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

BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

006 - Preparing the Survey - Survey Monkey - Tools and Technology

[00:00:00] [00:00:00] Mike: Hello and welcome to the BottomUp podcast on your cohost, Mike Parsons and I'm joined by Chad Owen into this journey into the wonderful tool of survey monkey.

[00:00:21] Chad: I don't know about you, Mike, but I'm really enjoying these short, punchy information-dense episodes here on the BottomUp podcasts. It's a nice way to share.

[00:00:29] all of [00:00:30] our learning

[00:00:31] Mike: It

[00:00:31] is. It's pragmatic. And I like this idea of punchy, so let's really throw some punches about how to think about preparing your survey for survey monkey. Now you're going to first think, Hey guys, on the last show, you gave me a bit of an introduction to surveys and quant research, and now before we open up the tool surveymonkey.com we're going to talk about a research plan, and you're like, [00:01:00] guys, this is a whole lot of planning and talking.

[00:01:02] Chad: Yeah. I just want to get in and create this survey.

[00:01:04] Mike: Right. Right, right. Exactly. But how important is it, Chad? Because if you don't think through a survey on survey monkey, if you don't think through your research, well number one, you're not going to get the most out of it, but it takes a fair bit of time to build a survey that works properly. So, you want to make sure that the plan, what you're hoping to learn from it is actually thought through.

[00:01:26] Otherwise it can be a long and somewhat expensive [00:01:30] process. Right.

[00:01:30] Chad: Oh yeah, you can go down roads you'd never meant to go through. Going back to this story about doing interviews and in surveys in China, I was so worried on that trip because I was literally flying around the world and you know, a week beforehand, I kind of had an oh, no moment where I realized that I hadn't quite solidified everything in my research plan because I knew that once I started, I couldn't really stop. So,

[00:01:55] imagine knowing that you're going to talk to 50 different people [00:02:00] conducting 50 different interviews in 50 surveys. You have to know exactly what you're going to do ahead of time because you can't change it midstream cause that's going to affect the data and information that you're collecting. So, I can't stress how important it is to have a research plan in place because it really just makes the data rock-solid in the end.

[00:02:18] Mike: It does, and it's a survival tool as well. What's really important is it points out a very distinct. Difference between quant and qual research, because Quan, you need to always keep the baseline the [00:02:30] same,

[00:02:31]

[00:02:31] so you can't change the questions in the survey midstream because then the data doesn't match because the first half of the respondents answered these questions.

[00:02:40] The second half of the respondents answered different or slightly different. So, therefore, it's harder to compare them. So, I think our big piece of advice for this show make a research plan frame how you're going to think about your research. And I think one of the most important parts of a research plan is what [00:03:00] questions need to be answered.

[00:03:01] How many of our customers are aged 18 to 24 is a very legitimate key question to be answered. What interests do our customers have? How much do they spend on fashion every month? Just as an example, do they live in urban or rural areas? Just get that clear because often your survey is not a kind of isolated one-off event.

[00:03:22] It's part of maybe an effort to build a product, to do a marketing campaign to improve customer experience. So, you should have a research plan [00:03:30] that you share and present to your colleagues and or clients. And Chad, how beneficial is it when we get our research plans together and we share them with each other and our clients.

[00:03:39] I mean, when you've been in that process, how has this been helpful for you when you are like owning the strategy for a huge new product.

[00:03:47] Chad: The clients demand it. So, at the outset, it can really just be a Google doc and you start with like, what do we want to learn? What are our goals in conducting this research? Then you should have some important [00:04:00] questions to be able to screen your respondents to be sure that you're collecting data from the right individuals.

[00:04:05] So that can be demographic or behavioral psychographic.

[00:04:08] Mike: Can we talk about screens just for a second, Chad? Sorry to just capture you in mid

[00:04:13] Chad: they're so important.

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[00:04:14] Mike: But seriously thinking through your screening questions is a chance to say, well, who is our target audience here and who's not? Because imagine if you did this big survey and you forgot to have a location screener, and you [00:04:30] had people may be from a different country, or maybe you're just on the East coast of the US and you've now got people from California answering the questions.

[00:04:38] You're really diluting the data.

[00:04:40] Chad: And spending a lot more money.

[00:04:42] Mike: Right. And so screening questions, so they're only talking to people that you want to talk is really important. But you were saying goals and screeners, and then what's next in a research plan?

[00:04:52] Chad: How the data's going to be collected. You know? Are you putting it into an Excel spreadsheet that everyone's looking at? Are you putting it into a really awesome tool [00:05:00] that we use called Dovetail? You know, a database and just being sure that you have a plan to keep and store the data and be able to share it with everyone that needs to have access to it.

[00:05:09] Mike: Socially, because you know, so often people are like oh, where's the stuff? And they're like, all the data's in this place. Well do, I have access? Ah, no, you need a login. Oh, I don't have a login. And you just lost 48 hours.

[00:05:23] So a research plan can be so practical like that. For example, if you're working with a virtual team, you're like, Oh, we're going to need to [00:05:30] give, you know, Joe and Jane access, because they're in a different market.

[00:05:34] And then, I think once you recognize that your quan survey is perhaps part of a larger series of efforts to get closer to your customer. We talked a lot about this in the previous episode. Why don't you share with us Chad like, how did you find it when you've been making research plans? What's the benefit of sort of mapping out the process and the context in which this survey's going to like happen in a broader program?

[00:06:00] [00:05:59] Chad: The best thing for me actually was because I had such a detailed research plan, I could recruit a partner to help with the research. So, imagine having to source your own survey and interview subjects in four different global locations. That can be pretty tough if that's not your daily work. But because I had the research plan, I could share that with a third party, and they helped recruit the right

[00:06:22] i...