CEDo Week 3 - How to Create a Survey that Works…Is that possible?

In spite of my reluctance to willingly participate in surveys, as someone with some business experience I do recognize they can be useful. Any business owner worth their weight in money wants to put the needs of their customers as a high priority or they will not be in business long. Many companies have learned that guessing about what their clients and customers want is not always effective. So what do they do? They hire a team of researchers, pay them to get in the trenches and find out what is on the minds of their customers and sometimes even more importantly, who are their customers.

To meet this objective the team has to know how to combine their product knowledge with their knowledge of how to reach the people they need to hear from. In the article, Designing Customer Surveys that Work, the authors – Richard E. Zimmermann, Linda Steinmann and Vince Schueler gave some suggestions on how to do this effectively. One of the first things they suggest doing is to keep in mind what your goals and objectives are. Those creating the survey must have a plan for what they are going to do with the data they collect – what is the point of the survey?

They also suggested some other things to consider for making a survey effective. I found the information in this article to be very helpful. It gave me some parameters to use when planning my next survey, but also some questions I may pose to the next group who asks me to participate in a survey. Additionally, it changed my mind about some perceptions I had about the process of surveying… sometimes there actually is a point and if people know the point maybe they won’t mind answering a few well crafted and purposeful questions.