Using Surveys to Benefit Your Company - Part 1 Getting Started

For those who take their web presence seriously and look to implement positive changes to their online business, this is the first in a series of blogs on how to use surveys to gather valuable visitor feedback.

Why surveys?

Gathering feedback and opinions from customers or visitors browsing your website can provide a wealth of useful information. If this is acted upon it will improve a multitude of aspects within your business. Remember, your customers don't see your website in the same way you do. Simple things like the location of a button can be the difference between an order being placed or the checkout process being aborted.

If you have gathered information from customers before, you'll know exactly what I am talking about! How many times have you been asked the same question for a specific product before updating the description, or had delivery questions that you thought were apparent on the website.

A business can only move forward by listening to their customers and adjusting the website to make the whole process easier. For instance, only asking for the relevant details when requesting a quote, or allowing customers to have their concerns addressed immediately with just once click, could make all the difference.

What is the purpose of a survey?

You may think this is apparent, but get this wrong and you'll lose sight of the objectives and collect the wrong information. Surveys should be designed to help your organisation make decisions that are based around usable data, assisting you to make essential continuous quality improvements to your business processes, in the most effective and efficient manner.

Essentially, a survey is a vessel to collect information from a select group of individuals using standardised questions. This allows you to identify your customer’s expectations whilst measuring their satisfaction levels, providing information to help determine areas of improvement within your business processes. Always ask yourself ‘What do I want to achieve from this survey?’

Is a survey necessary?

Before designing a survey, (including the questions you wish to ask, implementation and collation of results), ensure the data you wish to gather cannot be found elsewhere within your organisation.

For example, let's say you wanted to know the number of individuals that purchased goods from your website, or how they found you. Potentially this information is available from within your e-commerce system (order summary and referrer tracking). It would be much better to get the data in this way rather than asking your customers a question you already know.

Make sure you’ve followed us on Twitter and circled us on Google+ so you don’t miss the next blog in this series, titled ‘Writing your survey questions.’

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