Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, Conducting Effective Surveys, How to Get Meaningful Results from Your Survey Efforts. For those of you who are new to Demand Metric, my name is John Follett, and I'm joined by Jerry Rackley, our VP of Marketing and Product Development. In the next 30 minutes, we're going to talk about when to survey, and we're going to discuss some common survey topics. Then we're going to share seven best practices that'll help you conduct more effective surveys. And we'll wrap up by sharing how we can help with your research efforts. In fact, if you're trying to understand how your brand is being viewed in the market, make sure you download our Brand Perception Survey Template. There's no download credit required, so just visit us at demandmetric.com before it's too late. We've put together a great presentation for us today, and as he's going through the slides, I'll be monitoring the chat and the questions. So if you have any questions, don't be shy. We're all friends here, so feel free to submit them. If we can't get to your question today, we promise to follow up with you. So I think that's it for now. Jerry, the floor is all yours.

Speaker 2: Well, thanks, John. And again, let me welcome everyone. I'm Jerry Rackley, Vice President of Marketing for Demand Metric. And we're here today to talk about surveys. So let's begin and go through our agenda, which you'll see on the screen. We're going to talk about when to survey, what some things are that you would use a survey to measure, and how to do a survey effectively, and then a little bit more information about the resources that Demand Metric provides that can help you. So let's begin with when a survey makes sense. And the right place to start here is to understand that a survey is a market research tool that helps you measure something. So when you need to quantify an issue that you've identified, maybe that's either an opportunity or a concern, a survey usually is a pretty good way to do that. One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that a survey usually follows some sort of qualitative research. So often what you'll do is you'll gather some information qualitatively, and it may be through a focus group or just informal discussions, and that will lead you to do a survey to go a little bit deeper in terms of research. An example of this would be product features. Let's suppose that you pick up some chatter from your customer base about features they'd like to see in a future product, maybe through random conversations at a conference, maybe through a focus group, or even from things submitted to you via your website. You would then perhaps use a survey to go figure out which of all those feature requests you're getting might make the most sense to put into the next version of a product. So that gives you a feel for when you would use a survey. Now let's talk about some things you might use a survey to measure. Common survey topics. And I've listed them on the slide here. Customer satisfaction is probably number one. But there are other things as well. We see brand awareness, which John mentioned. We're currently offering a free tool on our website that will help you measure brand awareness. Product quality, product features, service quality, market research of just a general nature. All of these things are things that you would use to a survey to help you measure. And I would add even competitor awareness. If you want to know what kind of mind share your competitors have with your customers, surveys would do that. So these are all things you might use a survey to measure. Now let's talk about how to survey effectively. Surveying is a process. And we've listed the steps on the screen. What we're going to do in the balance of our time today is cover each one of these steps in the survey process. So let's begin with the focus. The focus is something that's really important to pay attention to because it's really easy to have scope creeps occur. So my advice is when you're doing a survey, number one is establish a survey objective. Make sure that it's really clear what you intend to accomplish through a survey. And I think you should write it out because generally you do a survey as part of a team or a group effort. And everyone involved needs to know what the objective is for your survey. The narrower the scope, in my opinion, the better you are because you tend to get better data that way. And what you're going to have to do is resist temptation to add things to the survey that are outside the scope because when other people in the organization understands you're going to do a survey, they'll come out of the woodwork and they'll start to say, hey, will you add this question to your survey or we'd like to know about this, can you put this in there? So before you know it, you've got lots of things unrelated to the scope. And that will really render the survey much less effective. So we think you need to have discipline about that, stick to the scope, and don't let those other things creep in there. If there are multiple objectives that are identified for a survey, then probably the best thing to do is to do multiple surveys. There's another thing that we recommend and that is pay real close attention to the length of your survey. People have a tendency to complete shorter surveys and longer surveys they tend to not complete as well. No surprise there because we've all probably taken surveys and gotten a little bit impatient before we reach the end of the survey. So here's some personal rules of mine that I've found work very well. I like to keep my surveys to 10 questions or less. And it's certainly fine to go over that by one or two questions. But if you can kind of use that as a rule, I think you'll find you'll get better survey data because more people will complete the survey. If you decide to administer a survey on paper, I think your survey should fit on a single sheet front and back. And that doesn't mean you use a really small font to get all your questions on that sheet of paper either. I think you have to pay very good attention to how the survey looks and how it's laid out. If you're going to go online, which most people do, I like surveys where the scrolling or clicking is kept to a minimum. Because again, the more of it there is, the less likely you'll have someone who's willing to take the survey and complete it. So what all this means is you have to take great care when you're crafting survey questions. And you need to strive for clarity. And when you do put your survey together, you should have several people proofread your survey. And one of the reasons is because people who end up taking your survey, you cannot predict how they'll interpret your survey questions. So the more people you can expose to your survey before you administer it, just to understand how a question might be interpreted, the better your survey will be. And I recommend if, for example, you're going to do a customer satisfaction survey, administer that survey internally to your employees first and explain to them what you're doing and tell them to act as if they were a customer and respond, just so you can begin to understand how your questions will be interpreted, and it will probably cause you to go back and revise your survey questions if you do that. So since we were talking about questions, let's talk about the question structure. I'm a big advocate of writing three-dimensional questions for surveys. And by that I mean a question that asks something you can answer with a number that you can respond to numerically, then a qualitative component that you would answer, of course, with words. And finally, the one that gets left off the most often is a question component that asks, of all the things we're asking you, which is most important? And that's the relative importance piece. It's very important to prioritize the information you gather from the perspective of the survey respondent, because you'll find that you may get data on a survey that indicates you're performing below where you want to on a certain area, but you also may discover, if you ask about relative importance, that that's not an area that matters that much to the people who took your survey. So you really need to get that priority information. If you're not really quite sure what that looks like, I've got an example question I'm going to put up right now. You can see on the screen, this is a sample question that asks about satisfaction with a technician's response time. And so those same three components I mentioned, all in this question set. And so the first one, we're simply asking the respondent to tell us how satisfied you are. And even though we're not using numbers to have the person indicate a response, we can convert their response to a number very easily. So they would circle whether they were satisfied, dissatisfied, or somewhere in between. And then below that, we have the comments section. And I'll tell you that the comments are potentially the most useful set of data that you'll get out of a survey. So anything you can do to encourage comments is really smart. And then finally, underneath that, in the last part of this question set, we ask the relative importance question. Compared to other things we're asking you on this survey, how important is this one? And so that's what a three-dimensional question looks like. So now that you know what it looks like, let's move on and talk about other aspects of the survey. It would be outside the scope of our presentation to really go into a discussion on statistical validity, but suffice it to say that it's important. You wouldn't want to go make strategic decisions based on a survey that had an invalid sample size. So just to simplify that discussion, what I'm going to do is recommend you go out there and use some tools that are available. And I've put on the screen the surveysystem.com website. They have a nice set of online tools. You can simply plug in your inputs, and they will calculate for you the results.