Seth Godin Takes on Surveying

It’s funny how you’ll hear similar topics come up within the same week — it happens all the time over here where we will get similar requests for features from all of you at the same time (we like to refer to it as a “collective consciousness”), but this time it has happened within the blogosphere on the topic of surveying your customers.

As you may have read on Friday, one of our survey experts, Ed Halteman posted an article on how to make your customer satisfaction surveys as effective as possible. Then on Sunday, Seth Godin posted on his blog his “Five tips for better online surveys“.

We like what both Ed and Seth have to say on the subject, and wanted to expand a little bit on what Seth had covered in his post. (No– we’re not trying to suck up to Seth Godin, just thought since surveying is what we do, we might add to what he has already brought to the table by telling you how to put his ideas into actions.)

The first thing Seth covered was the idea that “Every question you ask is expensive.” This means you should think about all the questions that you are putting in your survey and the actions you are going to take after you get the answer. One litmus test we have around here when thinking about adding questions to a survey is to answer this question, “Will my survey become absolutely worthless without this question?” If the answer is yes, then add it, but if the answer is no, then take it out.

Back in October we had a webinar with one of our survey experts, Bill Johnston, where he went over this idea in greater detail. You can check out his slides from the webinar, as well as look for another one of the Best Practices in Survey Design webinars to be held in early May.

Next, Seth goes over the idea of not biasing your survey taker by the type of language you use when asking questions. This is something our survey experts bring up time and time again. By adding negative words like dislike, hate, displeasure, etc., you’ve (as Seth puts it) “planted a seed.” Keeping the question text as neutral as possible will help to keep your survey unbiased and the results meaningful. If you would like help getting the best possible wording for your survey, you can contact one of our survey experts and they would be more than happy to help!

Seth then brings up the idea of making sure you “make it easy for the user to bail.” This might be an odd concept, but what he is bringing up is the idea that you want to make sure that every question one of your survey takers has taken the time to answer has been collected by you, even if they don’t finish the entire survey.

We couldn’t agree more with this idea! This is why it is important to decide which questions you want on your first page versus your last, as well as how many questions you want on each page. It is important to note that SurveyGizmo collects the answers to each respondents survey every time they hit the “Next Page” button. So going back to Seth’s idea– you’ll want to add a few of your most important, action item questions on your first page, so even if your respondents don’t finish your survey, SurveyGizmo will have collected those answers before the respondent drops off of your survey.

Seth then talks about “Making the questions entertaining and not so serious.” We love this idea and have always been all about making surveying fun, yet informative. Scroll down to the bottom of our website and check out our RSS feed :-)

Then his final tip is about “shaking up the format” of your surveys. This is another great idea, and another great way SurveyGizmo can help you with your survey. With our 23 question types, you can make boring multiple choice questions more exciting by changing them into image choice questions as well as use our ranking question type with the arrows instead of just having your users number a list 1-10. By using a variety of question types, you’ll keep your users engaged and willing to answer more of your questions.

Now that you have all of Seth’s tips, as well as how to use SurveyGizmo to act on his tips, it’s time for you to create that meaningful survey so you can make better, more informed decisions in the future. Start your survey today, and if you have any questions along the way– you know where to find us!

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