Whether planning a new customer survey in 2012 or preparing to re-field a past study, here are five tips to improve the customer feedback programme in your organisation. 1. Are you measuring what’s important? Does your survey generate actionable data, or is it a scorecard that simply allows you to pat yourself on the back when the results are published? If your survey wasn't reviewed … [Read more...]
How much does an employee survey cost?
January 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I was bowled over last week when John told me how much a potential client reported a competitor was quoting to conduct their employee survey. It was a lot! Occasionally, one of our potential clients has a similar reaction to Surveylab's quote (which usually falls between £1,000 and £3,000) - they think "but there are a plethora of services where I can do it myself for £50!" Comparing … [Read more...]
How to analyse your employee survey’s results
January 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment
It turns out that this is my eleventh post on the subject of how to conduct an employee survey. Yet, the analysis (and reporting) is the most important part of the survey process! This stage is central to the success of your survey, and future employee surveys... Set Expectations for Delivering Feedback Reviewing results is a relatively straight forward task, but a comprehensive analysis can … [Read more...]
How do you link employee engagement to customer satisfaction?
December 12, 2011 By 8 Comments
This was a question asked at the Stop Doing Dumb Things conference at the end of November as part of a discussion about measuring engagement - albeit asked more generally as how can we prove engagement makes a difference? Lots of comments, views, ideas and more questions ensued, exploring the customer engagement in particular. Yet, the employee engagement side has been bugging me ever since so … [Read more...]
Your survey has launched – what next?
December 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Once the invitations to your employees (or customers) have been sent, don't just leave your survey to run its course. I always get a sense of achievement every time we launch a survey for a client. Yes, it is a major milestone in the project, but now we also start to see something meaningful come out of all our and our client's hard work... At Surveylab, we monitor the first few responses … [Read more...]
Doing dumb things – revisiting the UK Customer Care Survey
November 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment
In the build-up to the Stop doing dumb things... to our customers and our people unConference, we have shared the summary findings of the UK Customer Care Survey that we conducted in 2008. Each year between 2004 and 2008 we pretty much saw the same results - consistently good customer service is hard to find! If you're looking for the PDF summary it can be downloaded here (or click on the … [Read more...]
A checklist for testing your survey before you launch
November 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Your survey is "final", it's been converted into its online form and looks great, but before you send out emails (or letters) to all staff asking for their time, you need to run through some final checks. Complete the survey yourself, answering each question for real. Read everything on the screen. You need to carefully check detail - do questions make sense? Find typo's, are instructions … [Read more...]
Using verbatim comments in an employee survey
October 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
'Verbatim' questions that ask for comments or description can be very powerful devices in an employee survey. They bring supporting evidence to results or a reasoning behind a score, and they offer an opportunity to identify any issues that were not covered by the questionnaire. Keep in mind that analysing the comments received - even one hundred comments - can be time consuming, so ask … [Read more...]
Survey scales – can I use a 3/5/7/10 point scale?
September 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The answer is yes This question is a little like arguing "Which is best: Microsoft or Apple (or Google, or Linux)?" - people fervently defend their scales, and not only about how big the range is, but should there be a midpoint (so now we're arguing about 4 point scales not 5) or should the scale display numbers or descriptive labels (a.k.a. Likert scale). My advice to anyone pondering … [Read more...]
Choosing questions to ask in an employee survey
September 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The content of an employee survey will vary according to the survey's purpose (or objectives). For example, an employee engagement survey has a very different focus to a questionnaire evaluating the impact of a merger or change in structure in the business. It is possible to conduct an employee survey asking only a handful of questions - Gallup has designed a survey to measure employee … [Read more...]
Offering expert advice for designing and implementing online survey best practice. We share our experiences working in the fields of customer satisfaction and employee engagement research.