Surveys Unlock Data-Driven Decisions
Research is a critical component of any successful business or nonprofit organization. To make informed decisions, understand your audience, and strategically grow, you need data that is reliable and actionable. Surveys are a powerful tool for gathering insights at scale.
Table of Contents
What Are Surveys?
The Benefits of Surveys
5 Different Survey Mediums
Surveys Partner Well with Interviews and Focus Groups
Real-World Example
Conclusion
What Are Surveys?
Surveys are a quantitative research tool used to collect data from a large group of people in a structured way. They consist of questions designed to gather specific information. Surveys include closed-ended questions (like multiple choice) and open-ended questions that allow respondents to provide more detail.
Surveys are a great way to gather information from a broad audience. They allow you to identify patterns, measure satisfaction, and make data-driven decisions based on real feedback.
The Benefits of Surveys
Surveys offer many benefits for organizations looking to grow, improve, and better understand their audience. Here are some key advantages:
1. Collect Data at Scale
One of the biggest benefits of surveys is their ability to collect data from a large number of people. Whether surveying hundreds or thousands, surveys gather broad insights that reflect the experiences and opinions of your entire audience. This is particularly valuable for understanding trends, measuring satisfaction, and identifying common issues or areas for improvement.
2. Efficient and Cost-Effective
Surveys are an efficient and cost-effective way to collect data. It's easy to distribute surveys quickly to a wide audience and collect responses in real time. This makes surveys ideal for gathering information when you need to make quick decisions or when you want to track changes over time.
3. Reliable and Actionable Data
Proper survey design is both a science and an art. Experienced researchers know how to craft survey questions that get you reliable and actionable data. By carefully designing questions, a research and evaluation firm ensures the data collected is accurate and meaningful. This provides you with the insights you need to make informed decisions.
Using well-crafted closed-ended questions helps you measure responses in a way that’s easy to analyze. Including open-ended questions allows respondents to elaborate on their thoughts. This combination provides the numbers you need for analysis. It also offers insights that add context and depth to your understanding.
4. Versatile and Customizable
Surveys are incredibly versatile and can be customized to fit your unique needs. You may be looking to gather customer feedback, assess employee engagement, or evaluate the impact of a specific program.
A researcher tailors surveys to your specific research objectives. You can use different types of questions, adjust the format, and target different segments of your audience. This ensures you’re collecting the information that’s most relevant to your goals.
5. Data You Can Track Over Time
Surveys allow you to collect data over time. This makes it easy to track trends, monitor progress, and measure the impact of changes. This is valuable when seeking to understand how customer satisfaction evolves, how well a program is meeting its goals, or how employees feel about new initiatives.
By regularly conducting surveys, you can keep your finger on the pulse of your organization and make adjustments as needed.
Five Different Survey Mediums
A research and evaluation firm, like Better Way Consulting, offers a variety of survey tools to meet your specific needs:
Email: Ideal for reaching a large audience quickly and cost-effectively, allowing participants to respond at their convenience.
Text Message: Perfect for engaging participants who are always on the go. This provides a quick and easy way to gather immediate feedback.
Paper: Useful for in-person events or when reaching audiences that may not have reliable internet access.
QR Code: Great for events, posters, or printed materials, allowing participants to easily access the survey using their smartphone.
In-Person: Effective when you need to gather detailed information or want a higher response rate. Participants are more likely to engage in a face-to-face setting.
Whether you are collecting customer feedback, employee insights, or market research, we select the best survey platform. This choice helps us achieve high quality and response rates for your data.
Surveys Partner Well with Interviews and Focus Groups
Surveys are a powerful tool on their own; however, they're often used in partnership with other research tools.
Surveys + Interviews: While surveys provide a broad overview of your audience's thoughts, interviews allow you to dive deeper into specific responses. Interviews help uncover the reasoning behind survey results, offering insights into participants' thoughts, feelings, and motivations. By conducting interviews after a survey, you can press into interesting trends or anomalies.
Surveys + Focus Groups: Surveys can show you what your audience is thinking, but focus groups can help explain why. By discussing survey results with a group, you can explore different viewpoints, learn about shared experiences, and identify any group norms that may affect responses. Focus groups are useful during the design phase of a survey and help identify important topics and refine questions.
When you put surveys, interviews, and focus groups together, you create a mixed-methods approach. This captures both the breadth and depth of your audience's thoughts, behaviors, and motivations. This ensures a comprehensive understanding, supporting data-driven decision-making that leads to meaningful and informed actions.
Real-World Example: Declining Repeat Customers
These data collection methods worked together to help a mid-sized business in the service industry. Their challenge? They had been experiencing a decline in repeat customers — and weren’t sure why. They want to understand their customers better and identifying ways to improve retention.
Researchers recommended starting with a customer satisfaction survey. They designed a survey that included closed-ended questions to measure overall satisfaction, likelihood to return, etc. It also included open-ended questions to allow customers to elaborate on their experiences. They distributed the survey to current and former customers through email and a QR code on their receipts.
The survey showed that customers were mostly happy with the service quality. But long wait times and poor communication when scheduling frustrated many. To better understand these pain points, researchers conducted a series of follow-up interviews with dissatisfied customers.
Interviews revealed the long wait times were due to a lack of clear communication about service availability. Customers felt that they weren’t being kept in the loop. The business made several changes. It improved its communication process, implemented a new scheduling system, and provided clearer expectations about wait times.
As a result, customer satisfaction improved significantly, and the business saw a noticeable increase in repeat customers. The combination of survey data and interviews provided an actionable roadmap to improvements that mattered most to their customers.
Conclusion
To Better Way Consulting, surveys are a critical tool for helping organizations make informed decisions and understand their audience. Surveys provide the scale, efficiency, and reliability needed to gather data from a large group of people. They are also flexible and customizable to meet your specific needs.
When paired with other research methods, surveys give you a comprehensive view of your audience. If you want to improve customer satisfaction, check employee engagement, or evaluate a program's success, surveys are very useful.
Ready to see how surveys can benefit your organization? Let’s work together to find a better way to gather the insights that matter most.
