Checkbox Blog

Read the full case study here.

Genzyme is one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies, having grown from a small start-up in 1981 to a diversified enterprise with more than 12,000 employees across the globe serve patients in nearly 100 countries.  Genzyme develops, manufactures and markets a range of innovative health care products and services that make a major positive impact on the lives of patients around the world.

Genzyme’s Global Security team is responsible with conducting processes such as risk assessments, Monthly Drills and On the Job (OTJ) training as part of their routine duties. Over time, these duties had become increasingly manual and time intensive, leading the team to look for secure, efficient, and smart solutions to streamline their internal and external security processes.

Genzyme implemented Checkbox Survey Online to help streamline these manual processes. Checkbox’s scored surveys are used to conduct training assessments, security protocol drills, and anti-terrorism assessments. Checkbox Survey has also been rolled out to the travel department and is in the process of being rolled out globally to perform Genzyme’s Business Impact Analysis assessments.

Checkbox Survey has helped Genzyme streamline all of these processes, resulting in a large savings of time and resources. According to Jeff DiPrimio, Operations Manager of Global Risk at Genzyme, “We are getting a lot of positive feedback, the business managers love it. I do a lot of presentations on Checkbox within my group or other groups in order to get more leverage out of the product and make sure we add value for Genzyme.”

Genzyme hopes to expand its use of Checkbox Survey and build on its relationship with the Checkbox team in the near future.

To learn more about how Checkbox Survey helped Genzyme streamline its security and assessment processes, please read the full case study.

by Carolyn Craven

I just came across this site the other day, AskYourTargetMarket.com – it’s basically a one-stop shop for companies looking to do small-scale market research. You can set the parameters of your target demographic, create a simple survey, and get results from their panelists within a couple hours to a couple days. I know there are other sites out there like this, but I was really impressed by AskYourTargetMarket’s simplicity and fair prices. And I couldn’t help being charmed by their cutesy tag line – “Serious Market Research at silly prices.”

 And before you ask, no, I am in no way affiliated with or being compensated by this company. I just thought it was a cool business model and it got me thinking….

 As a company who deals with researchers, it’s interesting to see how the market is changing as technology becomes cheaper and data becomes more readily available. Are we at the end of the era when elite market research firms hold all the cards in market research? Are we losing anything by making technology and data more accessible? Are we dumbing down market research by making it affordable to almost anyone?

In answer to those questions, I’d say yes, sort of.  I do think that the affordability and availability of feedback and data collection tools has created a bit of a monster, to some extent. It’s somehow given businesses (even Fortune 500 companies) permission to be sloppy. I can’t tell you how many poorly written, horrible looking surveys I get from companies that I would have expected a lot more from. It’s like there’s this attitude of “This product was cheap so it’s not worth me putting in a lot of time to produce something of high quality.”

That being said, I do think we’re moving in the right direction with regards to the ‘opening up’ of data, overall. It’s pretty thrilling to think about the technology we have for data collection, the social platforms we have to help us collect that data, and the possibilities of what we can do with that information. Then there’s the integration options – you can get an API for almost anything these days. I’m really excited to be part of an industry that’s giving almost universal access to information that was previously coveted by an elite few.

That’s my two sense – I’d love to get the conversation going on this topic. Should market research be left to the experts? Are we sacrificing quality for quantity by conducting more frequent, less formal surveys? Where is the research industry headed and how is social media going to continue to play a part?

by Carolyn Craven

Let’s face it, no matter how many snazzy question types, pretty colors, and great images you use to brand and stylize your surveys, they can still come across as pretty flat and impersonal. Luckily, the availability and affordability of video equipment, software, and multi-media web sites have made adding video content to surveys incredibly easy. Video allows you to jump off the screen, inject some personality into your surveys, or share information with your participants that you just can’t get across in words or images.

Embedding YouTube videos directly into your Checkbox Surveys is super quick and easy. You can create a video for your intro or completion page to welcome your participants, explain the purpose of the survey, tell them more about your organization, or offer them a heart-felt thank you for taking your survey. You can also position embedded videos above or next to question items and ask participants questions related to the video such as “How do you rate this video?” or “What were your impressions of the featured product after watching the video/commercial?” Check out this survey for an example of what you can do with video and Checkbox Survey Software.

