But I digress.

What I’m trying to tell you is that being a data badass at meetings is really tough to pull off when you’re in front of the room with overhead projector slides falling out of order and making a mess on the table.  Even modern PowerPoint presentation slides have static graphics that don’t allow you to dig-in based on feedback from meeting participants. If they want to see the data a different way, it’s back to the researcher or analyst (even if that’s you) to slice things differently. But with the QuestionPro App, you can make those adjustments in real-time and answer the question on the spot before a decision is made (or postponed)!

But today — you can be a total badass in your next meeting and get your point across by using the handy – dandy – brand-spankin’ – new QuestionPro interactive data visualization app! Available now on iOS devices. Here

You can download it here from the Apple App Store.

I’ve just downloaded mine from the App Store and is it ever cool!

If you have a QuestionPro account, all you’ll have to do is log in with your credentials and you’ll see all your surveys right there in the app.  Here are a few screen shots from some of my surveys.

As soon as you login to the app, it will synchronize with your account and show you all the surveys that are in your QuestionPro folder:

Here is a shot of the surveys in my QuestionPro account.  You can see the names of the surveys and the number of responses to each of the surveys.

After you click on one of the surveys — you’ll see this fabulous overview screen:

It shows you where the responses came from and the general stats for the survey completions.  At the bottom of the screen are all the questions you’ve asked.  The important part for you to know is that this app works best when you have CHARTS and not open ends.  It won’t do anything with those.

Here is an example of one of the questions:

Now here is the badass part of this — you can spin that pie chart around to see additional data — or the category that goes with the percentage response to the question. You can also use the built-in tools like Compile and Spotlight to make sure the most relevant responses are being highlighted. Select/deselect specific responses and the chart automatically updates!

How I would use this app

As I write this, I’m headed off to a meeting with a client.  Now, we’re going to be talking about some research and I’m going to have this data right there in my hand.  Whenever we have to make a decision such as “Who is our target audience?”  I can click on the app and say something like “Our research shows that 45% of the people we surveyed in this market are engineers.”  This would tell us that we should create the marketing materials with an engineering mindset at the center of our content.

Or let’s say you used the Net Promoter Score question in a customer service survey. The score is typically broken into 3 categories, then used to determine your ‘net’ promoter score:

• Promoters: nines and tens;
• Passives: sevens and eights;
• Detractors: zeros through sixes

Analyzing this, we might say that promoters are great pats on the back, and passives could be completely happy but could be from people who never give nines or tens. But if you really want to make improvements, you need to dive into the detractors. So in the QuestionPro App, I could go into this question, de-select the promoters and passives, and then look at the percentages for just the detractors. All in real-time.

Like I said: b-a-d-a-s-s.

Related:

For more info, check out the data visualization page on QuestionPro.com.

The QuestionPro App is powered by SecondPrism.

ENTER THE SURVEYPOCKET APP FOR IPAD AND ANDROID

Why the heck does it need to be an app?

Well, it doesn’t, as long as you’re always connected. But in the off chance you are going to want people to complete the survey offline, that’s a horse of a different color.

In a nutshell, any time you have field or event researchers, they could be plagued with connectivity issues. And respondents who are trying to complete the survey but get kicked off and have to start over, will probably, well, walk, no pun intended (ok actually that was on purpose).

Some of SurveyPocket’s features:

• Easy Offline/Online Access
• Location Data
• Write your own Instructions
• Single-type Questions
• Rank the Options
• Video-type Questions
• Branching / Skip Logic
• Multiple-choice Questions
• Rating Sliders
• Free-type Questions
• Signature-type Question

For more information on this powerful tool, check out our page on survey apps for iPad and Android.

There was only one problem with this decision making and strategy building process — the SWOT analysis we did was nothing more than a stupid list of stuff that didn’t have anything to do with anything at all — it was just a list.

Then one day, I was sharing my frustration with a friend and he showed me a SWOT format that he used that I fell in love with.  The idea was so simple and yet so powerful.  He basically drilled down to the true essence of each SWOT element.

