Zoomerang has a wealth of information available to help you collect the actionable data you need and analyze the results. You can find a new Zoomerang Survey Tip each day on Twitter which are designed to help make your survey experience a success.

To help keep you up to date, I have compiled the survey tips from the last week for easier reference and I will be posting an update weekly.

-  Use Categorical survey questions when the answers are categories and each response must fall into exactly one of them

-  Dig deeper into your data – Apply a filter and analyze a subset of your respondents

- Not all surveys are created equal-Poorly written or targeting to the wrong audience will produce inaccurate results

-  When concept testing (i.e. product enhancement or a new offering) send a survey to two segments – a portion of your customers and a portion of your prospects

-  Be sure your Medical or Healthcare related surveys are HIPAA compliant

You can find compiled lists of the previous Survey Tip of the Days as well as additional online survey tips and suggestions here at the Zoomerang blog as well as links to helpful Zoomerang tutorials and Zoomerang webinars.

Be sure to follow Zoomerang on Twitter if you would like to view the Survey Tip each day. You can also add the Zoomerang blog to your RSS feed or bookmark the site to get the weekly recap. If you have any survey tips you would like to share leave me a comment or send me an email, Zoomerang is all about sharing knowledge.

Customizing your survey is a great way to get respondents more familiar with your organization’s logo, to increase your survey response rate, and to stand out from the crowd.

Two of the easiest ways to customize your survey are within the survey itself and you can even make these changes to a survey you’ve already deployed:

Add your logo to the title – When you are creating or editing your survey, click Edit Title at the top of the survey. Add your organization’s logo under the Add image to title section of this page. Once you find the file on your computer and click Upload, just choose the orientation of the image- above, below, or to the left or right of your survey title.

Choose a design theme that matches – The bars between your questions are blue by default. If blue doesn’t blend with your image, just change the color with the drop down menu on the top left of the screen you see when creating/editing your survey. Zoomerang offers blue, black, red, green, yellow, and white bars. If you are feeling really colorful try a theme like “Oceanic Aqua” or “Mechanical Violet” that also changes the background color of your survey.

Advanced Customization Tips

There are additional pages, outside of the survey itself, that you can customize with the formatting toolbar in order to change text formatting, create hyperlinks, or insert images. You can also use HTML tags to add custom branding on other pages.

- The Online Survey Email Invitation: If you are sending to your own list of email addresses (not purchasing respondents from Zoomerang), this is most likely the first time your recipients will read about your survey. Customizing this email to say who you are and why you are asking for input not only adds a more personalized feel for the survey as a whole, but it tends to increase the response rate.

- The Online Survey Web Greeting Page: You can choose whether this page will appear at the start of your survey and customize it using the formatting toolbar.

- The Online Survey End Pages: These are the pages your survey respondents are directed to at the end of the survey; you can customize any of these pages with hyperlinked text and images or redirect respondents to your own website.

- PowerPoint Survey Results Presentation: You can create custom charts from the Analyze Results tab and download them (with or without the corresponding data tables) to PowerPoint, which you can customize by editing the text on each slide (title on the introduction slide as well as the survey question displayed above each chart), and changing the design theme as well as the chart image and data table background, border, and other slide attributes.

When you’re analyzing customer satisfaction survey results, the most important goals are minimizing the low scores and improving the top scores. It is important to monitor the “top two-box” satisfaction number, which is the combined percentage of those saying they are very or somewhat satisfied. It is essential, however, to call out to management the proportion of customers who are dissatisfied and to reduce those percentages. Insights into how to do that are found by learning what those who provide high ratings have to say and reviewing the results of those who are dissatisfied with performance.

1. Trends in Satisfaction Score

Observing the top-two box percentage over time will reveal where a company is improving and provide warning signs of what needs improvement. Percentages are a useful means of communicating results in customer satisfaction research because they are readily understood by most people. Moreover, they are more aligned with business objectives (increasing the percentage of people who are satisfied and minimizing those who are dissatisfied).

Example of Trend Report in Overall Satisfaction

 A succinct way to measure how well a company is succeeding in minimizing low scores and improving top scores is to calculate the satisfaction differential by subtracting the bottom two-box score—the combined percentage of those saying they are very or somewhat dissatisfied—from the top two-box score. A company that is successful on this metric will see this number increasing over time. The table below illustrates that score for the example trend report.

