As a market research professional and long-time survey guy, I have come across many clients who could be classified as unwieldy. Although I have nothing against them personally, their thoughts about survey development and the kind of information needed are enough to make one flinch.
A few unmistakable signs of an unwieldy client:
- They believe you should be able to ask an unlimited number of questions, as if all respondents have an unlimited amount of time and desire to perform brand awareness exercises.
- There is an insatiable desire follow every fixed question with an open-end.
- Their approach to analyzing survey data is one of ‘everything by everything to find anything’.
To answer the first point, we have to turn the tables back to the decision maker and ask them how likely they would be willing to dedicate 15 to 45 minutes of their time to complete a survey? If you are surveying highly engaged fans, you might achieve a decent completion rate. However, most customers, prospects, constituents and donors have a limited amount of time to complete countless Likert scales.
To the second point, even though tools such as Cvent offer text analytics, there is little need to convert your survey into a focus group. Certainly, follow-up questions to those who give you a poor Net Promoter Score are a best practice, but seldom is there a need to go beyond a limited number of open-ended questions. These should be strategically selected and placed where they will not impede overall completion.
Lastly, there is little need to go on an analysis fishing expedition. If your survey is focused and you have hypotheses established, then you can limit your analysis to answering those key questions.
In short, before you launch a survey project take the time to engage your client with a consultative approach. As the survey author, you will need to guide the client toward a compromise, one that balances their information needs with respect for the respondent’s time and opinions. Deploying surveys without agreed upon goals for analysis, cost and timeframe will create large headaches. Alternatively, if these three points describe you, the Cvent Professional Services group would be happy to help give you guidence in questionnaire writing, survey analysis or report creation.