Not for nothing, but I’ve just developed a new web site completely unrelated to MarketResearchTech for my dentist, who wanted to get onto the web. It takes a different approach than most dental related web sites and I’d certainly welcome your feedback before it goes live. The site can be reached at the following link:
nQual Rich Focus is a new, hosted software solution for online focus groups in real time. It was recently reviewed by Tim Macer on his web site and received fairly positive feedback. From my perspective as a very likely potential user (based on Tim’s review!) nQual Rich Focus sounds like a very easy to use system that seems interesting for respondents (more interesting, interactive and engaging than a simple chat window you see with some other systems) and easy to use controls for the moderator.
Highlights of nQual Rich Focus (according to Tim’s review) include the fact that it is extremely easy to use; it’s easy to present a wide variety of stimulus material; it offers a variety of innovative research techniques and it provides a transcript immediately following the session. Negatives of package include the fact that all participants must use Window-based systems (Internet Explorer, to be specific); it is not yet completely self-service and it only supports real-time groups.
nQual is a London-based company — which implies London-based servers, which may or may not mean latency in the connection (I’m not sure why there would be, but it’s worth thinking about ). The cost of a single group is around $900 although volume discounts are available.
My responsibilities at work have kept me pretty busy for the last few months…so I have not been as diligent as I’d like to be with this web site. Hopefully I can rectify that going forward.
My wife Elizabeth, an Orlando therapist, recently launched a a web site at Orlando-Therapist.com. While it really doesn’t relate to the topic of this web site, if you have any comments about her site I’m glad to hear them!
Martin Day, a Director of SurveyGalaxy, wrote an interesting article entitled "20 Top Tips to Writing Effective Surveys." The article is simply laid out, easy to read, and offers some pretty simple straightforward tips for writing online surveys (or offline surveys for that matter). My favorite tip (of the 20) is "Ensure that the questionnaire flows: whenasking questions group the questions into clear categories as this makes the task of completing the survey easier for the participants."
Sometimes it seems that many of the folks writing surveys — even the professionals — don’t seem to get it that the people taking the survey are for the most part volunteers (unless you’re paying everyone who takes your survey and not doing some kind of a drawing, almost all of your respondents are effectively volunteers) and if you don’t make the experience interesting and perhaps even fun then it is unlikely that anyone is going to go to the trouble of finishing the survey.
Not every survey can be fun. Some surveys are on boring topics. Some surveys use complex methodologies that make it difficult to create any kind of positive user experience. But it seems to me that it is important for us to at least try. If we’re going to ask our volunteers to give us their time and their opinions, it seems that the least we can do is try to make the experience at least somewhat entertaining and interesting.
To that end, in addition to Martin’s article below, I also present you with a link to a page on SurveyGalaxy which offers a list of the most highly rated (i.e., most interesting) surveys available on SurveyGalaxy as rated by respondents. Note that these aren’t always the prettiest survey in the world or the most interactive — but something about them has made respondents give them high ratings.
Is it enough to survey 100 people or are you only going to get useful results if you survey 1,000 people? The answer, unfortunately, really depends on the questions you are asking, the likely results, and your preferred "margin of error" (the +/- 3% or +/- 4% you see posted with most survey results). You basically need this information so you can reliably know whether that 4% difference between the two bars on your graph mean anything or not.
Personally, when I’m conducting an online survey I tend to prefer a sample of 1,000. In an overall sense it is usually overkill, but it usually allows me to segment the results in a number of different ways — I can break the results down by age group, gender, income, etc — something I couldn’t necessarily do if I started from a much smaller sample. I suppose it is the luxury of having access to a large respondent base — I can afford to oversample. Believe me, if I were paying $10 a response (like what I sometimes have to do when I rent a panel of people in another country) I am much more conservative in my sample sizes and pay really close attention to my margin of error and the needs of the study.
There are some web sites out there that make margin of error more understandable. The Red River College Marketing Research blog recently pointed to an article at www.isixsigma.com entitled "Margins of Error Made Easy!" which I found to be worth reading.
There are also several sample size calculators out there (you can find them by typing "sample size calculator" into Google). One that appears especially handy is at dssResearch.com. Grapentime.com offers not just a sample size calculator, but also a sample size calculator for attribute ratings (in other words, it tells you the minimum sample sizes you need for different type of metric mesasurement scales).
Margins of Error Made Easy at Isixsigma.com
Sample size calculator at dssResearch.com
Sample Size Calculator for Attribute Ratings at Grapentine.com
SurveyGold from Golden Hills Software is an easy to use Internet-based survey software system that has been around for some time and has to some degree mastered the art of making online research a simple, don’t-have-to-think-to-hard-about-it process. Although the software is limited to a basic set of question types, it does allow for some basic skipping based on responses and if you’re looking for a program that will get you the results quickly with very little training, this package may be worth exploring.
I’m not going to go into an entire review of the software package here at this moment (although I did just download it — Golden Hills offers a free 30-day trial), what I did want to say is that version 8 of the software was just released a few weeks ago and it offers a variety of features such as:
Several bugs from the previous version of the software have also been fixed.