Competitive benchmarks for customer satisfaction can be difficult to come by because this is typically proprietary information. Moreover, competitors’ results cannot be accurately interpreted without knowing the specifics of question wording and the scales used. The satisfaction ratings for the recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award given by the U.S. Department of Commerce, however, provide some insight into those companies that have been recognized for achievements in quality and performance.

 Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award Recipients’ Satisfaction Ratings

2. Find Sources of Dissatisfaction

To increase the top two-box score next quarter, it is critical to understand what is driving the bottom two-box scores. There are two easy ways to do that:

- Review the open-ended comments. Reading the volunteered comments following up on the rationale for the satisfaction rating is essential. The remarks among the most satisfied customers will shed light on what a company is doing well. They may also provide early warning signs if satisfied customers voice concerns with a service, product, or customer support experience. Dissatisfied customers will be vocal about the rationale for their satisfaction rating and will provide actionable suggestions for how to improve.

- Cross-tabulate by satisfaction rating. A key analysis includes looking at the people who are really happy and those who are not happy. Cross-tabulation features make comparisons between satisfied and unsatisfied customers fast and easy. The tendency in analyzing customer satisfaction results is to focus on those company, product, or service attributes that elicit the greatest dissatisfaction overall—price, for example. Most customers will want a lower price regardless of their satisfaction level. It is more revealing to compare how satisfied and dissatisfied customers feel about various aspects of the product or service relationship. The gap in satisfaction ratings for each attribute will help prioritize areas for improvement—the areas with the greatest difference should have the highest priority. In the example cross-tabulation table below, price has the lowest top two-box satisfaction score among all customers. The gap between satisfied and dissatisfied customers, however, is biggest for customer service, so that is the area with the most impact on overall satisfaction.

Example Cross Tabulation by Satisfaction Rating

 3. Present Findings and Action Items

Collecting customer satisfaction data is useful only if there is a process established to deliver recommendations, implement action plans, assign plan owners, and monitor plan execution. Once the results have been compiled and analyzed, they should be presented to management with recommendations for resolving the identified weaknesses. The recommendations should be actionable – reduce response times to four hours for example – and the person responsible and the resources allocated to meet that goal should be determined. There should be periodic meetings to evaluate progress on the action plan and the next customer satisfaction survey should evaluate progress on that goal.

  4. Contact Customers

If possible, dissatisfied customers should be personally contacted to see if there is something that can be done to improve their perception of the business. This is important not simply to increase the odds of keeping that customer but also to prevent negative word of mouth. The personal contact itself may succeed in doing that. Additionally, a discount or free product should be considered. If policies or products are changed based on customers’ feedback, those customers should be contacted to let them know about those changes and that their feedback was taken seriously.

Zoomerang has a wealth of information available to help you collect the actionable data you need and analyze the results. You can find a new Zoomerang Survey Tip each day on Twitter which are designed to help make your survey experience a success.

To help keep you up to date, I have compiled the survey tips from the last week for easier reference and I will be posting an update weekly.

-  Set up skip logic to screen out respondents who do not meet your criteria

-  Send transactional surveys promptly after the interaction while the experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind

- It is not necessary for a comment to be repeated by a large percentage of customers in order to make it actionable. Many people may share the same views but didn’t participate or participated but neglected to mention their thoughts on the subject

-  Review Zoomerang’s Best Practices for Survey Email Invitations prior to deployment

-  Evaluate your performance & measure your results by surveying event attendees

You can find compiled lists of the previous Survey Tip of the Days as well as additional online survey tips and suggestions here at the Zoomerang blog as well as links to helpful Zoomerang tutorials and Zoomerang webinars.

Be sure to follow Zoomerang on Twitter if you would like to view the Survey Tip each day. You can also add the Zoomerang blog to your RSS feed or bookmark the site to get the weekly recap. If you have any survey tips you would like to share leave me a comment or send me an email, Zoomerang is all about sharing knowledge.

                                  Double, double toil and trouble;
                                  Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
                                  Fillet of a fenny snake, 
                                  In the cauldron boil and bake; 
                                  Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
                                  Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, 
                                  Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, 
                                  Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,
                                  For a charm of powerful trouble,
                                  Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
                                  - Incantation of the Three Witches, Macbeth

Despite the consecutive steady increase on Halloween spending over the last several years the economy has finally caught up to Halloween, with this year’s trend best summed up as creativity on a budget. According to the National Retail Federation’s 2009 Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey consumers are expected to spend an average of $56.31 on Halloween, down from $66.54 last year, with total spending expected to reach $4.75 billion. The survey found consumers plan to spend an average of $20.75 on costumes (including children’s and pet’s costumes); $17.99 on candy; $14.54 on decorations and $3.02 on greeting cards. 

