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Considerations before creating your survey:
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Clearly define the purpose of the survey. Unclear goals lead to weak results. Effective surveys have focused objectives that are easily understood. Spend time to identify, in writing: Why are you creating this survey? What do you hope to accomplish with this survey? What is the goal of this survey? How will you use the results that you collect? What decisions do you hope to make with the results of this survey?
Spending time identifying objectives that might help the person creting the survey, such as:
1) Are we trying to understand our customers’ perception of our product in order to identify areas of improvement (e.g. hard to use, time-consuming, unreliable )?, or
2) Are we trying to understand the value of specific improvements. Consider asking customers to rank from 1 – 5 the importance of improving your product. Upfront planning helps ensure that the survey asks the right questions that will meet your objective and generate useful results?
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Use closed-ended questions whenever possible. Closed-ended questions give survey-takers specific choices (e.g. Yes or No), making it easier to analyze results. Closed-ended questions can take the form of yes/no or rating scale from 1-5. Open-ended question allow people to answer a question in their own words. Open-ended questions are great supplemental questions and may provide useful qualitative information and insights.
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Keep the survey as short as possible. More than 20 questions will lose your survey taker. Respondents do not want to spend a lot of time taking surveys; the shorter the survey the more accurate your answers will be.
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Place the most important questions first – keep them short and easy to answer. Keep as many of your questions closed-ended as possible, making them simple and easy to answer. This assures that even those that may drop out of the survey have given you the results that you need to make your decision.
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Use specific numeric ranges whenever possible. Because you’re trying to make a decision, you want to use specific numeric ranges such as 1-5, instead of “never, sometimes, always”.
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Pre-test your survey. The easiest way to test your survey is to literally give it internally to your company or a trusted group of respondents. This works well with having your survey password protected at first. Be sure to tell your test group who the audience or the respondents are and to act is if they were the target respondent when answering the questions. Look for two specific types of feedback: first check for clarity of the questions. Did the respondent perceive the question as it was intended? Next check the test results and see if you can make the decision that meets your objective. If you don’t have enough information to make the decision, then you will have to go back and modify the questions.
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