Five Things We Learned About On-site Surveys

One of the great possibilities of using a survey app like Responster is that you easily collect feedback using on-site surveys, such as in a store or in an office. What’s even better is that the survey app runs 24 hours a day, 3o days a month, all year around. This means that you constantly can collect valuable customer or employee feedback, without having to do all of the work on your own.

Working with this type of data collection method has taught us quite a lot about what you should think about when creating on-site surveys. Here are our five tips on how to create a better on-site survey that we’d like to share with you!

1. Don’t have too many questions in your on-site survey. Placing an iPad running a survey app on location means that the respondents choose on their own whether or not they want to do the survey. We have seen that five to six questions are enough if you want the majority of the respondents to answer all of them.

2. Questions must be formulated so that the respondents feel that it is meaningful to answer them. This means that you have to put yourself in the shoes of the respondent when you formulate the questions. If you were the customer in a store, what would you like to say about your visit?

3. Use questions that are connected in some way. When you start analyzing the collected data it will be much easier to break it down into smaller segments if you can see a connection between the answers for each question. This enables you to find different customer segments like “The majority of the unsatisfied gym members weren’t satisfied with the coffee either”. This type of data segmentation gives you more opportunities to find areas of improvement within your business.

4. Show the respondents that you care about their feedback! In many cases, respondents of an on-site survey feel that they don’t know if their opinions are valued, or if their feedback even will be used as a tool for improvement. That is why you have to make sure that you show the respondents that their feedback is important to you. If you have a store with returning customers: make changes based on their feedback so that they can experience it!  Or if you collect employee feedback: respond to the collected data on the next meeting and show the employees that their opinions have been heard.

5. Iterate on your questions. You will rarely get the questions right from the very beginning. Don’t be afraid to reformulate existing questions or come up with completely new ones. Perhaps the majority of the respondents answer one questions with the same option? Then go ahead and add a follow-up question asking them why! More importantly, when you use the collected feedback to make changes to your business you have to follow up with new questions to measure how the employees or customers experience the changes.

Have you conducted on-site surveys on your own and agree with our tips? Or have you had other experiences? We’d love to hear your story about on-site surveys!