Internal vs External Focus

The first thing he did was make the distinction between the internally focused elements of the SWOT — the Strengths and the Weaknesses, and the externally focused elements of the SWOT — the Opportunities and Threats.  That simple distinction immediately focused our conversations in the right direction.

Specific examples of events that define each element

The next thing he did was ask specific questions that might define what would be perceived of as Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities or Threats.  This helped focus the list on just those attributes that made a difference in the business.

For example, under the “Strengths” category he asked questions such as:

• What new business did you gain this year?
• What were the reasons you got that business?

And in the “Weaknesses” category, there would be questions such as:

• What business did you lose this year?
• What were the reasons you lost that business?

You get the idea behind this process — be specific and real strengths and weaknesses will reveal themselves.

But what if we were to take this process one step further?  What if we were to take these questions that we asked ourselves and start getting our customers into the mix?

How to bring your customers into your decision making process

Usually, organizations will use customer satisfaction research or other customer research they’ve collected as part of their market planning process.  The most common way I’ve seen it done is to take research we’ve done that has had other objectives and use that information to supplement our planning.

I’m not so sure that was a good idea.  These days I believe that a better process is to create a series of customer research surveys with the objective of collecting information that you can use to guide your decision making and marketing plans.

1. Start with a customer list.  It’s always a good idea to create a list of customer respondents and emails to start with.
2. Supplement the list with demographic profile information that you specify as a custom field such as industry, customer type, products purchased, etc.
3. Conduct some qualitative research to uncover what’s important to your customer when they are buying what you are selling.  You can ask open ended questions and then tighten those up with some specific attributes that play a critical role in how customers choose to purchase your products or services.  I feel like I have to point out that you need to be specific.  Don’t simply say “price” — this is useless.  Use criteria such as “walking distance from my home” as an example.
4. Do several short surveys to gauge what your customers see as your strengths.  This could be as simple as creating a list of strengths and asking if they describe your company, with the answer options being Yes/No (you can also include an NA).  While scales are often a default question type, I prefer simple yes/no answers to these kinds of questions because they force customers to choose one and not just  use neutral ratings.  The only suggestion I would give here is to carefully craft how you word your strength phrases so that you don’t have people feeling ambiguous.  For example:  high-tech, friendly staff, location, good value.  Notice how each of these attributes is referencing a specific area of the company.  I didn’t mix friendly staff and customer service — those are too similar.  Also, be sure to list elements that you think are your weaknesses or that you aren’t sure you do well and see if your customers agree.
5. Ask customers about external influences.  Remember that opportunities and threats are also a component of your SWOT and you can survey your customers to find out how the opportunities and threats that you perceive impact them.  Do they have similar opportunities and threats or widely different ones?

Overall, the idea is to create a series of surveys that are focused on collecting customer feedback as it relates to the decision making you will do as part of your marketing plan.  This way, you aren’t just pulling in old surveys meant for other kinds of decisions, you’re actually bringing your customer into your company’s decision making process – collaborative marketing style.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this!  In what ways have you used customer research to help in developing your marketing plan and making better decisions?

What is an Employee Satisfaction Survey?

This sort of survey is usually taken by staff members, designed to gauge their level of satisfaction with their employment. Typically these surveys ask for some demographic information, helpful in identifying any potential red flags with the way certain employee groups are treated; however it is customary to make responses anonymous.

What Employee-Related Questions are Asked?

Questions often revolve around employee satisfaction levels based on key areas such as manager/supervisor interactions; level of empowerment; satisfaction-level with pay and benefits; whether there is room for advancement, and much more. Employees taking the survey are often asked to rate each question based on a scale. For example, this scale could range from very satisfied to very dissatisfied.

Ultimately, the specific questions asked will be up to the employer. There are a number of varying schools of thought, and we’ve incorporated some popular philosophies to create the initial template. The employer can then add or remove to create the most relevant data set to capture.

Can I Use QuestionPro’s Employee Template As-Is?

We thought you’d never ask! Our template library has scores of great templates that are ready to go right out of the box!

To view our employee satisfaction survey and many other employee-related templates, please visit our employee satisfaction survey template page.

