survey academy

We are starting series of articles created for students that are looking for online survey and questionnaire tool for their dissertations.

It is said, that you can’t manage if you can’t measure effects of your actions. Organizations all over the world are looking for the ideal question / measure, that will allow to gauge and predict customer loyalty. The result is a specific “arms race” that leads to a new question. Which metric and question is the best one? To find an answer we compared three different frameworks – CSAT, NPS, CES.

Do you know what your clients and users talk about your company, products, or services? What do they like and what annoys them? Voice of the Customer can help you find answers to these questions.

Semantic scale, also known as semantic differential or Osgood scale (from the name of its creator – American psychologist Charles E. Osgood, 1916-1991) is commonly used for the evaluation of attitudes, products, or services.

5 Why (5W) is an iterative question-asking technique used to explore cause-effect relationship underlying a particular problem. Technique was originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda and used in Toyota Motor Corporation during the evolution of manufacturing methodologies. It gained big popularity and is used by such methodologies like Kaizen, Lean, Six Sigma.

360 feedback traditionally used for potential evaluation of managers gains more interest as a tool for employee evaluation, training needs evaluation and feedback collection where it is important to look at a given problem from different perspectives, eg. company, customer, manager, employee, partner (distributor, vendor, …).

Let’s get straight to the point: why should you conduct survey research and what is the objective to create one? Right now half of my readers will leave the blog and they will be right. I would do the same. So I will change my question: in what business situations should you conduct survey research? Does it sound better? Let’s call these situations research moments.

Are you planning market research? You should start your work with a research brief. Research brief describes the objective and outcomes of the research. The better brief you create the more accurate and better quality survey results you will get.

Measures of central tendency (averages) – a single value that attempts to describe a set of data by identifying “the central position” within that set of data. Central position can be defined in many ways therefore we have many averages.

Standard deviation (represented by the symbol σ) shows how much variation or "dispersion" exists from the average (mean, or expected value).

Are you wondering what scale you should use for your online survey? Below you will find a few examples of different scales that may be used in your surveys.

Likert scale was introduced to survey research in 1930. Scale name comes from Rensis Likert (1903 – 1981), an American psychologist, educator, and sociologist. It is a bipolar scale with interval-levels that measure respondent attitudes and opinions.