Jeff Jarvis in his article Love the Customers who Hate You makes the point that customers who hate your company are in fact offering you a great opportunity for you to improve your customer service and along with it your business strategy.

A similar philosophy can be adopted when carrying out your customer satisfaction surveys. While they can often provide a great opportunity to find out what your customers love about your business and they can be great confidence boost the real value in your survey findings can be in the messages that customers send about what can be improved about your business.

You don’t need to be Dell to to implement a system for customers to get involved when a simple online customer satisfaction survey can do the business.

In Thomas F. Stafford’s and Dennis Gonier’s article “The Online Research “Bubble” – Seeking to improve the commonly used online
survey sampling approaches” they seek to offer some improvements to the current online survey sampling methods which are in vogue with market researchers. The practice of large online consumer panels is posing a serious threat to the industry due to the fact that there is an emerging phenomenon of quasi-professional survey takers. Research from one large panel has shown that 1% of the panel was responsible for 30% of the online surveys completed. These survey takers are less likely to be fully employed and spend a disproportionate amount of time online.

The solution that Stafford & Gonier suggest is to look beyond the panel. They make the point that it is worthwhile considering other alternatives. They argue that To get your online research one quickly, you’ll either have to sacrifice cost or quality. It’s an easy choice: two of three important characteristics are available. You just don’t get it all, because the free lunch” of cheap, quick, and valid results doesn’t exist in online studies any more than it did in the world of offline research. Good sampling takes time or money; take your choice.

One thing that I do think that is worthwhile considering is designing purpose built panels. Custom online panels can can offer a pretty neat solution and at a reasonable price. While not suitable for all research problems instances they do particularly well within closed groups i.e. customer research, citizens panels.

Not a day goes past without someone releasing results of their survey into the media as news.

Surveys done well can make interesting news and develop a good public profile for your organisation. Case in point is the research completed by recruitment company Hudson released today and picked up by the mainstream media. The research results highlight that more than half of New Zealander’s are considering changing their jobs. While this is unlikely to come as any surprise to most people it is an interesting thought piece and can only help Hudson to develop themselves as a thought leader in their industry.

It is important to follow this process with some caution though as research poorly undertaken or poorly communicated can just as easily leave you with egg on your face. Case in point is a press release from uSwitch in the UK who stated that 9 million (35%) will go without a pay rise.” The release was timed to coincide with the run-up to Wednesday’s UK Budget, designed to get maximum publicity for the company.

Yet as Sam Coates highlights in Dodgy uSwitch surveys do nobody any favours the findings were from a YouGov survey “revealed” that 29% of teachers and a quarter of civil servants will not be receiving pay rises. It appears then that the statement made in the press release was based on a manipulation of a consumer confidence question, and therefore deeply flawed.

In situations like this more harm than good can be achieved with your research results and it is imperative that any results you release into the public domain are effectivly bullet proof to any serious criticism.

A useful post on www.marketresearchtech.com titled Fake Survey Software Reviews (How to Spot) provides some interesting suggestions on how to spot fake review sites.

Highlighted are a number of things to look out for but they main thing to be aware of is that fake review sites do exist and they are increasingly becoming pretty good at hiding their true motives i.e. to push a particular product. The best advice is to stick to mainstream review sites or active forums/blogs where it is clear that what you are reading is unbiased or at least the author has divulged any vested interest they may have.

Prolific market research blogger Ray Poynter has started a Market Research social space on Ning called Market Research Space.

Market Research Space is described as “A place for market and social researchers to share views, to look at new tools, to explore job opportunities, and to simply hang out.”

While relatively new the growth of Market Research Space has been impressive with (to date) 305 members signed up. Members appear to be a good mixture of market research professionals and groupies from around the world. It will be interesting to see how it grows but if the current growth continues I can only imagine the potential is large. Currnelty the site seems active with a number of on-going discussions.

Visit Market Research Space

In order to reduce any bias created by non-response to your survey it is critical that you work as hard as possible to increase your survey response rate.

In the research paper titled “Personalized salutation, power of sender and response rates to Web-based surveys” published in “Computers in Human Behavior’ the researchers (Adam N. Joinson & Ulf-Dietrich Reips) highlight that while a personalized salutation is important to your responce rate i.e. Hi John, please do my online survey. What is more likely to impact on the web survey is who the sender is and whether or not the sender can be seen to have a high power status e.g. Hi John, Please do my survey. Signed ‘Very Important Person!!

Surveys that used a personal salutation delivered from a high power achieved a response rate of 53.4%. Compare this to just 40% of students who responded to a survey without a personal salutation from a neutral power.

So if you are looking to optimise your response rate, serious consideration needs to be given to both the use of a personal salutation and who is to send the email invitation. Beware though, if your survey is anonymous and is asking sensitive personal details the use of the personalised salutation may in-fact have a negative impact on your response rates.