We have always encouraged our survey software users to open their surveys with a solid introductory message. 

This message should explain to your respondents:

• The goal/objective of your survey,
• What you will do with the results,
• How long the survey will take, and  
• Any additional instructions necessary for the respondent to complete the survey.

If your survey is longer than 5 pages and requires some thought by the respondent, it is advised that you set your survey to be able to ‘Resume’ at a later date.  This will allow your respondents to save the survey at a certain point and continue later on.  By switching on this functionality you are giving your respondent options which are more likely to result in a completed response, rather than offering a longer survey with no escape, where the respondent might lose interest.

Here is how you can do this using Checkbox’s Survey Tool:

1. Open your survey in Checkbox’s Survey Editor
2. Select ‘Permissions’ from the black menu bar
3. Select the checkbox ‘Allow Users to Resume”
4. Click ‘Update Settings’ at bottom of this page
5. Select ‘Style’ from the black menu bar
6. Select the checkbox ‘Show “Save and Exit” Button’
7. A text box will now appear and you can customize the message that will appear to the respondent
8. Select the ‘Submit’ button at bottom of this page to save settings.

Respondents will now view the survey as appears below with the option to ‘Save and Exit’:         

The respondent will then receive the following message that explains they can save the following URL and navigate to it at any time to continue where they left off, or they have the option to insert their email address and the URL will be emailed to them as a reminder.

Most survey creators will look for inspiration before creating their first survey.  You will no doubt look at other surveys similar to yours and see how they were laid out, how many questions were asked, how long the survey is, or did the survey include an incentive.  These are all important factors in creating a survey.

To make your life easier, any subscriber to Checkbox Survey Software automatically receives 24 survey templates covering four main topic areas:

• Academic
• Customer Satisfaction
• Employee Satisfaction
• Patient Satisfaction

These templates have been provided to give you the basic generic templates for designing surveys in these topic areas.  Checkbox’s pre-designed templates can be copied, edited and customized for your own use, so make the most of them and start creating right away!

Checkbox Survey Solutions are offering a Free 30 Day Professional account, unlimited surveys, unlimited responses, up to 10,000 email invitations, web services, and your own custom sub-domain.  If you decide to transition to a fully paid account within the 30 days you will keep your data and your sub-domain.  Sign up here to get started http://www.checkbox.com/FreeTrial.aspx.

Checkbox Survey Solutions.

If you’ve found yourself with the daunting task of researching survey software, we feel your pain and we’re here to help. Checkbox Survey Solutions has developed a simple, logical and objective 3-step guide that will help you and your organization make the right survey software choice.

Step 1: Compile a Comprehensive List
Create a list made up of all potential candidates. Take to the streets (literally and figuratively) and scour search engines, ask friends and colleagues, and use online business directories that list survey software providers. When using search engines, be sure to specify the most relevant keyword phrases that appeal to you and your organization; this will help narrow down your search. For instance, you might use long-tail keyword phrases like ‘Microsoft-based survey software’ in order to find a survey tool based on a Microsoft platform or ‘customer satisfaction survey software’ to find one specific to customer feedback. Include every option you come across, even if you know you will quickly eliminate many of them. Including obvious  ‘no-good’s’ will often help you hone in on the attributes that are must-haves, as well as the ones that aren’t as critical. 

Step 2: Compare Basic Attributes – It’s Spreadsheet Time
Now it’s time to create a spreadsheet that will become your ratings guide for product comparison. Use your spreadsheet rows to lay out the product attributes and features that are important to you. For example: Price Range, Support Options, Delivery Options, Architecture, Security, Question Types and Advanced Features (i.e. Ratings Scales, Matrix Questions, Skip Logic, Piping, Etc.), Branding Options, Invitations Options, Number of Users, User Management Options, Multilanguage, Reports, and Integration. To make scanning your grid easier, group together and highlight the attributes that are most critical to your project and your decision.

Survey software company websites should provide most of the information necessary to populate your grid, but you may need to make a few phone calls or send a few emails to sales departments to fill in the blanks. While not always the case, keep in mind that a transparent and well organized website with a wide variety of information and resources related to the product often speaks volumes in terms of a company’s commitment to customer service and support.

