Could I have a few moments of your time?

The other evening, I got a call asking me to participate in a survey.  As I am a marketer and a communicator, I know the value survey feedback can provide and I am usually an easy mark when it comes to surveys.  I agreed after being told that the survey would only take "a few minutes."  15 minutes into the survey, with no signs of things slowing down, I was reminded of how a recent AP article reported that people are getting tired of being asked for feedback.  The article indicated that people in general are feeling fatigue when it comes to surveys.

Undoubtedly it is a good thing to ask your customers and other stakeholders for their input.  Without question, a company should consider customer feedback when evaluating new or changing product features.  And it is so easy these days!  Google the phrase "free survey tools" and you will get pages of options that let you send out quick little electronic surveys that look good and automatically tabulate the results for you.  You can generate charts and graphs of the results in seconds.  It is a beautiful thing!

Nevertheless, cheap and easy survey capabilities may actually be doing marketers a disservice.  When it costs thousands of dollars to even think about doing a survey, those hosting a survey have to carefully consider the questions they are asking and the value of the answers that they will get back.  Questions that yield answers that are not actionable are (usually) eliminated.  Redundant questions are culled.  Heck, some companies even pre-test their surveys!  Companies who pay to have their surveys done professionally have a financial incentive to make sure their surveys were tight and targeted and purposeful.

With the preponderance of cheap and easy to implement survey tools (Survey Monkey I'm talking about you!) it has been too easy to just dash off a quick survey without giving a lot of thought as to what the question is really asking, or what the results of the question will provide as far as usable and actionable data.  This means not only do we get approached to take more surveys on the computer or the phone, but the surveys themselves are more and more frequently confusing, inane, highly biased or just plain no fun to take!

So, if you are a marketer who is surveying your audience, my advice is to act as if you are paying thousands of dollars to have each question asked.  If you aren't going to get at least thousands of dollars of value from the answers, don't ask the question.

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Newspaper survey

I participated in a phone survey last night about local newspapers. It was conducted by a college student, which is one of the reasons I agreed to take the time. They survey was obviously conducted for the local daily paper in my community. While I was pleased they were gathering customer feedback and looking for ways to improve, I was struck by how the survey revealed the shortcomings of the thinking that went into designing it.

I see two mistakes that the designers of this survey made. First, while they were obviously focusing on their online presence, they seemed to be treating their website mostly as a newspaper that they don't need to print. The survey only focused on newspaper features and content that is currently in the printed version and how those features and content would translate to an electronic version. There were no questions about the value of archives, interactive stories, links to other news sources, or other features that would be unique to an Internet-based newspaper.

The second, and in my mind greater, mistake is that I was not given any opportunity to provide additional thoughts and input. What a shame to have me thinking about and focusing on their newspaper for 20 minutes (candidly more time than it takes me to read the paper in the morning) and not gather my thoughts and comments. What a shame to not to gather the unique insights I have as a reader or non-reader. What a shame to spend all that time (and money) to only go 80% of the way. All it takes is a simple question: "Do you have any other comments or thoughts?" Better yet, ask open-ended questions within the survey. The information you get is not quantifiable and can't be converted to a pretty graph, but can shed amazing insights.

Anything else?