So why are we asking them to do our jobs? I ask this question a lot when we execute surveys for marketing and business strategists. They’re smart people who want us to synthesize lots of data into compelling stories for their business clients. They love to assemble data into dashboards, visualizations, and grids. But they…
Oddly enough, the researchers who most prize scientific rigor (our research colleagues in academia) are the last to have realized that online sampling can be treacherous. An article published in Wired magazine last week describes academic psychologists as “freaking out” because they just learned that a lot of their data, which they source from Amazon’s…
There is a “user-friendly” feature that some survey platforms now offer, and almost certainly you should avoid it. It is called auto-advance. I had an unpleasant encounter with it in a customer survey I just took. The idea is that, after clicking on an answer, instead of having to move a mouse or finger all…
Here is the third invitation in our review of three survey invitations. (See also: #1 How Bad Are We? and #2 How Amazing Are We?) In my opinion this one is easily the best. It is truthful and sincere, and tells me immediately why helping this company (by completing their survey) is important to them…
Of the three invitations up for review in our mini-series on survey invitations (see also: #1 How Bad Are We? and #3 How’s Our Relationship?) this is the laughably obnoxious one: What do you think about Acme? Tell us about your experience with Acme products and solutions to help us understand what’s going well, and…
I received survey invitations from three different companies over the last three weeks. Each takes a starkly different approach to wooing participation. One of them I admire; the other two offend me. The invitations brought to mind two feature-length articles we wrote for our newsletter subscribers in 2017: Building a Better Customer Satisfaction Survey and…
You might think that writing a feature article about liars, cheaters, and trolls in online surveys means we have a pretty damning view of online polls as a method of research. Not so. We are all in when it comes to online polling, and in fact it comprises the majority of the survey research we…
If you are a smart person and you only occasionally try your hand at writing a survey, here is something you may find yourself doing: adding an open box at the end of every question so that respondents can “write in” their own answer if the pre-listed answers do not fit them. Our clients do…
This is still raw, so I’m working hard to be constructive and not mean. But seriously, how much more self-centered can a veterinarian company be, than to send me a survey the morning after my dog dies to ask, “How did we do?” Yes, this really happened. On Friday, Lancelot (pictured above, on the day…
If you deploy your own surveys trying to solicit feedback from your customers, you know how hard it is to get them to respond. There are many good reasons why customers ignore surveys nowadays. Here is one potential culprit: You may be asking them for information you already know. If you are, they know that…