Symptom
My lack of information about my customers and my employees could be preventing me from making the right strategic decision. Is there a web "remedy?"
Recommended medications
Ivan: Sounds like you have a mild case of "blurred business vision." Most companies now resort to various forms of marketing research projects to treat or prevent this condition. There are many different research methods that can help you improve your vision. We'll focus today on one particularly powerful tool: online surveys.
Cyri: Online surveys can save you money. A business associate told me he used to pay tens of thousands of dollars for various marketing or HR research projects, until he realized he can do a lot of the research by using various free or low-cost web tools. I use online surveys almost daily to collect data from students and for business interventions. My three favorites are Quia (www.quia.com/web), Google Forms (www.google.com/google-d-s/forms/) and a powerful WordPress plug-in, Gravity Forms (www.gravityforms.com).
Ivan: Online surveys are an important part of my medicine cabinet, too. They're especially good for managing marketing and human resources. In fact, SurveyMonkey.com, one of the leading online providers of survey tools, offers many ready-to-use questionnaire templates, including 360-degree Employee Evaluation, Customer Feedback, Product Research and Media Usage.
Cyri: To help us get some direction on our Business in Vancouver BizPharmacy column, we have just created a feedback survey. To show differences among different survey tools, we have put the same questionnaire on four platforms (bizpharmacy.com/survey/).
Creating a questionnaire is simple. You can use any of the existing survey templates or start from scratch by creating your own questions. You don't need a training course; the tools have great user interfaces so you can learn as you go. With most tools, you can export your collected survey data to a CSV file that you can open in Excel, which is familiar territory for many businesspeople.
Future management of condition
Ivan: Through SurveyMonkey.com you can decide to collect data via web link, email, Twitter, Facebook or by embedding it on your site or blog. You can send the surveys to your own database or decide to have SurveyMonkey send your survey to your target audience ($3 per completed questionnaire).
Generic and alternative medicine
Cyri: The generic name is "survey" or "online survey" or even just "form." Some are designed specifically for surveys; others are more generic forms that can be used to collect data in any context.
Cost:
Ivan: The basic plan offered by SurveyMonkey.com is free, and it includes questionnaires consisting of up to 10 questions and a sample size of maximum 100 respondents. For business use, you will probably need the Select ($19 per month), Gold ($29 per month) or Platinum ($69 per month) plans. Select gives you an unlimited number of questions and responses, plus important features of data download, filtering and cross tabulation.
Cyri: I know the paid-tools have their place, but I find for many survey tasks, the free tools like Google Forms work just fine. I also don't like that some paid online survey tools charge by how many respondents you have. I want free medication for the masses. Nevertheless, sometimes it's worth paying a bit more. Gravity Forms is $39 for individual use and $99 for business use, and it allows you to create an unlimited number of forms. Quia is US$49 per year.
Precautions/warnings
Ivan: Online surveys can be used as an exploratory type of research. We use them whenever we need to shed more light on an issue, get a better understanding of a problem, generate new creative ideas or decide on direction for future research. However, if you want to make an online survey more conclusive and sharpen your business vision, ensure that your sample is representative, random and large enough to provide acceptable confidence interval or margin of error.
One way to determine your needed sample size is by using survey sample calculator tools like the one offered by Survey System (www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm). That way you can draw conclusions about the entire population or your target group, not just the respondents you surveyed. •
