Online surveys are one of the most ubiquitous tools used to gain insights and opinions from current and potential customers. For researchers, they are relatively inexpensive to launch, extremely efficient, easy to scale, and are not tied to particular geographies or time zones. For respondents, the passive nature of online surveys mean that they can be completed at the most opportune and convenient times of day — and because many companies offer honoraria for participation, surveys can allow people to gain benefit from their downtime. For entrepreneurs, they are keys to effective A/B testing, and are especially useful for people investigating technology and software markets.
However, the ease of designing and launching online surveys leads many people to conclude that surveys require no skill to design or execute, and that if you just ask the same questions everyone else is, but ensure that your sample size is large enough, you don’t really need to do much else. As a consequence, most surveys are done poorly.
This should be obvious to participants and researchers alike. As a participant, how often have you begun a survey only to find yourself at a proverbial fork in the road where none of the choices express your true opinion? Or how often have you finished a survey with such poorly thought out questions that it felt like a complete waste of your time? As someone using the information from surveys, how often have you received results that didn’t make any sense or that were useless because they didn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know?
The fact is the risks of executing a poor survey can be far worse than this. Phrasing a question wrong, asking questions in the wrong order, or not stratifying or segmenting the sample appropriately can give you data that are not only useless for your strategic initiatives, but can actually lead you to make the wrong decisions.
At Justkul Inc. we take a consulting approach towards survey design and execution, and take the extra effort to make online surveys not only user-friendly, but also strategically actionable and informative. We adopt a hypothesis-driven approach where the goal is not only to have respondents rate their satisfaction or tell you their opinions, but to actually get behind their responses and see what is motivating your audience.
When clients tell us they are happy with our products, it’s because we provide them with exactly the responses they need to make important business decisions. When survey participants tell us that they loved taking our surveys (and they often do!), it is rarely because of the bells or whistles of the survey instrument or the size of the incentive we offer, but rather it’s because we know how to design surveys that are informative to participants and don’t waste their time. A good survey should lead both to better insight for you, and happier customers.
Besides our own contacts, we work with a variety of 3rd party partners for survey targeting and know how to reach any audience whether they be:
- Hotel managers in Singapore,
- Teenagers who have been authorized by their parents to participate,
- Millionaires in Broward county Florida,
- Mid-level managers in Chicago,
- or 20 to 30 year old purchasers of nearly anything.
- Approaches for limiting gamers and unreliable responses,
- Language translation,
- A variety of survey instruments for different audiences. From easy to use forms for fast execution, to slower interfaces that can provide more reliable and thoughtful responses from certain audiences,
- The ability to perform follow-up surveys and telephone interviews to investigate unusual responses,
- The ability to gain data from smart phones at the moment of purchase,
- Customized outputs so they fit seamlessly into your workflow,
- The ability to use mixed-modal approaches coordinating technology with in-the-field presences to reach audiences who are less technically savvy,
- Data coding with summary and descriptive statistics,
- Analysis, including statistical analysis,
- Detailed reports suitable for publication from our in-house design staff,
- Online surveys optimized for entrepreneurs and designers,
- Strategic online surveys for disruptive innovation and markets with significant uncertainty.