Surveys

Posted March 7th, 2008 by

I was recently invited to complete a survey for Apple. And OK, yes, I admit, I finished it.

Why? Well, on the one hand I love my iPod. On the other, I was curious as to how one of my favorite companies approaches surveys. And, to be honest, I was expecting some sort of incentive for finishing it… though it turned out there wasn’t.

In any event, it gave me something to write about!

Surveys can be a great tool:

Surveys are cheap. SurveyMonkey doesn’t charge for up to 100 responses, and has affordable pricing if you need more. There really is no need to use your own infrastructure to conduct a survey. Even Apple, who sells web publishing tools, servers, and no doubt has the resources to support it, used a third party provider to conduct the thing. (The real work, of course, is coming up with a good set of questions.)

Surveys provide an opportunity to market your other products or services. Apple’s survey asked if I owned any of their other products. (One day soon Apple, I promise!) Even though you may already know the answer, why not ask your customers if they’ve taken advantage of your professional services, or support options?

Surveys provide you and your customers with insight into other ways of using your products. It may seem trivial, but ask your customers how they use your product. Maybe they’ve forgotten certain features existed!

Surveys show that you care. Sure, surveys can be annoying — especially when completely unsolicited — but if I care enough about a product and want to see the company be successful with it, I am more than willing to go out of my way to answer their questions. What I’d love to see, though, is surveys become more “social”: Why not share the results? I’d love to know how I compare with the average iPod/Apple consumer. What are they using the product for?

Surveys keep your customers coming back. I recall receiving a receipt at a particular restaurant chain that noted a link to an online survey. In itself this isn’t new: Typically you’ll see invitations to surveys that result in a “chance to win” something; not exactly a good incentive. Upon completing this survey, however, the receipt told me I would get a special code, which I could then bring back to the restaurant to receive a not-so-nominal discount on my next meal. How cool is that?

While collecting a human’s feedback is vitally important, in today’s newfangled world technology products can also survey themselves — call this product analytics, if you will.

Video game developer Valve tracks a ton of statistics in their games, including what computer hardware was used, how long people play, and even where people are most likely to die in a given level. (By the way, by sharing hardware statistics Valve did the PC gaming industry a great public service, since they do have many excellent, top-selling games. They didn’t have to do this, but they did, which earns them serious Cool Pointsâ„¢ in my book!) Another, less exciting example is Salesforce.com, who provides you with usage statistics periodically, making you aware of features you may not be using, and tells you how you fare in this regard with the average user.

I think in general, we like to read about ourselves, even if it’s something as seemingly boring as how many times I started an application.

So, if you could do a survey today and send it out to all your customers, what do you think you could learn? What if your product could keep track of how your customers used it?

How could this information be used to improve your product’s user experience?

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