To learn how to embed YouTube videos into your Checkbox surveys, watch this training video or follow the steps below. And feel free to send us your favorite surveys with video – we’ve been known to give away free Checkbox accounts or add-ons for really great customer stories!

How to embed a YouTube video in your Checkbox survey:

1. Either upload your video to YouTube (watch YouTube’s video instructions) or find the YouTube video you want to use. Make sure you own the rights to all videos that you embed in your surveys.
2. Click the ‘Embed’ button under the video you want to embed.

   

3. Copy the html code that appears below the ‘Embed’ button by hitting ‘Ctrl C’ on your keyboard or using the ‘Copy’ function on the menu of your internet browser.
   
4. Add a new survey within Checkbox or choose the survey from the Survey Editor that you would like to add the video to. Choose ‘Add Item’ from the Survey Editor menu and choose the item type ‘HTML’.
5. Click the ‘Text Input’ radio button and paste the embed code in the box provided by either typing “Ctrl V” or choosing ‘Paste’ from your internet browser’s menu. Click ‘OK’.
6. Your video will now show in the Survey Editor, in the preview window, and the survey test link. You can now add borders, related questions, or messages about your video. The possibilities are endless – have fun!

Checkbox Survey Solutions is pleased to announce the release of Checkbox Survey Version 4.7 tomorrow, July 27^th, 2010. Checkbox 4.7 will include several new features, including the addition of mean, median and mode for ratings scales and enhanced pie chart options. Version 4.7 will also include many performance enhancements and bug fixes, including report memory enhancements, the addition of a dedicated email queue and a matrix border bug fix. Complete release notes can be found at the bottom of this message.

What Checkbox Online Customers can Expect:  Unless you have previously arranged with us for a deferral of your upgrade to 4.7, all Checkbox Online customers will be patched from Checkbox V4.6 to Checkbox V4.7 at approximately 7pm EST on July 27, 2010. The upgrade should be complete in under an hour, will be done entirely by the Checkbox development team and does not require any intervention from you.

While we do not anticipate any downtime, there is a slight possibility that if you are in the middle of editing or taking a survey you may be logged out of the application and need to log back in to resume your work. If you plan to have critical survey work going on tomorrow between 7pm and 8pm EST, please let us know and we can defer your upgrade for up to a week to avoid any chance of a brief interruption.

We will post a message on your Checkbox customer support page when the upgrade is complete.

What Checkbox Server Customers can Expect: Version 4.7 will be available to Checkbox Server customers approximately 1-2 weeks after the Online release. The download will be available on your Checkbox customer support page and we will notify you with a separate email and customer support bulletin at that time.

Full Checkbox 4.7 Feature and Enhancement List:

New Features

• New reporting item to show mean, median, and mode for 1 or more rating scale questions.
• Ability to make responses anonymous. No user data is recorded when this option is selected, whether the user is anonymous, a Checkbox user, or a network user.
• Choose whether pie chart labels should be displayed inside the pie slices, outside the pie slices, or only in the chart legend.
• Choose whether to show result percentages in pie chart labels or only in the chart legend.
• Choose from alphabetical, answer count, or survey option order for bars in column and bar charts.
• Specify custom validation regular expressions for single line text items.
• Ability to record the email address of a respondent to whom an email invitation is sent.
• Change in the .csv export format. When ‘Detailed Response Info’ is selected, export now includes ResponseGuid and invitee email address (from above bullet).

Performance Enhancements

• Integration with external caching component for reduced memory use in web farms.
• Several enhancements to reporting to improve performance and reduce view state size  and memory use, especially for reports with large numbers of items or filters.
• Use of AJAX for better reliability for long-running tasks such as exporting large result sets, or sending invitations.
• Optional dedicated email queue and sending service improves reliability and recovery when sending large numbers of invitations.
• Optionally store files uploaded to surveys in Amazon S3 buckets instead of the Checkbox database.