To gain further insight into celebration plans for this year, Zoomerang recently conducted an online Halloween survey. The spirit of the holiday (pun intended) is still running strong for respondents, with 71% of respondents planning on celebrating in some form. Holiday plans vary from handing out candy (67%) to attending a costumed work party (9%). With 41% planning on going trick-or-treating, others will be busy visiting pumpkin patches (27%) and haunted houses (18%). For the 54% planning on dressing up, humorous costumes at 19% are the more popular choice over the 11% who are choosing horror-related costumes.

There is good news on the eco-friendly front: 42% will be making their own costumes at home, 18% will be reusing previous costumes, 6% will be going to a used clothing or consignment store and 5% will be borrowing from friends. Only 11% will be buying from a brick and mortar store while 18% will be buying from an online retailer (it is always a good thing to cut down on fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by shopping online).

One thing does remain true each year: Halloween is the perfect time to express your individuality. As for my plans, I tried my best to be creative on a budget while celebrating in an eco-friendly way. With Halloween falling on a Saturday this year, I decided that I will celebrate with a weekend-long Simpsons Treehouse of Horror 20 episode marathon. Oooh, Scaaareeeyyy! – Count Floyd

Okay Marge, you hide in the abandoned amusement park. Lisa, the pet cemetery. Bart, spooky roller disco. And I’ll go skinny dipping in that lake where the teens were killed one hundred years ago tonight. –Homer Simpson

Happy Halloween!

Zoomerang has a wealth of information available to help you collect the actionable data you need and analyze the results. You can find a new Zoomerang Survey Tip each day on Twitter which are designed to help make your survey experience a success.

To help keep you up to date, I have compiled the survey tips from the last week for easier reference and I will be posting an update weekly.

-  Use Statistical Analysis to Measure Your Survey Results

-  For employee or company satisfaction surveys, surveys should be conducted quarterly rather than conducting them once per year. If there is only one data point for each year, a single recent event could have a large impact on results, impacting business decisions

-  While it is important to have some written conclusions, an illustration usually speaks louder than words

-  Spend time and effort to plan your survey – Bad information is worse than no information at all

-  To gather input for a smoother, more effective meeting send a Meeting Planning Survey                                   

You can find compiled lists of the previous Survey Tip of the Days as well as additional online survey tips and suggestions here at the Zoomerang blog as well as links to helpful Zoomerang tutorials and Zoomerang webinars.

Be sure to follow Zoomerang on Twitter if you would like to view the Survey Tip each day. You can also add the Zoomerang blog to your RSS feed or bookmark the site to get the weekly recap. If you have any survey tips you would like to share leave me a comment or send me an email, Zoomerang is all about sharing knowledge.

In creating a visual representation of your survey results there are a few options to consider so be sure to choose the format that will best illustrates your results.

A survey results pie chart is best for seeing how something is divided among different groups Pie charts show categories of data in proportion to the whole data set. The entire pie acts as the visual representation of the compiled data and each slice represents a different category within. When analyzing pie chart data look for the largest piece to find the most common category and be sure to pay attention to the relative sizes of pieces; some categories may be unexpectedly similar or different in size.

For a pie chart, the following statistics are calculated:

Mean: The average of all the data points in the series

Maximum: The maximum value (biggest slice) in the series

Minimum: The minimum value (smallest slice) in the series

Sample Size: The number of values (slices) in the series

Range: The maximum value minus the minimum value

Standard Deviation:  Indicates how widely data is spread around the mean

A survey results bar graph makes for easy comparisons. Like pie charts, bar graphs are useful for comparing categories of data where you can have a single category of data or you can beak down the data further into multiple categories for greater depth of analysis.

For each bar in the bar graph, the following statistics are useful:

Mean: The average height of all the bars

Maximum: The maximum value (tallest bar) in the series

Minimum: The minimum value (shortest bar) in the series

Sample Size: The number of values (bars) in the series

Range: The maximum value minus the minimum value

Standard Deviation: Indicates how widely data is spread around the mean

For more information on how to get the most from your survey report and improve the way you analyze surveys be sure to read the Survey Results Report post and 10 Tips to Get the Most out of Survey Reporting

Zoomerang has a wealth of information available to help you collect the actionable data you need and analyze the results. You can find a new Zoomerang Survey Tip each day on Twitter which are designed to help make your survey experience a success.