You may also want to fill in your grid with information you gain first-hand through a software trial or free account. Most survey software products offer a limited time free trial or free basic account to let you kick the tires and experience what the product looks like, feels like, and delivers. If available, a free trial is also a good time to evaluate the company’s support options, documentation, and training options. If customer support isn’t available with your free account, give the sales department a call with a sample support question – their willingness to help a potential client with a free account is often a good indication of the service you will receive in the future.

Step 3: Narrow it Down & Analyze Top Candidates in Depth
After compiling your spreadsheet, testing some of the software, speaking with the companies, and checking out what kind of resources they have available, you probably have a pretty good idea of your top three to five contenders. Before you make your final decision, it’s time to dig a little deeper.

Compare your most critical attributes side by side among the survey tools on your short list and make sure you fully understand the differences between each one. For instance, when evaluating software based on cost, take a hard look at how your needs line up with their offerings and be aware of any incremental costs you may incur. Many ‘value-positioned’ software tools are a great deal for occasional users or survey projects with low response needs, but the incremental costs of adding additional surveys, responses, or users can often surpass the cost of purchasing a higher priced tool with higher or no limits.

Your final choice should do the best job balancing price, having the most features on your critical list, being scalable if your needs change, and having adequate resources to get you going including self-service training resources and a friendly, helpful sales and support staff. Online surveys are critical to so many areas of a successful business including customer retention, employee satisfaction, and more; spending enough time doing your due diligence to make sure you have exactly the right survey product for your needs will come back to you many-fold in the value a good survey tool will bring you.

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).

Checkbox Survey Solutions is excited to announce the release of our new Free 30 Day Account. 

We have upgraded our Checkbox Free Trial Account to a Free 30 Day Account.  What does this mean?  It means that we have lifted all the limitations of the free trial account to offer you a fully functional, feature rich online professional account.  On top of this, we have made it much easier to transition to a paid account at any point during the 30 day period.

This is the best introduction we can offer potential customers looking to try our online survey software, at a professional account level with no limitations. 

Here are the highlights:

• Free 30 day Professional Account
• Unlimited surveys and responses
• 10,000 Email Invitations per month
• Web Services (Online only)
• Free Training videos, documentations, forums
• Host on our servers or install on yours
• Transition to paid account anytime – keep your data

On top of the features above, we are also offering the ability to sign up for you own custom sub-domain, and if you transition to a fully paid account within 30 days you will keep this name and all your surveys with no disruption.

So, what are you waiting for?  Get started immediately @ http://www.checkbox.com/FreeTrial.aspx 

Congratulations, you’ve taken the important first step of sending out a customer satisfaction survey to gather feedback on your products and services. You’ve thought out your questions really carefully, branded your survey, sent out invitations with reminders, and received some really good responses.

Now what? The biggest problem with customer satisfaction surveys doesn’t have anything to do with the surveys themselves, the questions you ask, or the survey tool you use. It has to do with what you do, and too often don’t do, with the survey data. If you allow your feedback data to get sucked into a black hole, it’s as if you never spent all those hours designing the perfect survey, sending invitations and reminders, and putting together beautifully branded reports. And by not responding to the customers that took the time to offer their feedback or by not incorporating that feedback into your daily business operations, that’s exactly what you’re doing – assigning that data about as much value as it would have in a black hole.

There is nothing more frustrating to a survey respondent than when he pours his heart into a satisfaction survey and hears nothing in return. We all know this from experience – how a company responds or fails to respond to customer feedback has a profound impact on how we feel about that company. Just yesterday I sent a scathing survey to a major credit card company’s travel service department regarding a particularly bad experience I had with them. As angry and frustrated as I am about my experience with this company, I have given them a small window of opportunity to attempt to change my opinion of them. A prompt reply, apology, and offer to right the wrong may just salvage the relationship. On the other hand, if I hear nothing back, I certainly will never use their travel services again and may very well cancel my card with them. I took the time to take their survey and offer valuable feedback and I just want to know that they are actually doing something with that feedback – that it’s not just being sucked into a corporate data black hole.

