Resources
Various resources on the web that you may find useful.
Whitepapers
Evaluating Contact Centre Performance - A Guide to Online Customer Loyalty & Satisfaction Tracking Surveys: what's involved in a good, regular customer satisfaction research programme. (January 2008)
Five easy steps to improve your next customer survey - it is easy to concentrate on getting the perfect questionnaire and assume your list of customer emails will simply deliver. This brief guide gives five points to consider when emailing your next customer survey.
Updated September 2007 with 2 new sections - The Five Fatal Flaws of Online Survey Design. This whitepaper covers the key points to consider when putting together an online survey (be it for a workplace survey, customer satisfaction feedback or market research).
How to Amplify the Voice of the Customer: Developing Your Own Online Consumer Panel to Generate Proactive Customer Feedback
The checklist for planning and implementing a consumer survey panel from our whitepaper is reproduced here for quick reference.
The slides and supporting documentation from the WACRA 2007 survey presentation in Bahrain (22/23 October, 2007) are available to download here.
Customer satisfaction & loyalty research
UK Customer Care Survey Summary 2007
In June 2007, as part of the Customer Care Alliance, Surveylab fielded the third
UK Customer Care Study, updating the studies conducted in 2004 and 2005.
This survey examined the experiences of customer care levels and the effect on customer loyalty from almost 8,000 respondents. Findings from the past studies are published at europe.customercarealliance.org
Surveylab at work
In 2005, Surveylab provided survey support to the Moore Adamson Craig Partnership for a study into patients' complaints at a NHS hospital in London. The article on their web site is an insight into how powerful good survey data is.
Conducting employee surveys
Harvard Business Review publish Getting the Truth into Workplace Surveys ($6 to download) - an excellent account of how to design better surveys (many of the points also apply to other surveys).
Email surveys
If your intent is to use email to ask your customers (or anyone else) to take part in your survey, check out Email Marketing Reports and their blog. While conducting research through an online survey might not be deemed "marketing" in your organisation, sending emails does need some thought when composing copy, who to send it from, subject, how to handle remove requests...
The Information Commissioner's Office published 'Good Practice' notes for email marketing (2 pages - click on 'Email Marketing Link') - http://www.ico.gov.uk/eventual.aspx?id=7485
Survey Design
Jakob Nielsen, web usability expert and best selling author, states what we all know and tells us to keep surveys short: recommended reading for novices and to remind old hands.