Creating The Perfect Survey

In the modern world, data is the cornerstone upon which important business decisions are made. It is more accessible than ever through technology, in which every single interaction with a customer can be recorded and analyzed. But a powerful and often overlooked way to gather relevant data is quality surveys. By utilizing this method of data collection, a business can glean insight directly into the customer’s perspective. In order to gather the most relevant, insightful information possible, it is important to construct a high-quality survey. This requires following four major steps throughout the entire process. 

The initial step involves defining the key takeaways that the survey is trying to unearth. Planning the survey around answering the five W’s (who, what, where, when, and why) is a great roadmap for building out the business’ objectives. Next, the survey must begin to be authored with relevant questions that build upon each other. It is important to avoid questions that would create any sort of discrepancies with the data. Loaded, leading, and double barrelled questions are all non-conducive to an unbiased survey. For example, a loaded question intentionally influences a participant to respond in a certain way by using weighted wording. It is better to not place any sort of judgment upon a certain response. 

After the questions are drafted, the survey enters the executive phase. After some initial testing of its functionality and appearance, it can be finally released to the public. Responses will start pouring in, and some early analysis can be conducted to make sure that the information being gathered is helpful. Finally, once all of the responses have been recorded, the business can start to create visual representations of the data to help them discover what takeaways they can find. Bar, line, and pie charts are all great ways to represent the data in order to spot trends much faster.