How to design a customer survey - Survey Monkey - Tools and Technology

BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

007 - Designing the Survey - Survey Monkey - Tools and Technology

[00:00:30] Mike: [00:00:30] Hello and welcome to the BottomUp podcast. I'm your cohost Mike persons, and as always, I'm joined by Chad Owen. Are you ready to design your survey in Survey Monkey Chad Owen?

[00:00:51] Chad: [00:00:51] Oh you mean I can finally go to surveymonkey.com and play around?

[00:00:54] Mike: [00:00:54] Good point. So for all of our listeners there, follow Chad's very wise advice. You are [00:01:00] very welcome to just enjoy the show in its audio form. But if you'd like to get the most out of this show, jump into surveymonkey.com, create a free account because we're going to be poking around in there and sharing with you some best practices on how you might design your survey and design it well. Now, as a way of introduction, as everybody is scrambling around typing in surveymonkey.com, I have to say the reason this episode [00:01:30] is going to save you time and money is, like many things in life, once you get into it, you realize it's going to take you a lot more time to do it properly than you first thought.

[00:01:38] Have you had this experience, Chad Owen?

[00:01:40] Chad: [00:01:40] Yes. I always get something wrong. I either ask the wrong question, I leave an answer out, I send it to the wrong people. There's always something that goes wrong.

[00:01:50] Mike: [00:01:50] I had a time once where I forgot to make a number of questions compulsory so that in the survey, they were skippable [00:02:00] and I remember I couldn't work out. There was like, I don't know, two or 300 people had completed the survey, but I would have like, any three-quarters of people answered a question.

[00:02:10] I'm like, this is the weirdest thing. And I realized that I had left the mandatory like the question must be answered, radio button. I hadn't ticked it

[00:02:20]

[00:02:20] and I was like, oh, no.

[00:02:22] They probably spent three or 400 extra dollars on those useless answers.

[00:02:27] So this ladies and gentlemen is why getting [00:02:30] the design right matters. Because if you think it through and do it rigorously once, there's a huge benefit here, isn't there Chad?

[00:02:38] Chad: [00:02:38] Yeah. My mantra with surveys is K.I.S.S.: keep it simple, stupid. So if this is your first one, try a survey with just two questions, that's it. You can always send out another survey later, but if you're just trying it out for the first time, I would say, you know, pick either one of Survey Monkey's templates. Which you'll see have very few questions.

[00:03:00] [00:02:59] So, the NPS survey is just one question that's mandatory, and then there's a follow-up. If you want to type in your thoughts or leave a comment, and even if you're not going to use one of the Survey Monkey templates, I did advise you to look through them because they have seen millions of surveys designed and know what a good survey looks like.

[00:03:18] And so you can use those as inspiration.

[00:03:21] Mike: [00:03:21] And so if you follow this line of thinking that we're on, what we're really saying is, look, getting a survey, right takes time. [00:03:30] But there's a great feature inside of surveymonkey.com. If you just go to the create a new survey tab, what you'll see is you're going to be presented with a couple of really important options.

[00:03:42] One copy a past survey. Now this one works really well. If you've got like a corporate branding in your survey and you design a nice template, you can just copy that template that you've made for a previous one, or you can just copy a survey and it picks up the questions, the look and feel and makes a new survey. [00:04:00] Saved you heaps of time.

[00:04:01] So this is one way to move fast with surveymonkey.com copy a past survey. If you want to be a bit more structured about it, the second option you have is start from a template. So you can actually build custom templates. So you say, use our corporate branding, use this branding or, whatever look and feel is appropriate.

[00:04:18] Chad: [00:04:18] Here's all the demographic questions we ask every single person.

[00:04:21] Mike: [00:04:21] Yes, and it's right there, Chad, that once you've rigorously built a template, you should have like warning signals going off. If you [00:04:30] hit the start from scratch button in Survey Monkey, you should just be like, hang on, Mike and Chad said, touch this as a last resort.

[00:04:38] Chad: [00:04:38] Grab a coffee and be in it for the long haul.

[00:04:41] Mike: [00:04:41] Because it really, you have to rebuild everything to look and feel and the questions. Now I'm thinking to myself, okay, I followed Mike and Chad's advice. I opened up a survey. There's a couple of key things here when you're building a survey that I think we should touch on, and if you look down [00:05:00] the left hand side of Survey Monkey you're in a survey, you will see that you can click on the question builder and it gives you all these different choices.

[00:05:11] And I think it's important that we sort of call out what these are for. Invariably, I think you're going to find yourself going for multiple-choice as a starting point. Chad, wouldn't you say that's the survey classic, the good old multiple choice?

[00:05:24] Chad: [00:05:24] Yup. That and or the radio boxes where you can only choose one.

[00:05:29] Mike: [00:05:29] Yeah. Now [00:05:30] you can start to get a little bit more fancy. I think one of our favorites is the rating scale where you say to someone, one being terrible, 10 being great, can you please rate your customer experience for us? Now, what's interesting about that is that you get a little bit more nuanced than just, you know, click which option best describes your customer experience? Good. Bad, otherwise. You start to get more accurate statistical data, that can [00:06:00] be very helpful. Now, once you go beyond just asking questions, you can actually build into your survey stimulus. What we mean by stimulus is you could show someone a picture and say, tell us what you think.

[00:06:14] So you can actually embed not only images using the question builder, you can actually embed video, all sorts of content and so forth. And this is where you really started having like a rich quant survey where you're not only asking them about [00:06:30] themselves, but you're actually providing them with stimulus and starting to give feedback.

[00:06:34] Now, Chad, we've done a number of design thinking workshops where after the first day, we've actually put the workout to survey overnight so that when we come in on the second day, we already get like a global point of view. Do you want to maybe talk about what we've done and how we've done that? Because that's a great thing to design into your survey.

[00:06:53] Chad: [00:06:53] So essentially, we spent a whole day working in collaboration with customers to figure out what their pains and gains are and what they [00:07:00] want for a particular solution. And rather than just, you know, go home and sleep on it the first night, we actually have Survey Monkey do all this work for us. So at the end of the first day, we come up with an image and a headline to kind of represe...