But we’ve noticed that some of you have been a little slow to action, so we thought we’d have some fun with some of the stupidest business decisions — ever– and how we could have solved them using our QuestionPro tools.  A word of warning — QuestionPro didn’t exist at the time many of these decisions were made, but so what!  It’s fun.  So play along.

Turning down the Beatles

Before the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 they were turned down by a record label because “Groups are out; four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished.”

Back in the day, decisions (especially those about music) were gut reactions.  These days we’ve seen lots of successful pop bands and boy bands become icons simply because of good market research.  Remember the Monkees?

You can say that human likes and dislikes are a mystery, but today’s marketers use highly sophisticated research tools and methods to craft entertainment offers that are guaranteed to make money.

So how would you use online surveys to do something like that?

You could run a series of creatively crafted polls to ask your audience simple questions about which kinds of musical tastes they have.  You can even ask them what they like or dislike about specific musical styles or bands.  You’d have to do a bunch of these, and you’d have to do a lot of testing, but over time, you’d come up with a sort of specification list of the general kind of sound your audience would appreciate and purchase.

Kodak ignores the digital camera

Why isn’t Kodak the premier provider of digital cameras?  They had developed the technology in 1975 and were early pioneers in many ways, but basically ignored the trend and ultimately missed out on the opportunity.

So how could they have used today’s survey technology to make better decisions?

I can’t believe they didn’t have a market research department tracking customer purchases of films and cameras.  We see these kinds of surveys all the time;

• Which of the following cameras do you own? (Kodak instamatic, Fuji Digital, etc)
• Which type of camera do you own?
• Are you looking to purchase a new camera in the next 3 months?
• Which type of cameras are you considering?
• Do you own a digital camera?

I’m sure you could come up with a million better questions than I did, but the point here is that Kodak was certainly doing surveys, but maybe not regularly enough or asking the right questions.

To avoid missing out on the next big thing:

• Use polls to quickly interact with your customers and ask them simple, fun questions that will take their purchasing pulse.
• Regular customer purchasing surveys.  I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, but make it a point to touch base with customers regularly.  Weekly, quarterly, monthly — use good judgement based on your business cycle and being careful not to annoy your customers.  Just be sure to check in and see what they are interested in.

In what areas of your business are you seeing trends that should have you asking your customers regular questions?

Kmart

I’m not even going to add any more to that sub-headline.  Saying Kmart is enough.  The iconic store known for it’s Blue Light Specials lost its way when it lost touch with its customers and assumed that what they should be doing is competing with Wal Mart.

The sad truth is that at the time Kmart was losing its way — they could have used QuestionPro — but didn’t (too bad for them and for the manufacturers of those blue filters that go over the light bulbs).  Here are just a few things they could have done.

• Use transactional surveys.  You run into transactional surveys all the time. When you check out of a store, the clerk often circles a web site on your receipt and encourages you to go there, fill out a survey for the opportunity to win a great prize!  I don’t know about you, but I don’t do them.  Do you?  It’s still an option but not the best one.
• QR codes in different departments.  Now we are talking.  Kmart could have strategically placed QR codes in each department with well-crafted questions that were fun to take.  They could have treated the whole thing like a game and offered immediate prizes and discounts to customers (now often called ‘gamification’) who visited each department and answered every question.

Now it’s YOUR turn!  Can you think of other bad business decisions and how today’s online survey technologies could have helped avoid them?  Come on — give it a go!

One way to look at this is to analyze poorly executed decisions in hopes of identifying ways to improve it. So to this end we bring you the following video, which pokes a bit of fun at poorly executed decisions. Enjoy!

We’re Compiling Decision Making Content

We will be updating this page throughout this month to centralize our posts and content, so please check back often, subscribe to the blog (in the sidebar) and follow us on Twitter for updates on the topic of decision making and much more!

Decision Making — right?  That’s the point here.  I made this crazy statement that the only reason to do online surveys is to make a decision and now I’m going to give you some “trigger” moments that should raise the red flag that says “HEY!  We should do a survey!”

You look at your financials and profitability has taken a tumble.  

