how to change the language inside SurveyGizmo, check out: https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/23598226-SurveyGizmo-Application-Translation

• You can now hide Answer Option titles! - Hiding the titles for answer options within Likert Scale questions is a very common survey design practice & we now have the option built in. Here is a quick tutorial: https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/23607308-Hide-Answer-Option-Titles

Changes:

• Clicking ‘Active’ inside of individual contacts did not resubscribe the respondent to the current email campaign - It does now, however, this fix also included changes to how the Contact Status works in email campaigns (for the better), so please check out this portion of our updated tutorial: https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/448849-Create-an-Email-Campaign#active
• We added the ability to click labels in Custom Groups to activate checkbox & radio button questions

Fixes:

• Questions with numerous lengthy answer options or reporting values would break Summary Report vertical bar graphs – Breaking bad no more.
• In Polls, the Image Choice type was not adding images upon creation -  Add away!
• White space was added when typing in a list of textboxes in IE9 – Not anymore.
• When basing logic off a textfield using ‘Less than’ or ‘Greater than’ if a 0 was involved it would count as a null value instead of a 0 – Nullified.
• Image Choice questions in Cross Tab reports were causing duplicate response counts – Singled out!
• Download to PDF option “Only Show Answered Questions” shows all questions – And the answer is? Fixed.
• Custom Group sub-questions selected in the logic builder of Send Email actions displayed as the same question - Sorted.
• Strange issues occurring when attempting to change width of Other Textbox in a multi select question with 2 columns. – Paging, Dr. Strange! Fixed.
• Numbers and Whole Numbers are being exported as strings instead of numbers in SPSS text files – One more bug bites the dust!
• The Language Bar was malfunctioning in IE7 – Repaired!
• Validation for textboxes was appearing strangely for right to left languages -  Strange no more.
• Ampersands were being HTML encoded in answer titles & reporting values when adding questions using quick or advanced edit – & fixed!
• Modifying the response object for a survey using surveyResponse post modified the object but changes were not reflected in View Responses – Modify it!
• Suspended accounts were displaying ‘Online Survey Not Found’ error when trying to download exports – Found!
• The Reset Password screen was not appearing in IE7 or 8 – Presto!

• Adding sub-questions to Custom Groups was removing the line break from the previous sub-question & it was unable to add table sub questions – Fixed.
• Custom Questions built by customers broke when you went into the new Editor & saved the question – Broke no more!
• More than one Add-As Needed Custom Group would cause issues with exports – Add ALL the things!
• Required Other textboxes in Add-As Needed Custom Groups would fail on validation when the field was populated – Fixed!
• Data Import error appearing when Other Textbox field was included – Error abated!
• Other text fields for Custom Group radio button or checkboxes did not have the option to map the textbox when using Data Import – Whew, it’s there now!
• When copying an email campaign, it made the last send date on the new email whatever time you copied the campaign – On time now!
• Copying surveys from v2 to v3 wasn’t copying over answer options – Sorted.
• Reporting Values of 0 in Add/Edit in Bulk removed the answer option – Fixed.
• Using Groups in Logic Conditions cause “and” & “or” to act ‘funny’ – No funny stuff, Lebowski!
• sgapiResultsQuestionAverage & sgapiResultsQuestionTotal were returning a Survey Not Found Error – Works! 
• HTTP POST was returning Null values for tables in Custom Groups – Exit the null zone!
• Flipping the scales on a slider was not working when rendered on mobile – Boom, flip it!
• Dynamic Question Numbering wasn’t working with Show/Hide – 1,2,3… Fixed.
• Show/When logic did not work with sub-questions in Custom Groups – Show/When-ever!
• Custom Group Add As Needed not working in IE7 past the first Add Another – …and then?
• Info 99 error was appearing when you Reset the Survey Database – Reset it! (Erik & Ryan)
• Editing items on the Email Campaign > Manage Contacts screen caused an Oops! – Fixed.
• Table of Textbox Add/Edit in Bulk whitescreened – Fixed.
• Single Use Passwords were wonky with a ~ as the first character – You can’t use a ~ as the first character anymore.

Account Improvement and/or Fixes

Ground Rules

First of all, there are two ground rules that we need to set when talking about SurveyGizmo customer service and the hiring process:

• SurveyGizmo uses the term customer differently then some other organizations. We consider customers anyone that we interact with throughout the working day. A customer can be someone that purchased your product, but also the mailman, your co-workers, the person that waters the office plants and your supervisor. So, when we talk about customer service, we are taking about great service to all of these individuals.




• We adhere to the 5-90-5 rule as prescribed by Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service. Basically, it states that 5 percent of people are “born service providers.” About 90 percent of people are willing to give good service if they know what it is and have the opportunity to learn the skills needed to deliver it. And there are 5 percent who — for whatever reason — just can’t or won’t give great service regardless of how much training they receive. We strive to hire the born service providers, or ones that we can teach.