Other Changes and Bug Fixes

• Fixed issue where native SPSS export did not work on 64-bit servers.
• Added logic to ensure surveys marked “Invitation Only” do not appear in survey list on AvailableSurveys.aspx.
• Duplicate user names in user import are now handled more gracefully and no longer cause entire import file to be considered invalid.
• Fixed issue where object returned by CreateInvitation web service call only contained some invitation data.
• Fixed issue that prevented matrix borders from being displayed.
• Added logic to prevent occasional errors when survey progress bar is enabled and respondent views first survey page.
• Fixed issue where answers to drop down list questions inside a matrix were not recorded in some situations.
• Prevented error from occurring when a user in the Form Editor role, but not the Form Administrator role, created a new survey.
• Fixed rendering issue that occurred when a matrix column contained a single radio button or checkbox.
• Respondent IP address is now only logged when LogIpAddres database application setting is enabled.
• Zero score value of “(0)” no longer shown in response details for surveys where scoring is not enabled.
• Improved performance of GetSurveyInfo* web service calls by excluding item configuration details by default.
• Application now redirects properly to configuration error page when application url is not set in the web.config.
• Fixed issue where characters such as the apostrophe where double-encoded when stored in the database.
• Resolved upgrade errors that could occur when Ultimate Survey database contained referential errors for report pages.
• Removed “Other” option configuration options for report charts that only contain rating scales, and therefore have no “Other” options.
• Fixed case-sensitivity of search when adding entries to ACLs.
• Fixed issue where user would be asked to login in a certain edge case for invitations with auto-login enabled.
• Changed alignment of “Other” text input for matrix questions to be left aligned instead of center aligned.
• Fixed issue where it was not possible to search for groups by name when adding entries to ACLs.
• Added logic to prevent appearance code for custom report items from being changed when chart styles are applied to a report.
• Added example of creating invitation to web service starter kit project.
• Added response database identifier to names of files uploaded to surveys, which allows for easier matching of uploaded files to exported survey responses.
• Added print-only style to improve appearance of text inputs when a survey is printed.
• Added configuration file reference paths to WYSIWYG editor for style header/footer to allow for end user configuration changes.
• For new installations, response answers saved by default when respondent clicks “back” button.
• Additional error details logged when relational errors occur when loading or saving data.
• Added logic to more accurately calculate page and item numbers for surveys with branching rules and conditions.
• Fix issue where pipes could only be added to questions when the WYSIWYG editor is used.
• Removed “Flash”  option from WYSIWYG editor since it did not function properly.
• Ensure “NetworkUser” column only included in exports when “LogNetworkUser” database application setting is enabled.
• Removed nonfunctional “Deactivate Item” link from report editor.
• Fixed issue where date picker  control didn’t allow selection of pre-1981 date.
• Fixed issue where matrix header rows where not shown properly in matrix summary report items.
• Add data encoding to mitigate risk of XSS attack when displaying error messages when query string data could not be converted to the expected datatype. 

by Carolyn Craven

I was reading Yelp last week, looking for restaurant recommendations while on vacation in southern California, when I came across this one place that looked promising and had a pretty decent number of four and five star reviews. Of course, my eyes immediately jumped to the one and two star reviews because I naturally wanted to know what the complaints were. This one guy totally slammed the place; I don’t even remember why, but that’s not important. What was memorable was the owner’s response to the review. The owner’s reply went something like this (I’m paraphrasing but it’s close): “Joe Smith, I’ve read your other four reviews on Yelp and you don’t seem to like anything. You obviously can’t be pleased. Do yourself a favor and stay home.”

I re-read it a couple of times to make sure I got it right. I mean, c’mon. Do we all have clients who are miserable and are never going to find the good in us, no matter what we do? Yes. Should we ever say this out loud, especially in a public forum? Absolutely not! Being a business owner or working in a customer-facing job, whether it’s at a restaurant, in a call center, or in a B2B office environment, means you have to put your ego in check and look at the big picture when it comes to customer complaints.

Not only was this business owner’s response totally inappropriate and rude, it was downright foolish. He missed a HUGE opportunity to try and turn around that diner’s opinion of the restaurant and he probably tainted the opinion of other readers and potential diners, including mine. I know first-hand that it’s hard not to get defensive and take it personally when a customer has a complaint about your products or services, but a defensive attitude has no place in customer service. And from the looks of the subsequent reviews on Yelp, it looks like someone tried to get that message across to my restaurant owner because his later responses to complaints were less confrontational and more apologetic. Unfortunately, the damage was done with that one obnoxious comment.