Oooo — sucks to be you.  That’s usually a trigger that you are making less money than you were before.  And since it seems like you’re working harder — that is no fun.  The other problem is that you’re not exactly sure WHY all this is happening.  Is it costing more to run the business? Are you selling less stuff, selling to the wrong customers, selling the wrong mix of products, etc.  Lots of possibilities.  You’ve got to find out what’s going on.  So while the financial folks are doing their side of the math, you could easily use an online survey to find out if there’s something fundamentally wrong going on, on the customer side.

How to use online surveys to uncover profit-sucking elements of your business

Dropped profits are the perfect application for doing a quick online survey using the importance/satisfaction question type.  The decision making power of this question type is inside the items or characteristics that you choose to measure.  You see, if you just put in (pardon the expression) stupid stuff like “friendly service” or “on time delivery” — you are NOT going to be able to do anything about that.  Seriously.  Imagine sitting with $2 million dollars worth of management and saying we need to improve “on time delivery” — that doesn’t help you decide where to put your money — does it?  Of course not.

You need to list powerful decision making attributes for your customer to rate or rank.  I always suggest using things that you were considering doing in your business or things your competition does in their business.  Things like:

• Personal greeter at the door
• Online chat 24/7
• Overnight delivery

Getting these attributes just right and focused on the actual decisions that you are considering will yield crazy good results in a short period of time.

Not reaching your forecasted revenue — Sales are DOWN!

There are really only two reasons that your product or service isn’t selling; you aren’t selling the right stuff  and/or you’re not selling to the right people.  Online surveys can actually help you target your audience with exactly the right products and services.

QuestionPro’s online survey tool is your decision making savior in this area.  First, there are built-in segmentation tools that you can use such as our geography index which automatically tags each respondent with their geographic area.

Another often overlooked option is having the ability to upload and pre-populate information about your customers.  The best way to do this is to create a list of customer respondents with their emails.  Ultimately, you will upload this list into QuestionPro and send personalized invitations to take a survey.

But the super-sneaky and wonderful part about this process is that you’ll have the ability to upload up to 255 custom variables along with that.  This is crazy powerful because you can pre-populate your data with all kinds of attributes such as frequency of ordering, product types purchased, industry segments or anything you can dream up that you THINK might influence their purchasing decisions.

And here’s something you may NOT have considered when it comes to targeting your audience.  Online surveys are a critical tool in helping you identify psychographic target segments.  This is how all the fancy demographers come up with segments such as “soccer moms.”  They not only have demographic profiles of their customers, but they match those demographics with behavioral information.  QuestionPro can do that quickly and easily — and you don’t need a PhD in stats to use it.  (Trust me — I know!)

You’re sitting in a meeting arguing about what your customers really want

This is a favorite trigger of mine.  There we all are. Sitting in a marketing or product meeting and arguing about what our customers want.  ”I think they want this” and “I know they want that.”  ”Customer ABC has told me countless times they want and they want Y.”   This is a crazy waste of time.

The thing to do when you’re in one of those meetings is run a quick online poll with your customers. You can embed QuestionPro’s online polls in emails and as web site widgets quickly and easily.  The best part is that you will be able to run your poll and get results in the time that it takes everyone to take a bathroom break.  Granted, the results won’t be statistical, but you will certainly have customer feedback as part of your decision making process.

Now it’s your turn.  Share all the different ways that you’ve used QuestionPro online surveys in your decision making process!

Can a question type impact survey results — and your decision?

The short answer is yes.  Granted survey design includes everything from the length of the survey to the way the questions are worded and everything in between.  In this case, I’m going to specifically talk about how the design of questions and question types can increase the engagement level of your survey and improve the quality of your results.  That’s important to you because respondents who are engaged in your survey are more likely to provide “honest” accurate and predictive answers and this will help you make better decisions.

Introducing the Smiley Question Type

Over the last decade or so, neuromarketers have been avid users of FMRI brain imaging to get a better understanding of what trips our brain triggers and engages us or sends us running for the hills.  In fact, Martin Lindstrom has written extensively about it in his recent book, Brandwashed.

Marketing scientists have discovered that people love anything that resembles a face.  In fact, it’s this kind of research that helped Mini Cooper enhance the design of its cars to more closely resemble the face of a human baby.

But I digress.