Although because of the nature of this blog it is somewhat hard to say whether anyone noticed, but I haven’t updated the site much in he last few weeks. Just about one month ago I started a new position in charge of Universal Orlando’s Consumer Insights program — and as a result I’ve been focused on getting things lined up for 2007. Now that things have "settled down" a bit, I hope to get back to posting regularly.
Just for the record, I should say that all of the opinions expressed on this blog are 100% my own and do not in any way reflect the views of Universal Orlando or any of the vendors I work with.
I was poking around in Google today and came upon an interesting article in the October, 2000 issue of hte CustomerSat.com monthly newsletter (appropriately entitled "CustomerSat.com Connections" about the relevance of using top box ratings, bottom box ratings and mean scores.
The article argues that it is impossible to get a true understanding of your customer’s satisfaction by simply using one of the three metrics, and that the best way to really understand what is going on is to use some combination of at least two, one of which will be the mean score.
In terms of determining whether it makes more sense to look at the top box or the bottom box, it suggests examining how changes in either box correlate with the overall outcome.
What is most fascinating and useful about the article is actually its description of "Non-Linear Effect Analysis" in which it describes how customer loyalty tends to rise not linearly, but exponentially. In other words, customers who give a "9" out of 10 instead of an "8" out of 10 are exponentially more loyal.
Read the full article at CustomerSat.com
See all of the online resources offered by CustomerSat.com
About a year ago Tim Macer gave a presentation at the SPSS Directions Conference entitled “Weaving, not drowning: An update on take-up and best practices in Mixed- and Multi- mode research.” Long, perhaps even academic sounding title, but actually extremely relevant to folks trying to figure out how to conduct and combine multiple modes of research (phone, web, paper, etc). In his presentation, he agenda covered the following questions:
One really neat concept I hadn’t thought much about was the idea of having a respondent start the survey using one mode (perhaps paper or the phone) and then have them finish the survey in another mode (usually the web). This has been found to help out when it is hard to retain respondents in one mode using a particular data collection method (perhaps they don’t want to hang out in your store for 20 minutes, or maybe they just want to get off the phone).
Multi-mode data collection will become especially useful as we adopt more mobile survey solutions — perhaps have the user start with a WAP based survey and finish up with a web based survey when they get home.
eDigitalResearch today released a press release highlighting their relationship with U.K. based department store John Lewis, who is using their system to collect and report on real-time customer satisfaction related issues.
eDigitalResearch’s Satisfaction Suite collects customer purchase information from the John Lewis database and emails surveys out to customers, tying in all the purchase information with customer responses. Monthly reports are produced which can be cross-tabbed and filtered in terms of product groups or particular divisions.
John Lewis’s particular satisfaction solution uses elements of both eDigitalResearch’s eMystery Shopper program and their eCustomerOpinion program. eMysteryShopper specializes in the in-depth and structured studfy of website usablity, functionality, and customer service using a eDigitalResearch’s panel. eCustomerOpinions also provides feedback, but from directly from randomly selected web site visitors.
View the press release at PRWeb.
Learn more about John Lewis.
Learn more about eMystery Shopper.
Learn more about eCustomer Opinions.
Stefania Viscusi of TMCnet recently posted an article that offers ten top considerations for selecting call center software for your company. Although not completely on topic, it does have some research ramifications (one would hope that your call center is in some way integrated into the collection of customer satisfaction data, which is definitely marketing research related).
Read the full article at TMCnet.
Props to Jim Berkowitz for finding this article first!
David Tebbut of IWRBlog (Information World Review) recently posted some interesting observations about Confirmit’s dashboard application, in which an online survey system is used to track customer attitudes in real time and report the results in an automatically updated "dashboard" application. The idea is to be able to provide useful research results instantly — as soon as they are relevant — instead of having to wait hours, weeks or days for results.
In my own experience, the greatest challenge to this type of a dashboard — which in some ways speaks to the potential to integrate customer satisfaction directly into a balanced scorecard type system in a meaningful way — is the ability to collect enough data on a regular basis to cause the "dials" on the dashboard to reflect something meaningful. 10 or 15 responses a day are simply not enough for a system that is meant to be continuously updated.
On the other hand, there are applications where such a system might be somewhat useful and relatively easy to "keep fed." For example, if on the way out of the store there was a single question that customers could answer — either as they walked out the door or as they checked out — and if there were enough registers in the store — it might be possible to collect enough data to make the dashboard meaningful. Or maybe if there were a way to ask the question on customer cell phones as they walk out of the store (perhaps a little less realistic).
Recent quote from Rebeca M. Johnson, CMO of the Brinker Corporation restaurant chain:
Researcher is good at technical tools…quantitative and qualitative. Insights provider uses those tools to provide actionable recommendations to the company. They manage with research but lead with insight. It’s a difficult person to find, so we’re nurturing them on our own.
In a recent article posted on TMCNet entitled "Effective Customer Service Requires not Just Knowledge, But Insight," Bruce Pollock identifies some of the criteria he uses when selecting a survey took specifically for use by customer service representatives and call center agents. He suggests that the tool you select should be "agent anonymous" (the customer service agents shouldn’t be able to influence the results); interactive (survey should be easy); time-efficient (the survey should be fast); it should offer both qualitative and quantitative results (scores are good, but comments can provide the most insight); and it should provide real-time access to results.
Read the full article at TMCNet.
Article found at CustomersAreAlways.
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