To help keep you up to date, I have compiled the survey tips from the last week for easier reference and I will be posting an update weekly.

-  A targeted follow-up survey may help reveal causes of negative responses from employees working in the same dept

-  Keep respondents moving at a quick pace through the survey by mixing up the easier questions with more difficult ones

-  Sample size can often make or break your results – If the sample is not large enough results may be inaccurate

-  Your customers’ time is valuable so don’t ask for more than 10 minutes of it when you invite them to complete your survey

-  When building a survey results graph choose the graph that best illustrates your results: A line graph is great for showing trends or specific data values; A bar graph makes for easy comparisons; A pie graph is best for seeing how something is divided among different groups

You can find compiled lists of the previous Survey Tip of the Days as well as additional online survey tips and suggestions here at the Zoomerang blog as well as links to helpful Zoomerang tutorials and Zoomerang webinars.

Be sure to follow Zoomerang on Twitter if you would like to view the Survey Tip each day. You can also add the Zoomerang blog to your RSS feed or bookmark the site to get the weekly recap. If you have any survey tips you would like to share leave me a comment or send me an email, Zoomerang is all about sharing knowledge.

The final stage of your survey is the preparation and presentation of the survey results report. This stage is as important as, if not more important than, any other stage in the market research process. Regardless of the care taken in the design and execution of the survey itself, the time and effort expended on your research project could be wasted if the report does not communicate effectively.

The research report is your factual message relying on tables, figures, and graphical displays of various types to clearly communicate the research findings. The report presents actionable data and vital recommendations so that the most informed decisions can be made. Keep in mind there are usually stakeholders involved in the decisions you are trying to make who want to see a visual representation of your survey results and survey analysis.

When building a survey results graph or chart choose the format that best illustrates your results:

- A bar graph makes for easy comparisons

- A pie chart is best for seeing how something is divided among different groups

Analyzing and illustrating your survey results is fast and simple to do with Zoomerang. In just a few clicks you can graph survey results or apply cross-tabulations, filters, and comparison reports. With Zoomerang you can quickly and easily create a survey results graph directly from a question—even with a filter or cross-tabulation applied—and output it to PowerPoint or a PDF making it easy to share information with key stakeholders.

For more information on how to get the most from your survey report and improve the way you analyze surveys be sure to read “10 Tips to Get the Most out of Survey Reporting”

Despite the economic downturn, e-commerce sales (including event and movie tickets) will grow about 11% to $156.1 billion this year, up from $141.3 billion in 2008, according to the State of Retailing Online 2009. E-commerce sales grew 13% from 2007 to 2008, and online sales will account for 6% of total retail sales this year, up from 5% last year. To retain customers, 53% of online retailers will use e-mails to feature online-only promotions while 55% will use e-mails to either extend invitations to participate in online surveys, highlight new product availability or to gather customer feedback.

With the holiday shopping season just around the corner, it is time once again for Zoomerang’s Annual Online Shopping Survey. This year’s study revealed that 22% of online shoppers had already begun shopping for the holidays prior to October 1, with the majority doing their online shopping between October 1 and December 10, 2009. Using Zoomerang’s Comparison Report feature to segment the survey results by gender, convenience was cited as the most important reason women are planning to shop online, while the ability to compare prices easily was the most motivating reason for men.

Additional highlights from the survey include:

- 18% of holiday shoppers plan to spend $501-$1,000+ online this year

- Ages 26-64 are the most popular recipients being shopped for online

-  Electronics and accessories was the top holiday shopping category, followed by clothing and apparel with books and media placing third

If you are an online retailer, be sure to check Zoomerang’s Top 6 Tips for Your E-Commerce Website This Holiday Shopping Season, created to directly address the top concerns raised by online shoppers.

The benefits of online shopping are plentiful for both e-tailers and consumers. The convenience involved and extensive research capabilities for product reviews as well as best prices aside, my favorite aspect is the environmental benefits. Shoppers browsing online reduce fuel consumption and avoid the CO2 emissions associated with a single-occupancy trip to the store – every minute spent shopping online uses 20 times less energy than a minute spent driving to the mall. Shopping online also reduces the need for print catalogs and excess packaging plus downloadable items purchased online eliminate the need for any kind of material goods at all. Online shopping is clearly something we all can benefit from, whether we actually do so ourselves or not.