Survey Software HQ

One thing that survey software can be used for, is to conduct research projects into your customer base. Businesses looking for feedback can turn to their audience and recruit their assistance. Ask them to come up with ideas. Reward them if they come up with something good. This will make getting feedback easier.

The Cost of Incentives

Usually, if you customer base is large enough, the hard cost of the reward is worth the feedback you will get if they are comfortable with providing feedback or lured with a large enough incentive. Look out, though, as the wrong incentive will lure the wrong kind of people. A cash reward is useful to anyone, so you might stay away from that. Think of something specific to your industry which would weed out people who sign up in a second for a cash reward.

 Effectiveness of Incentives

The effectiveness of incentives varies from survey to survey and from industry to industry. Think of what would benefit you, and what the ideal provider of feedback to you would want. Come up with a win-win (sorry, over-used buzzword) situation. Send me your stories.

Although it’s a well known perception, this study validates that consumers believe that Japanese automakers such as Toyota and Honda make better cars than American companies such as GM, Ford, and the Chrysler. What I liked about this study is that they made their poll results public and available for anyone to scrutinize.

Excerpts from the AP Press Release

Americans have a bias against cars made by U.S. automakers, but an AP-AOL Autos poll found flickers of loyalty that could offer hope for an industry struggling to survive.
What is the American auto industry doing to reclaim its evaporating support?The industry is returning to the types of autos that gave it a sense of “swagger and attitude in the 1960s,” said John Wolkonowicz, an auto industry analyst.
In the poll, 44 percent said Japan makes the best autos, 29 percent said the United States and 15 percent said Germany.
Asked what car manufacturer makes the best autos, 25 percent said Toyota, 21 percent said General Motors and 17 percent said Honda.
Full Survey Results ( Web | PDF )

Poll of 1,004 adults conducted Dec. 19-21. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

This is a quote from a recent Google video showing how the Google Finance team surveyed their customers to gather their feedback and then implemented the most repeated requests into their tool. The end result is a useful tool that looks slick and easy to use (although I still use Yahoo Finance). Way to go Google.

Five years later after the switch to the euro, most Germans still long for their old currency, according to a recent poll by the market research firm Forsa. The poll, for Stern magazine and RTL television, showed that 58 percent of Germans would prefer the deutsche mark over the euro.

France Too

In a recent survey by TNS-Sofres in France, 52 percent of those polled said giving up the franc had been “quite bad” or “very bad” for France, compared with 45 percent in 2003.

From Tolar to Euro

Slovenia just made the switch from the Tolar on Jan 1st 2006. In Slovenia, however, polls indicate that the euro is still generally embraced, in part because it represents a final break with the Communist past. Much of the population is already familiar with the currency from shopping trips to Austria and Italy. But pride in the country’s readiness to join has been offset by fears that the euro will make life more expensive.

(source: The Ledger)

Companies today are in dire need of finding ways to innovate so that they can stick out from the dozens or hundreds of companies competing with them.

Step 1) Listen

One approach that makes a lot of sense is to survey your customers. Ask them what they think. Not just the ones who paid for your service, but really focus on the ones that are vocal and opinionated. What do they have to say? Listen carefully…

Step 2) Innovate

Let’s say you sell staplers and in your survey it turns out that a few people don’t like the way you have to load staples into your stapler. Everyone else’s stapler loads in staples the same way, you think to yourself. You realize you have discovered a unique opportunity and decide to market a new “EZ load” stapler.

Step 3) Raise Prices

Congratulations. You’ve created a new market segment (EZ Loading Staplers) that has never been done before. You are first to market so you should state that loud and clear. Because it’s a new segment there could be a lot of buzz to support your marketing efforts. People could overwhelm your little company if you don’t have some controls in place. Raising the price is a great control because of the law of supply and demand. When demand is low, and supply is high you have to lower prices (look how cheap you can get a DVD player nowadays). When demand is high and supply is low, you have to raise prices in order to effectively serve the market.

Enjoy your newfound success and feel free to send me your questions at bhenderson @ prezzatech . com

How many responses do you need in order to have an accurate survey?

You need to understand the right amount of survey responses that you need in order to be confident that your survey results are fairly indicative of reality. Usually people trained in this field have a background to statistics. But the basic idea is that someone conducting a sample survey tries to get results from a portion (sample) of the overall population and tries to get as many responses as possible to reflect the opinions of an entire population.

