are customer surveys worth doing?

How often are you asked to participate in a customer survey? And if you do participate, how often do you actually care?

One of our loyal readers recently asked us a common question:

I am thinking of doing a customer survey, do you know of any particularly good sites that allow you to create a survey? Also, in your experience do you find that this is a good way to gauge who your clients are (what industry, what they’re using the product for, etc.)?

There are several good online solutions for surveys, including Zoomerang, Survey Monkey and countless others. But for this kind of marketing endeavour, the tool can be as important as the message.

Seth Godin makes a great point about web surveys in his post Old marketing with new tools. His suggestion to use e-mail or a web form is perfect. I couldn’t agree more with the need to keep your survey from being dehumanizing, it’s certainly worth the additional effort to keep it meaningful.

We are preparing our first survey for Business Ready and we’ve chosen to use the form functionality of Google Docs to collect our responses. It’s incredibly easy to set up and configure for a simple online survey and the results are immediately dropped into your spreadsheet. No need to export or parse anything.

But remember that your findings will only be useful if you understand the feedback. Try using quantitative as well as qualitative questions so you can compare and measure specific aspects. So many times we see survey results collected and ignored. Before you spend the time and effort to design a survey and collect the data, ask yourself how you intend to respond to it. Will you follow up with each respondent? Will you take action based on what you have learned? Will the questions you are asking give you the information you need to make decisions?

And most importantly, give your respondents a reason to respond to your survey. Because not only are you asking them to give you their time, you’re asking them to care.