Survey solutions are used to perform market research and gain insights into people’s choices, opinions, and experiences. Surveys are used in n number of situations, ranging from listening to the voice of customer, measuring employee satisfaction or launching a new product.
According to an online research firm Statista, 36% of the total market research spend was on market measurement, usage, and attitude studies. Survey solutions software can help market research companies collect mass data and achieve these goals in no time. Some of the survey software are end-to-end solutions, i.e, they not only create and send surveys but also create reports and provide sample audience.
LEARN ABOUT: Survey Mistakes And How to Avoid
What problems should a good survey solution solve?
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Survey creation for problem-solving
Creating a survey shouldn’t take less than a minute with a good survey solution. Users should be able to easily drag and drop questions and rearrange their order. Also, real-life situations require to use different question types. So the survey software must offer survey creators with a wide range of question types.
A good survey solution can implement logic to make the questionnaire concise and efficient. Many survey solutions also offer free ready-to-use survey templates. These can be customized as required and save a lot of time. The theme of the surveys can be changed to match the brand voice. This can be accomplished by changing the fonts, background color and logo.
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Survey distribution
Surveys are used to gather data from a large number of people. Hence a good survey solution must be able to reach people in their preferred mode of response. It could be email, SMS, website, social media or a mobile app. Many businesses work in an area with poor internet connectivity. They need a mobile survey app that can work even without an internet connection. Such mobile apps store responses on the device. Once they connect to the internet, the data is transferred to the server.
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Reports generation
Creating reports and making sense out of survey responses is the primary aim of the organizations. Survey solutions offer reports that are commonly used in market research such as GAP, TURF, Trend, Conjoint analysis and many others. These reports can be exported in SPSS, .PDF, .XLS and .DOC formats.
Moreover, survey admins can share these reports with other teams and departments. To gain a deeper insight into respondents’ opinions, one can also create filters. You can create custom reports based on demographics, question, system variable, location, device, etc. The interactive dashboard gives an overview of the view, completion and drop-out rate.
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Integration with other apps
We are in the age when if an application doesn’t talk to other apps, sooner or later it dies. Survey solutions can be integrated with several like SalesForce, MS Dynamics, Tableau, Zapier, Marketo, etc. Many of these apps form the backbone of an organization. Hence, if a survey solution is integrated with them, one can create a better strategy to connect with them. Also, it gives valuable insights while making decisions.
For instance, whenever somebody responds to the survey, that person’s contact information can be flagged green in the CRM and sent future discounts email based on his/her consent. You can also trigger workflows using Zapier and automate business processes.
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Management existing and new surveys
It’s nice if you can create new surveys easily, but what about those which have already been created? A few survey solutions also let you import existing surveys and data into the new survey solutions. All you need to do is use an import tool. There are many reasons people switch to different survey building solutions. It was on our customers’ demand that we got such an import tool developed for them.
Survey solutions also let you store your data on a database server or export it in SPSS, SQL, XML, and raw format. To reuse the survey questionnaire, you can either copy individual questions or save them into question library. You can also create a copy of full survey questions and create another survey from it.
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Compliance
Many US and EU countries have strict data privacy and security measures to protect the identity of an individual. Survey solutions must comply with regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, Privacy Shield Framework, and others. The means for data collection, storage and analysis must be safe and carried out over secure HTTP protocol. Survey solutions tools using Single-Sign-On (SSO) authentication is not only safe but also don”t require users to sign in multiple times if logging in from the same machine.
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Access to sample audience
Most survey solutions only let you create and distribute surveys. A few of them let you analyze data in detail and generate various reports. However, only a handful of them provides you with the sample audience. Thus, businesses don’t have to worry about finding the right people for whom the data should be collected.
Why should businesses invest in survey solutions?
While the problems mentioned above are more about the tools, the basic business challenges that survey solutions are as below:
- Market research
No company would jump in the dark without doing enough homework. Market research lets businesses create segments of consumers and offer them products and services that suit their budget. It also helps them reach people and create an innovative marketing strategy.
- Customer satisfaction
Happy customers create word-of-mouth publicity and become your organic brand ambassadors. Many customers share their experience on the social media platforms. This can have a very dampening effect on their reputation. Running a customer satisfaction survey eliminates such situations and helps businesses improve their products and services.
- Employee satisfaction
Employees are an asset to any company. They can have brilliant suggestions to increase business and improve efficiency. Happy employees give their best and in turn, keep customers happy. An employee satisfaction survey gives a chance to work on the improvement areas.
- Product optimization
Product optimization surveys are the best way to find out what features are most liked by the users and what new features should be added. It also helps to optimize the resources invested in various products and services.
People from different geographical and socio-economic backgrounds have different requirements. Survey solutions can let firms filter survey responses based on demographics and custom filters to segregate the data.
Problem-solving survey questions
As we’ve learn, problems are an inevitable part of any business. Once we make peace with this, we can start working through the problem-solving process. Surveys are a great tool, and there are different ways surveys can solve problems for you.
By using surveys, you can gather information that allows you to understand better what the problem is and how to find it. Once you locate it, the solving strategy can begin developing. Difficulty solving problems comes from inaccuracy in reading and/or thinking.
Survey solutions can be used in projects of varying complexity – from simple evaluation questionnaires to sophisticated multistage panel surveys. Want to learn more? Get in touch!
