Using online polls to get customer feedback12 July 2005
Interactive online polls, surveys and questionnaires are attractive to visitors, and can boost traffic to your web site. They can also provide you with valuable customer feedback if you are looking for detailed information about your customers' usage of a particular product or service.
There are various options available depending on the amount of time and money you wish to spend on this form of customer feedback. You could choose to:
- Build your own questionnaire, and place it on your own web site. The University of Texas at Austin has a useful tutorial on how to create a questionnaire and manage data collection and analysis.
- Use a third party website or software package to manage the poll or survey. PollMonkey.com, Key Survey and WebSurveyor offer free polls for low-traffic web sites, and monthly subscriptions for more complicated surveys and questionnaires.
- The benefits of using web survey sites include readymade templates for your surveys, and extensive data analysis and report production.
- Send your customers an email questionnaire (if you do this, you must make sure that they have opted in to receiving marketing emails).
Tips for online surveys and polls
- Give your visitors an incentive to complete the survey - you could offer a prize, a discount on a product or service, or something like a free article or report if they reply.
- Explain why you want their help - are you looking for feedback on an existing product so you can improve it, testing a new design or price for a product, or just providing an online poll for fun?
- Include instructions - explain what you want your visitors to do (especially if they need to claim a prize/discount), and how they should complete the survey.
- Make sure your questions are as unambiguous as possible, ideally with yes/no/don't know options only. The questions also need to be short, jargon-free and easy to understand.
- Don't have too many questions - a maximum of 10 or 12 is ideal. Any more and people will lose interest.
- Make sure your survey is easy to complete - it's much easier for people to tick boxes than write in sentences. Check out some tips for designing surveys at the Survey System.
- Test the questions first before letting your visitors loose on them by getting a couple of friends or valued customers to fill in the survey.
- Make sure your web pages are designed in a simple, accessible manner - if your customers have to wait ages for a graphic-laden survey to download, for example, they may get bored and abandon it. You also need to ensure that the survey is accessible to as many people as possible. There are various tools available to help you check how accessible your web pages are, including Bobby and Cynthia Says.
- You may get a better response if you allow people to complete the poll or survey anonymously (although if you are offering a prize or a discount you will probably need to collect some personal details). If you do collect personal data, you will need to consider the Data Protection Act 1998, and related privacy issues.
