Customer Satisfaction

You carefully craft what you think is the perfect survey for the perfect target audience. You send the survey out and receive what you think is a representative sampling of your target audience. Except it’s not. Biases have booby-trapped your survey. Sometimes unforeseen biases can skew a survey dramatically. Here’s a quick rundown of the …

How Biases Can Wreck Your Survey Read More »

A business can’t implement changes based on customer feedback if they can’t convince people a survey is worth their time from start to finish. A survey doesn’t do your business any good if no one takes it, or if no one finishes it. Four ways we can improve our chances are 1) explain the survey and …

Customer Satisfaction Survey Tips: How to Get Customers to Start and Finish Surveys   Read More »

The goal of all honest surveys is to get information that accurately depicts reality (e.g., to find out what your customers or employees really think). That’s the gold at the end of the survey. Many factors influence accuracy, including how representative the sampling is and what sorts of biases the respondents bring to the table. A …

How to Write Surveys People Actually Take Read More »

Now that we have to consider public opinion in the conduct of foreign policy, it’s worth listening to what Kohut has to say about what his polls show. That’s former JFK advisor Theodore Sorenson introducing researcher Andrew Kohut in a 1990s meeting of the U.S. foreign policy community. Kohut, then working for the Times Mirror …

How Surveys Became Vital to Modern Society Read More »

“Isn’t asking for someone’s opinion and then not doing anything substantial with it or not telling them what you are going to do following their input tantamount to not asking at all? Follow up and follow through seems to be where there is a real issue.” —Adrian Swinscoe, customer experience expert and Forbes contributor Too …

Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s Thoughtful, Focused Approach to Surveys Read More »

We know what surveys are and what they’re for, right? Don’t we? Actually, there seems to be a lot of confusion out there about surveys. What they are, how they’re done, how valid they are, et cetera. Given how much survey techniques are changing these days, I thought a review was in order. Here’s a …

What Are Surveys Again? Read More »

Surveys shouldn’t be about a vague sense of customer satisfaction levels. They should be about discovering the specific things we need to improve on and how we might improve on them. Constructive criticism is what we’re looking for, not nebulous data. We need laser-focused data on the areas we perceive as our weaknesses and the …

Conduct Surveys for Constructive Criticism, Not Praise Read More »

Surveys are as old as large societies. Historically, humans have lived in groups of about 120 people. Researchers say this is roughly the number of people we can actually know, as a friend or relative or acquaintance, not just a name. However, as soon as we began gathering in societies rather than small villages, it …

The Origins of Surveys Read More »