So next time you’re faced with a ranting customer, think of my restaurant owner friend. Take a step back, put your ego in check, and think about that customer not as someone you have to defend yourself against, but as someone you have the opportunity to change the opinion of. Or, more simply, just ask yourself, would you rather have that customer walk away more pissed off or really impressed by your willingness to listen, understand, and make a change?

To learn how Checkbox Survey Solutions can help you gather and respond to valuable customer feedback, visit http://www.checkbox.com or contact a Checkbox Product expert at 866-430-8274 (Int’l +1-617-715-9605).

by Carolyn Craven

My last blog post was about some of the more creative uses for online survey software. I was re-reading it this weekend and thinking about some of our customers’ creative success stories with Checkbox when it occurred to me – there are probably tons more innovative ideas out there when it comes to online survey use. As great as our customers are, I’m sure I’m just scraping the surface by sharing a handful of their stories and case studies.

So I’m trying an experiment: in an effort to gather some truly innovative survey tool uses and share them with other users and surveyors out there I’m holding a contest to find the most interesting, innovative, and original survey tool use you can send me. The winner gets an entire year of Checkbox Survey Online Professional FREE and the chance to share the story with our customers and readers – no strings attached.

So if you have a great story to tell about how your company or organization uses online surveys (any survey tool, not just Checkbox), just fill out our entry form with your contact details and a description of your creative survey tool use. Good luck!

When most people think of online surveys, customer satisfaction or employee feedback surveys often come to mind. But there are so many other creative and fantastic uses of online survey tools. Here at Checkbox, we all love talking to customers and learning about some of the unique ways they use our software. It seems every time I turn around, someone gives me another idea, so I wanted to share with you a few of the examples that I think have far-reaching implications for many organizations:

• Event registration forms:  Several of our clients have used Checkbox to collect registration information for conferences or other events. They created custom online forms to gather data such as name, company, event attending, meal preferences, hotel rooms needed, etc. Some have even used Checkbox’s web services to send payment information to their credit card processor so that payment for the event could be made all in one step. The main advantage of using Checkbox for even registration is that all registrant information is stored in the Checkbox database, which means that follow-up communications and surveys can be easily sent without having to import contact data from another system.
   
• Risk Assessments:  Many corporations and organizations, especially those with large volumes of sensitive data, routinely perform risk assessments to ensure their security and damage control protocols are sufficient to protect against potential catastrophe. Although specialized risk assessment software is readily available, it tends to be expensive and sometimes over-specialized. Checkbox Survey has been an affordable alternative for our clients who wish to design their own risk assessments or assess risks across multiple departments or business units.
   
•  Compliance Surveys:  A number of Checkbox clients use our survey software for compliance evaluations. These online surveys are used internally and externally to measure anything from employee, contractor, and vendor compliance with safety regulations to physical and data security protocols to environmental guidelines. As with risk assessments, there are software packages available that are specifically designed for compliance evaluations. Our clients have chosen Checkbox for their compliance surveys because of its affordability and flexibility. Checkbox’s user management module, question libraries, and templates make it easy create and share evaluations with different purposes across an entire organization.
   
• Focus Groups: Online survey and data collection software is becoming a popular alternative to traditional paper note taking for focus group moderators. Personal and demographic data from participants can easily be collected alongside their responses for easier reporting and analysis. This data can also be used to send follow-up surveys or to link together multiple surveys or sessions for the same user.
   
• Medical Research: We’ve seen quite a bit of growth in the use of online survey and data collection software by medical professionals in the last couple of years. Research hospitals and medical research facilities have always had a need for data collection software, and Checkbox has become a popular choice due to its affordability and wide array of security and permissions options. But we’re also seeing more and more hospitals and doctor’s offices using online and mobile surveys to measure and act on patient satisfaction or to gather and update critical patient health information. Given the propensity for human error when using paper forms, we certainly hope this trend towards online data collection in the medical community continues!
   