Of course organizations, especially large ones with huge client bases, don’t have the resources to individually respond to every customer survey. But to the best of their ability, organizations should try to at least respond to the surveys that give extreme positive or negative feedback. The most efficient way to do this is by choosing a tool, like Checkbox Survey, that allows for survey scoring and automated email triggers. Scoring is a powerful method of assigning numeric values to individual responses so that a survey’s total or average score can be tallied and used as a measure of overall satisfaction. Email triggers can be set up to automatically send emails to the appropriate person in an organization based on a survey’s total score or on a response to an individual question – positive or negative. Scoring and email triggers, especially when used together, are a great way to alert organizations to feedback that needs immediate response. Responding to feedback while it is still fresh and relevant can go a long way in maintaining or repairing customer relationships.

Whether you have the ability to respond to individual feedback surveys or not, all organizations should make an effort to share feedback survey results and action plans with customers on an aggregate level. Once your survey is closed and the results have been analyzed, it’s important to share some of those results highlights with your customer base. And, even more importantly, decide how that feedback is going to impact how you run your business, make product decisions, etc. and share that, too. Sure, getting a personal email in response to a survey goes a long way in making a customer feel important. But I would argue that telling customers that their insight and opinions are responsible for company-wide changes to products, service, or direction is a much more powerful tool for improving customer loyalty and retention.

So, by all means, keep creating surveys that ask the right questions, are well organized, and look great because you won’t get quality data without those elements. But if you really want to get value out of your customer feedback surveys, make that data count by using it to drive your business decisions and sharing those decisions with your customers. That will give you more bang for your buck when it comes to customer loyalty than any advertising campaign out there.

For more information on how Checkbox Survey Software can help you design and deploy valuable customer surveys and drive customer satisfaction and retention, please visit www.checkbox.com.

How many badly branded, poorly organized, and just downright rotten online surveys have you received in the past year? If you’re like most of us, you’ve probably lost count. While our primary goal at Checkbox Survey Solutions is to create a powerful, easy to use, feature-rich online survey tool, we feel that it would be irresponsible to send you out into the online survey world armed only with the software.

Sure, we think our software is one of the best online survey tools out there. But without some background on creating effective surveys, it’s still just a tool. And that’s why we decided to create an e-book that combines our best advice on getting started with online surveys. The Checkbox Survey team has years of experience helping our customers create well-organized, beautifully branded surveys, all the while making the most of Checkbox’s powerful features and architecture. We’ve harnessed that knowledge to publish our first e-book, “Survey Creation Made Easy by Checkbox Survey Solutions.”

In the beginning of this book you will find our Top 12 Survey Creation Tips. These are basic guidelines that all survey creators can follow, regardless of the online survey tool they are using. They will help you get started and help you create effective surveys that maximize the quantity and quality of your responses. Following the Top 12 Tips, you will find a series of survey building tips and tricks that are more specific to Checkbox Survey. These tips arise from our “Did you know?” and Customer Support blogs and detail some of Checkbox’s lesser known features and answers to our customers’ FAQ’s.

To receive your free copy, simply go to http://customer.checkboxonline.com/ebook1.aspx and fill out the required contact information.

We hope you enjoy this e-book and that our tips help you create fantastic online surveys. If you’d like more information on Checkbox Survey, please contact our product team at sales@checkbox.com or call 866-430-8274 (Int’l 617-715-9605). To stay apprised of the latest Checkbox news, deals, and tips and tricks subscribe to our blog at www.checkbox.com/blog.

Checkbox Survey Online customers will experience hosting downtime beginning Saturday February 6, 2010 at 12am EST through 9am EST. During this time Checkbox Survey Online will not be accessible as we will be performing maintenance to enhance the speed and performance of hosted accounts.

Service outages should not last for more than 45 minutes per customer account. However, due to the nature of the maintenance we cannot schedule or guarantee a particular maintenance window for any customer. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that you do not create or launch any surveys on Saturday February 6, 2010 until you receive notification that the maintenance has been completed and full service has been restored.  Creating, editing, or launching surveys during the maintenance period may cause you to lose surveys and/or survey data. We will post a message on www.checkbox.com/blog and the Checkbox customer support site once the maintenance has been completed and it is safe to access Checkbox Online again.

