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This is the same survey I told you about a few weeks ago. It came back to me again, since I am part of the ABS-recruited probability-based panel that is fielding the survey. It is still one of the worst surveys I have ever seen. This time I took some screen shots: …
Survey questions that have multiple response options with an instruction to “select all that apply” are common in our industry, and for good reasons. They are efficient and easy for respondents to answer. They are efficient to lay out graphically. They shorten the length of a survey in terms of both time and space. The…
Falling in love with PowerPoint is not hard. It just takes some practice, and a wee bit of interest in learning some basic principles of design. You can gain fluency in PowerPoint entirely on your own—no training classes needed. And once fluent, you will understand it gives you abilities to create beautiful research reports even…
The online customer satisfaction survey I received today had me noticing an unfortunate side-effect of the NPS (Net Promoter Score) schema and visual imagery. For those of you unfamiliar with NPS as a way to measure and track customer satisfaction, here is how it goes. In your survey ask: “How likely are to recommend Acme…
Conducting surveys with your own customers is surprisingly difficult anymore. Phone options are dead, and online surveys are tough, because nobody answers or responds anymore. So what’s a researcher, strategist, or marketing professional to do? How about conducting a paper-based mail survey. It sounds crazy, but we just did it, and it succeeded beyond what…
The Versta Research spring newsletter comes out this week, and highlights some of the work we have done that is in the news and recently published. Here is a sampling: New Index for HR Management Launched Versta Research was commissioned by The Standard to develop its Absence and Disability Readiness Index, launched in March 2019,…
Every year I review and suggest summer classes that researchers might consider to learn all the newest techniques for research design and analysis. But for researchers who work in corporate settings, many of those classes are not practical. Who has the luxury of hanging out in Ann Arbor for six weeks to brush up on…
For every dozen people who hate using PowerPoint, there is a weird person who loves it. That weird person is me. PowerPoint has surprisingly strong capabilities for charts and for displaying research data. All it takes to create beautiful and powerful research reports in PowerPoint is: (1) getting familiar with its functionality, a lot of…
While it is tempting to use advanced programming to “force” good answers and good behavior out of survey respondents, don’t do it. Let respondents make mistakes. Let them mess up, and then review who messes up. This is one of the best ways to assess data quality in a survey, and trust me you will…
Survey response rates, which are still a measure of data quality and survey success in our industry, continue to drop. Most online surveys of customers (one’s own customers) will garner response rates of two to three percent—and that is if you are lucky and if you do everything right. Rigorously executed phone surveys achieve miserably…