Here’s a Free Survey Sample Size Tool and how you would use it.

Let’s say you are conducting a health care survey on the attitudes of the patients of a particular hospital. You need to get a rough estimate of how many patients they serve, and that becomes your population size. Plug that into the survey sample size tool and then leave the defaults.

Read up confidence levels and intervals if you have some time and you will learn a lot more about the results from this tool.

My company’s motto is that you don’t need a Ph.D in order to create, analyze, and share results from a survey… you just need some common sense (and a connection to the internet

- Brian, from SurveySoftwareHQ

Slightly related to the buzzword Enterprise Feedback Management …

Who: The Creative Group, a specialized staffing service providing marketing, advertising, creative and web professionals on a project basis.
What: The most annoying industry buzzwords by advertising and marketing executives.
Sample Size: The US poll includes 250 responses – 125 from advertising executives among the US’s 1,000 largest advertising agencies and 125 from senior marketing executives among the nation’s 1,000 largest companies.

Executives were asked, “In your opinion, what is the most annoying or overused buzzword in the creative/marketing industry today?” Top responses included:
“Outside-the-box”
“Synergy”
“The big idea”
“ROI”
“Paradigm shift”
“Strategy”
“Integrated solution”
“CRM” (Customer relationship management)
“Customer-centric”
“Voice of the customer”
“Critical mass”
“Buzz”
“Make it pop”
“Break through the clutter”
“Take it to the next level”
“Innovation”
“Free value”
“Organic growth”
“Low-hanging fruit”
“It is what it is”

What buzzwords annoy you the most? Get the Full Story Here

The Gartner Group was paid a bundle to come up with a fancy name for survey software - Enterprise Feedback Management (aka EFM). They also gave a huge indication that the industry is heading this way - fast. They even gave strong probability numbers that companies will be ditching their survey software tools for tools that cost in the millions - because they believe feedback is so vital to their success. There are a lot of companies that claim they invented EFM.

But seriously… who cares about EFM?

 What you need to do (if you are in the market for survey software) is to get referrals, evaluate your options carefully, and create a list of what is most important to you… as if you were buying a car. There is a huge difference between Survey Monkey and tools from companies like Perseus and Confirmit that can costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but there are also a lot of companies in between, such as Prezza Technologies with high-end features and aggressive pricing meant to challenge this market…

From what we have seen, this is what the survey software market looks like:

1. Cheap but Limited Survey Tools (LOW END)
Limited Features: doesn’t support advanced features Limited Support: no live technical support when you are in a bind Limited Scalability: limits growth by placing penalties on submissions Limited Life: data is away each time, not easy to re-use and perform trend analysis

2. Powerful but Expensive MR Tools (HIGH END)

Expensive: Usually starts at $10K(base) for 1 year of hosted surveys! Penalties: Limits on responses, submissions, users, bandwidth Difficult: Need a PhD to understand advanced stats packages Overkill: Bloated with features from very specific customers

3. Business Research Tools

Emerging… right now. It’s the high end tools without the extra market research (MR) add-ons.

Who: ComputerWorld
What: IT Spending Projections for 2007
Sample Size: Not revealed

Major revelations: IT spending projections decreased in the last quarter of 2006, with CIOs predicting IT spending increases of 5.8 percent over the next 12 months. That’s down from expectations in the previous quarter that spending would rise by 6.5 percent during the next year, according to the quarterly CIO Magazine Tech Poll released Friday.

Full Story Here

Who: Engage.com
What: “Manners and Behavior” survey
Sample Size: 600 single adults

Major revelations: 24 percent of respondents believe it’s all right to lie when dating online; more men than women (30 percent versus 19 percent) of the total respondents think untruths are suitable.

More than half (53 percent) of singles feel it’s acceptable not to respond to emails from singles in whom they’re not interested, and women are more likely than men to have that belief. Following are other online dating practices singles consider acceptable:

– Changing your username to avoid someone (40 percent)
– One line emails, such as “tell me more” (31 percent)
– Sending the same email to numerous prospects (19 percent)

What are less tolerable online dating practices?
– Using out-of-date photos (11 percent)
– Having photos retouched (12 percent)
– Forwarding private emails to friends (10 percent)