How to create a successful survey for your business

13 May 2011

If you need to know more about customer feedback, learn more about your target audience or PR coverage, the best way of doing this is to conduct a survey. Sounds easy enough but it can be a struggle to get started.

There are companies who specialise in this field and they will take all the strain out of doing it oneself. They are experts, they know how to word a survey in order to get the desired results.

Should the budget not stretch to employing one such company then it is up to the individual to get a survey up and running. To do this well there has to be a clear objective in sight. Staying focused will mean that the results will be useful. Every bit of information has to put across to the person filling out the survey in a clear and interesting way with as little technical jargon as possible.Next is to decide which survey is the best one, whether the use of omnibus interviews, street, telephone or online interviews. They all work in one way or another, it is just a question of knowing which is the best for the survey that is being done.

With online businesses now at the forefront of the business world, online surveys have become one of the cheapest options around. It provides results quickly. There are lots of companies around that let a person create a survey for a really small fee and there are some who offer this service free of charge. This form of conducting a survey has become popular. The one drawback is that it only reaches people with Internet access. As most people now have access to a computer, it is only a little glitch to have to consider. The questionnaire can be attached to a website which is really handy.

The more traditional forms of surveys are listed below:

1. Telephone surveys
2. Face to face surveys
3. Omnibus surveys.

Telephone surveys will reach a wider audience because most people either have land lines or mobile phones. This method gives truer demographics as to the age and the region of the person answering a survey. However, it can be hard to get someone to commit to answering any questions on the end of a phone line.

Face to face surveys are a good way for a shop keeper to find out what their customers want or think about the shop. The customers can be asked to fill out a form either when they enter the shop or are coming out of it. Face to face surveys work well on a door to door basis but again some people do not like this sort survey and it can be hard to get them involved. If they do want to though, it can provide very focused information.

Then there are omnibus surveys which in theory could be carried out very much as the telephone or face to face survey but the difference is that the omnibus survey is conducted by the general public themselves. They are effectively sharing the survey with each other. This form of survey is a lot cheaper and is used by many research companies rather successfully.