Start at the Very Beginning

The beginning is a very good place to start. Knowing that great service starts with hiring the right people, we start the process of great customer service training during the application process. With this, we can evaluate each candidate and see where they fall on the great service spectrum.

Our application process is not easy; in fact it is quite hard. We have multiple individual and group interviews and an assignment. Throughout each step, we look for cues for great service; those candidates that go the extra mile, quickly learn the SurveyGizmo application, and have positive reactions to constructive feedback. By viewing their behavior, we can get a clue at how they will interact with customers.

If they are not providing us, their potential employer with great customer service, will they do it for SurveyGizmo’s customers?

By starting the training from our very first interaction with a candidate, not only can we determine if they have what it takes to provide good service, but we also start from day one reinforcing our service-based culture. We also model this behavior by offering great service to each potential candidate.

Learn More

We preach it; we practice it, and now we are offering a chance for you to learn it: Great Customer Service!

Are you interested in learning more about providing your customer with great customer service? Why don’t you joins us for our 2-day workshop on Building Customer Happiness? Great customer service is at the heart of everything that we do and the foundation of our success. We have decided to share our proven techniques with you! Find out all you need to know here.

After reading about our hiring process, are you even more interested in joining the SurveyGizmo team? We are a growing company and often have open positions. Check out our current open positions here.

It’s another beautiful Friday afternoon in GizmoLand & we’ve been busy as usual. Here’s what we’ve been up to this week!

• Our WordPress Plugin has been rewritten! You can get the new version & read more about it here: https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/20322893-Wordpress-Plugin

FIXES:

• IE10 was truncating page titles when translated in a foreign language – Truncating no more!
• A blog embed didn’t have the Embeddable theme selected by default when created through the v3 API – Fixed.
• Uploaded files could not be viewed if the question was modified to accept multiple files after having a file uploaded when only one was allowed – Fixed!
• Ranking Tables, when Javascript was disabled, did not display consistent data in the Overview Response grid – Consistent again.
• Data displayed in View Responses was rotating through the 1st, 2nd & 3rd question – Now working as expected! 
• Page jump logic was displaying the current page title instead of the target page – Proper fixed.
• The “Is Exactly To” filter when used in conjunction with radio buttons was showing 0 if multiple answer options were checked off – Exactly right now! 
• %%mailReplyTo API parameter was not populating – It does now!
• Variable names in Tables were not pulling into SPSS exports – Pullin’ in again!
• Login Passwords & Recaptchas had numbering that couldn’t be disabled - Zoinks, fixed!
• Extremely large Status Logs were timing out when trying to download – Not anymore!
• Using the Back button to go back to a page with multiple Show/Hide questions broke the trigger & the triggered question – Filthy, tricksy Hobbitses!
• HTTP Connect actions on pages other than the Thank You page were being included in the Email Action PDFs – Fixed!
• Editing Reporting Values in bulk would not save or update reports – The fix is in!
• When resending to an individual contact, it would load the contact history from all surveys in the Contact History field – Proper fixed.
• When basing a logic action off an open-text field & using “less than” or “greater than”, if the field was left blank, it counted as a 0 instead of NULL – Fixed > Broke
• Ranking Table with a Max validation more than the number of options was adding an extra column – Not now!
• Added more TinyMCE options for editing question titles in the new Editor – Woot!
• The most recently added contact was missing from the Status Log – Found it. It was just shy.

We hope you have a relaxing weekend & look forward to hearing from you next week!

Cheers & happy surveying from SurveyGizmo Support!

     “What are the choices again?”
     “I have no idea.”
     “How do you expect me to answer that, I’ve never been in that situation or even known anyone in      that situation?”
     “I can’t answer that, it doesn’t make sense.”
     “I thought you said this survey would only take four minutes.”
     “That doesn’t apply to me.”
     “Can I just answer, ‘I don’t know’?”

And a couple more comments from my wife after she hung up:

     “I don’t ever want to take another survey like that!”
     “That caller doesn’t care anything about the survey.”

I really wonder who does these telephone surveys and how they get away with perpetuating the bad wrap surveys receive. Unfortunately, the data from these types of surveys is probably treated just as it would be from a meaningful survey.

However, as my grandmother used to say, “Nothing is ever a complete failure, because it can always serve admirably as a bad example.”

Let’s look at what we can learn from this bad survey example:

1. How people feel about the survey affects the quality of the data you receive. If you are frustrating your respondent, the data they give you is compromised.
2. It is important to understand your audience completely before starting the design of your survey questions.
3. Know who is making the calls for your survey and work to make a respondent-friendly telephone script.
4. Finally, when you look at survey results from someone else consider how the data was collected!

One of the challenges with all kinds of surveys (telephone, mail, online) is that you have no way of knowing how well the respondent understands the questions. The design must account for this.

Do you know who is on the other end of your telephone surveys?