An important role for good survey researchers is to translate ridiculous sounding jargon their clients give them into ordinary words that real people use. The jargon is typically business or marketing related, because most surveys are done for business or marketing clients. But I just ran across some “marketing science” jargon (created by market researchers)…
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…
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…
A good friend and client likes to joke during every project: “Remember Joe, correlation does not imply causation.” Well, I thought she was joking. Surely everybody with a job in marketing research knows this? Apparently not. Even professors at fancy business schools seem to forget it, as evidenced by this snippet of an article a…
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…
In the Versta Research spring newsletter, Build a Better Customer Satisfaction Survey, we mentioned—but did not speak to—the seventh question in our newly developed survey for clients. It was added at the last minute. We put it right at the top, so it is the first question you see. If you didn’t yet test drive…
It bugs me that companies would use customer feedback surveys not for information or learning, but to manipulate customers into buying from them again. On the other hand, how many companies inundate us with those zillions of customer satisfaction surveys because they truly care about learning? What they really care about are their “metrics,” their…