I mentioned all of this to introduce QuestionPro’s latest graphic question type, the smiley face.  The Smiley Face question type is our way of helping you to generate a stronger engagement with the respondent.  Because the question type actually uses smiley faces to represent the emotion behind the rating, you can expect that your respondents are going to choose the rating that most accurately represents their opinion on the topic.

How to use the smiley face question type

Here is a quick video tutorial on how to insert the smiley face question type in your next online survey:

The new smiley face question type will make it so much easier for you to move out of doing boring, drab and annoying surveys and bring you into a closer conversation with your audience.  And when your audience is engaged, you’ll get better information and make better decisions.

In fact, I bet you never put making more money and doing surveys in the same sentence — did you?

Welcome to Decision Month at QuestionPro

This whole idea of making decisions is at the core of QuestionPro.  After all, if you’re not making good decisions, you’re not making money.

So how can you use QuestionPro to make better decisions and make more money?  I’m going to give you a few ideas today.  Stay tuned all month long for more great strategies.

Decisions you can make using QuestionPro’s Online Surveys

• Which customers to target – Be sure to ask several demographic questions to understand which customer profiles are most open to your offer.
• What are your customers’ challenges -   Remember that your customers are focused on THEMSELVES and not your features.  Use your online survey tool to get to the root of what their frustrations and challenges are.
• What to focus on.  You can also do a benchmarking type of question by making a list of things that are important to your customer and then asking them how well you and the competition perform in that area (it’s called and importance/satisfaction question type).  Once you pull all the data together, you’ll actually be able to identify areas where your competition is lacking and you can take up the slack.
• Which logo or design they like best.  Why guess?  You can upload your image options to an online survey and run your design options past your customers and have them rate which they like best.  Use the “star rating” question type and make it a game.

What kinds of decisions did YOU use QuestionPro to make?  Put your tips and strategies in the comments!

The first article talked about the benefits of widening your options.  The next one dug into the benefits of experimenting with possible options, the third one explored the idea of stepping away from the decision and today we’re going to finish off the series with giving up the need to be right.

I know it might seem like overkill to be talking about a single book across so many posts, but I wanted to share as many of these tips and strategies with you so that you can get even more creative ways to use your QuestionPro tool.

Decisions aren’t permanent

It’s funny, but we all seem to think like every decision is cast in stone and will hold forever.  That’s the emotion talking.  You know better than that — decisions are like everything else — mutable.  Instead of being the END of something, they are really the beginning of a path that leads to other decisions.

What you need is a tripwire — a trigger that tells you that it’s time to make another decision.  It’s a lot like the fuel gage on your car that lights up when you only have a gallon or two left so you have time to get to a gas station.

The brown M&M Tripwire or Why David Lee Roth was NOT an A-Hole

We’ve all heard the story of Van Halen’s lead singer David Lee Roth requesting to have all the brown M&M’s removed when they performed in a city.  And we all assumed he was just being an A-Hole.  But there was a method to his madness — the M&M requirement was actually a very simple tripwire.

You see in the 80′s Van Halen was one of the first rock bands to take their ENTIRE high-tech show to smaller cities.  While it was great for the audiences — it was actually a tremendous amount of risk for the band.  The show required a lot of technical set up and detail and the band was concerned that there would be a major safety “incident” if their procedures were not followed precisely.

They put the M&M clause in their exhaustive contract as a tripwire.  The thinking was that if there was even one brown M&M in the bowl, they would not play the show because there wasn’t enough attention to detail in reading the contract and in sorting the M&Ms and if they screwed that up — who’s to say how the pyrotechnics would turn out.

I suppose you could argue this strategy, but the point is, they HAD a strategy and a tripwire put in place to help them make further decisions.

What’s YOUR Tripwire

This is another fantastic tip and way to make decisions.  Online surveys can be a wonderful provider of “tripwire” data.

Say you’re tracking the adoption of a specific product or service – you can use a simple online survey to track the rate of adoption or the shift in market share.

Another terrific way to use surveys is to gauge customer satisfaction.  Your Net Promoter Score is a tripwire for customer service.

What will be your tripwire and how can you use QuestionPro to measure it?