We apologize for any inconvenience this service downtime may cause you. If you have any questions or concerns, please open a support ticket at http://www.checkbox.com/support/members/Login.aspx.

Thanks,
The Checkbox Support Team

You no doubt put a lot of time and effort into creating your online surveys.  In time, surveys need updating and re-structured to keep the data fresh and relevant to the overall objective.

Copying a previous survey and using the basic content and logic is the easiest way to make these changes.  This can be achieved easily with Checkbox Survey:

1. Select the survey you would like to copy
2. Left click the ‘Actions’ menu to the left of your survey choice     

3.   Select ‘Copy’

4.  A new survey will appear under your original survey with ‘…Copy 1′ at the end of it

5.  Select the new survey and click ‘Properties’ in the black menu bar.  Here you can rename your survey

6.  Edit/update your survey as necessary.

We recently offered advice on a well known market research forum as to how you can increase the responses to a satisfaction survey in B2B context.  This is information we offer to many of our clients on a daily basis and thought it would be useful to post and share with all our readers.

1. Customers are generally more motivated to provide feedback by a passion for your product/services (positive or negative) than they are by giveaways.  Building a community of customers who are tied to your offering or company is the #1 way to increase quality feedback.  A baby step in the meantime is to impress upon them, in a concise manner, how valuable their opinions and time are to you.
2. Linked to #1, practice what you preach.  If you value their time, don’t waste it.  Make sure every question has a purpose and use the systems and software you have in place to avoid asking duplicate information such as company name or products purchased.
3. Similarly, keep your survey concise and as user friendly as possible.  Do not load a survey page with so many questions that a respondent has to scroll and scroll – this will only lead to frustration and incomplete responses.  Use branching and conditional logic to ensure that your respondent is only answering questions that are relevant to him/her.
4. If you want your survey to be forwarded on, make it easy to do so.  We advise creating a unique URL for each company and branding that survey with the company logo to make it friendly and inviting, and embed a “Share” widget or something similar in the survey to make it easy to pass on.
5. We will also add caution to #4 and the risk of opening up your survey to sharing.  We would advocate using a  tool that has robust security options so you can limit the survey to one response per IP address, password protect it, limit access to a range of URL’s, etc.  Sure you want to maximize your response rate, but you also want quality. 

Always keep in mind the end objective and what information you are looking to gather.  Also, make sure you test surveys before issuing and clear up any errors/logic before they hit your customers/respondents. 

Checkbox Survey Software offers a robust and professional online survey software tool for creating, generating and analyzing survey data.  Visit www.checkbox.com for more information or to trial our product free for 30 days.

by Carolyn Craven

I just got back from lunch at a popular chain Italian restaurant where, it turns out, a local food critic’s television show was filming. Other than wondering why in the world they were filming rolled out pizza dough with nothing on it over and over, the main thing my lunch companian and I noticed were the restaurant managers. There were not one, not two, but three managers in starched shirts whipping around the restaurant and feverishly clearing plates and re-filling sodas. Now, I’ve been to this restaurant a number of times since it’s close to my office and I will say that the management has always been relatively attentive and eager to resolve any issues we’ve had with the food or service. However, I certainly have never seen three managers there at once – they were clearly there to put on a show for the cameras.

Not to say that I blame them. If a television crew was filming my office, I would certainly take care that desks were tidied up and that everyone was putting their best foot forward. But it made me stop and think – in an age of economic uncertainty and increasing competition across most industries, shouldn’t we be giving our customers the best service possible even when nobody is watching? If you can put on a show and give exceptional customer service when you have an audience, then you can do it every day. And even when nobody else notices, your most important audience – the customer that needs you – always does.

About Checkbox Survey Solutions
Our mission is 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. We’re a young, energetic group of professionals from all different backgrounds who all have one thing in common – we love creating a product that we know helps our customers work more efficiently and effectively. Since 2002, we’ve been developing professional survey software and feedback tools that help our customers gather the data they need to make smart decisions. Visit www.checkbox.com for more details.