• Academic Testing & Evaluations: More and more school districts, colleges, and universities are seeing the light when it comes to using campus or district-wide survey or data collection software for exams, student, professor, and school evaluations. Using survey software like Checkbox that has built-in user group functionality and extensive permissions settings means that professors and administrators can easily share and compile data and results from students or staff, allowing them to view respondent testing or evaluation scores over time and all in one place. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to uses of online survey and data collection software. If you or your organization has a great story to tell about how you use online surveys, we’d love to hear from you and possibly feature you in one of our blogs! 

About Checkbox Survey Solutions
Checkbox Survey Solutions, Inc., strives to offer the best choice in professional survey and data collection tools by combining flexible pricing, choice of platform, a superior customer experience, and best in class features and interface. With a longstanding track record of helping businesses and organizations, large and small, implement high quality survey and data collection solutions, Checkbox Survey has developed relationships with top global companies in more than 30 countries with a continual emphasis on quality, performance, and usability.

To find out more about Checkbox Survey, visit www.checkbox.com or contact a product expert at 1-866-430-8274 (Int’l 1-617-715-9605).

New Training Videos added this week to the Checkbox Survey Resource Library:

Copying  Survey - Learn how to easily copy a survey already created and then edit and customize to make a new survey.

Creating a Question Library - Question Libraries are a  great method of storing and reusing popular question items.  This video will demonstrate how to create a new Question Library as well as how to use a Question Library to add questions to a survey.

Save and Exit - A very important feature is how your respondents can save and close their survey to finish at a later date.  This video will demonstrate how to add this functionality to a survey and how it appears to the respondent.

If you have any requests for specific training videos, please contact Shona Dawson at sdawson@checkbox.com.

Checkbox Survey Solutions has added two new training videos to our resources library.

Style and appearance are important factors when presenting a survey to your respondents.  To help respondents identify with a survey, your brand or organization should be easily recognizable and familiar.  Checkbox Survey allows you to fully customize your survey styles and appearance and the Checkbox logo/branding will not appear anywhere.

Style Template Creation

This video will demonstrate how to build a style template which can be created and used with multiple surveys.  You have full control over fonts, colors, sizes, images, headers, footers, as well as progress bars and survey buttons.

  Survey Style Creation

Not only can you create Style Templates, you can also be creative with individual survey styles by using our page layout feature within the styles manager.  Here you can design the look and feel of each survey page and determine the layout of question items, images and messages.

We hope you find these videos useful and we will be adding more to our resources library in the coming months.

There’s been so much talk of ‘Customer Experience’ and ‘Voice of the Customer’ these last couple years that I feel like we’ve lost sight of an important fact – 100% customer satisfaction is a near impossible goal and one you shouldn’t necessarily strive for. Of course it’s good business practice, not to mention the right thing to do, to give your customers the best products, service, and experience possible. Customer experience drives customer retention, repeat sales, and referrals, which are critical to maintaining a healthy bottom line – we all know that. But it’s easy to forget, in the midst of striving for customer service excellence, that there are some customers we will never please and that we just need to let go.

We certainly see that here at Checkbox. As much as we try to qualify our leads and make sure we are selling customers the right product for them, there are times when clients’ needs either change after purchase or are misunderstood during the sales process, and they end up with a product that doesn’t work for them.

I recently spoke with a client in a situation like this. They purchased Checkbox Server survey software with the intention of using our API to make some modifications and integrate the software with their own front-end. Long story short, their developers got in way over their heads and they weren’t able to accomplish their online survey goals with Checkbox. We went back and forth a couple of times looking for a solution, but in the end we just couldn’t spare the development resources needed to take over their customization work for them. As much as it pained me to watch a customer walk away unsatisfied, I had to accept that Checkbox just wasn’t the right solution for them. They probably would have been better off purchasing a custom solution from one of our full-service competitors rather than trying to modify a somewhat off-the-shelf product.

Those types of customer interactions are though – I know I spent days wondering if we could have done a better job qualifying the sale. Had we realized earlier on in the process that our customer’s developers were trying to accomplish the near-impossible, we could have probably spared a lot of trouble on both sides. But in the end, all you can do is your best when it comes to finding the right fit for your clients – be it with your product or someone else’s.

And when it doesn’t work out, you sometimes have to make the difficult but smart business decision to let that client walk away unsatisfied. 100% customer satisfaction sounds great on paper, but it’s not worth sacrificing resources that you can’t afford in order to attain it.