Your Virtual Assistant

One feature I really love about online survey tools is the Rules and Alerts. No, I don’t love rules, in fact I end up breaking them more than often. The reason I love this feature is because it allows you to schedule the launch of your surveys amongst other things. You need not be physically present by your PC to launch the survey. Simply select the desired date and time and your survey will be mailed across while you out there attending some other important work.

When you are dealing with surveys that contain sensitive data or have a large number of participants, the Rules & Alerts feature makes your data more manageable. You can create leads on the basis of what the respondent likes or dislikes, keeping the participant amused, wondering how your survey can read his mind.

This also allows the survey manager to create custom alerts for himself, for whenever a respondent selects a particular response. In short, Rules & Alerts allows you to take control of what happens after the participants have submitted their replies. You can also send across a Thank You note automatically on completion of the survey. This will make the survey participants feel special and they may actually look forward to your next survey.

Your Survey Your Style

Styling is an integral part of branding. It distinguishes the brand from the rest; it sets its standard in the market. Everything associated with the brand reflects its style. Be it their products, associates or websites. And when such brands send across a survey to their customers or clients, it needs to spell the brands’ philosophy and style as well.
Online surveys started as monotonous templates in black and white but are slowly evolving to support this trend. Some online survey tools allow you to customize surveys using various color combinations and quirky fonts. One can even add logos to ascertain the brand it promotes. Addition of multimedia to illustrate the survey questions or answers visually, make the surveys further interesting.

I agree with actor, director, writer and producer, Orson Welles, when he says that, “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn”.

Safe & Secure Surveys

The digital age has made security a topic of rising concern and when it comes to sharing or gathering sensitive data about your company out there in World Wide Web, you want to be extremely sure that it’s secure. Online survey software deal in monetary transactions as well as customers’ valuable data and hence take extra measures to protect it. This is where various layers of security blankets come to play.

The Secure Socket Layer (SSL), or its latest version, Transport Layer Security (TLS) uses asymmetric cryptography for authentication of key exchange, symmetric encryption for confidentiality, and message authentication codes for message integrity. In simple words, these cryptographic protocols encrypt respondents’ data during transmission, making it as secure as possible

Then there’s the TRUSTe validation software that lets you allow or block companies that are tracking your browsing behavior. It was the first organization to join the U.S. Department of Commerce's European Union (EU) safe harbor framework back in the year 2000. A TRUSTe seal says that the site self-certifies that it complies with its own privacy statement.

There are tones of other security measures and software in the market that are used to protect customers’ privacy. Bottom line? Whichever online software tool you use, first check which security software it uses to protects its customers’ data.

Designing a Survey

Yep! That’s what it is usually called. And why not? With the numerous elements involved in the creation of a survey, the process becomes no short of design. Online survey software provide various interesting features to enhance the effectiveness of the survey.

Any given online survey software will have, on an average, 30-40 design elements, that is, if you buy their most advanced package. The free versions offer around 10 odd basic features, enough for you to explore the software’s potential, while you make up your mind about purchasing their paid version.

Some of the important features to look out for are secure socket layer (SSL), display graph, redirecting to a customized URL after survey participation, auto-translation, customization, multi-lingual option, import of answer options, multimedia embedding, branching, question display logic, piping, rearrangement of questions, data population, quota control, expiry rules, amongst others. Though the names of some of these features differ in various online survey software brands, I have mentioned the common names they go by.

Of course, we’ll delve on each on these in detail. For that, keep an eye on this space.

What’s in a Survey?

What’s in a name, asked Romeo in Shakespeare’s tale of star-cross’d lovers. Of course his was a rhetoric question unlike ours, but the intention behind the question remains the same. To unravel the core!

Literature aside, an online survey is the best way to receive an honest feedback; that we’ve seen. What one wonders next, is how they work. So you send across a bunch of questions and request the customers to answer them. Isn’t that what a survey does? Yes, but not just that. That is the main purpose of online surveys.

Online surveys are found to be more effective than offline surveys because of their reach, ease of use, anonymity when needed, and its analytic capability. For better understanding, an online survey can be divided into four parts – designing the survey, mailing them across, generating reports from the data gathered, and managing the gathered data. How you go through these four stages determines the success of your survey.

Of course, these stages are made of several components which we shall discuss in detail in the days to come. Till then, adios amigos!