But where do you begin, especially if you don’t know the first thing about customer satisfaction surveys?  First, we recommend that you take some time to understand the basics of customer satisfaction surveys, in general, and handheld survey tools in particular.  You will also want to familiarize yourself with mobile survey software– so that you ultimately select the best handheld survey options for your purposes.  Without a working knowledge of customer satisfaction surveys and the tools used for gathering the data, you may needlessly expend limited resources and not get the results you want.

Know what questions to ask

As you search for the best handheld survey device and handheld survey software, here is a checklist of preliminary questions and issues for which you’ll want answers:

1. What are the objectives of your survey; what are you trying to find out?
2. Who is your target audience for the survey?
3. What is the best way to contact and interact with your target audience?
4. What is the budget allocation for the survey?
5. Do you have authority to contract with an expert in customer feedback projects?
6. Is there a specific result or outcome expected from the survey?
7. What is your time frame for gathering the data and producing reports?

In the handheld survey device category, PDAs and the iTouch, iPad offer a number of advantages including:

• A touch screen so the device may be handed to patients, visitors or customers for their feedback entry
• Cordless and battery powered so it’s easy to handle and runs reliably for hours
• Generous storage – holds between 20,000 to 30,000 survey records
• Uploading of survey data in real-time or on a scheduled batch basis
• Easy loading and updating of handheld survey software updates
• Multimedia, including  images, sound and videos may including in your survey questions and response scales to supplement and improve comprehension
• Multi-lingual capable
• Open-ended verbatim comments via voice recording or text input
• One-time capture of feedback so there’s no data re-entry – saving time and improving accuracy
• Skip patterns and branching logic

For more information about Opinionmeter and their impressive range of customer satisfaction survey products and services, please visit www.opinionmeter.com today.

We have discovered that our customers (retailers, restaurants, hospitality and market research firms) are finding significant value in moving away from this modality, onto the mobile survey devices. The value of doing is enormous; here are some reasons why:

• Consumers Love It! Don’t underestimate the value of this; consumers would much rather engage a slick piece of technology versus a clipboard, for instance. It is highly likely you will see a quantifiable increase in your take rates.
• Real-Time: No longer do you have to “wait” for the information to be faxed/mailed to a central location, sheets given to temps to input data and then start your analysis. Devices have 4 different ways in which they can connect to the internet, and data is uploaded immediately.
• Program Management: I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a project in which edits weren’t being made to the survey questions all the way up to the actual day the project was going to start. This is extremely cumbersome with paper surveys, but it is a non-issue for mobile survey devices since our software communicates with the devices in real-time. Thus, you can be sitting at the comfort of your desk – pushing edits to it in real time – with the devices spread across the nation/world.
• Multiple Surveys: Rifling through papers to find the right survey is disruptive at best. However with mobile devices, there are no limits to the number of surveys that can be hosted on a device. So, just imagine you have a customer who would rather participate in his native language; well, he would simply select it from a multilingual menu on the device, and he’s off and running!

It is high time to discard this archaic mode of paper surveys. Embrace the technology of today by using mobile devices! Have you had a bad experience with paper surveys? If so, tell us about it in our comments.

• Placement – When using an unattended survey system, such as a Survey Kiosk or counter mounted touch screen tablet, it’s important to carefully consider the optimum placement of the device. You’ll need to consider the transaction or service flow of your lobby environment and at what point in the flow you wish to capture feedback. Do you want to capture spontaneous feedback at the Point-of-Sale, or after the transaction or service? What are the objectives of your survey? Perhaps a table-mounted Opinionmeter adjacent the cashier can take advantage of the customer’s wait-time during checked-out and capture a short, spontaneous survey on their shopping experience. Or perhaps you may want to place the a Survey Kiosk by the exit or discharge area in a healthcare setting, for exit surveys. If on the other hand you wish to gather pre-visit data relating to the overall experience from repeat visitors, place the device in the waiting area or adjacent the queue line and take advantage of your customer’s waiting time.

• Signage – Along with the placement, signage can significantly help draw attention to the unattended survey device. Signage can also be used to effectively communicate the importance of the data being collected, along with any incentives being offered, if any. Another great use of signage is to communicate to the customer the changes that are being implemented based on previous survey’s feedback. This creates a strong sense of ownership and participation on the part of your customers and results in higher customer loyalty. Signage doesn’t need to be static! With Opinionmeter’s digital signage feature, you can run a sequence of videos or images during idle-time between surveys to communicate your messaging.

• Staff Involvement – The single most powerful driver of response rates is staff involvement. At the conclusion of the visit, if staff ask the customer to provide a “minute of their time to give us their feedback” – a high percentage of customers will do so. It’s also important that staff be educated about the purpose of the survey so they don’t feel intimidated by the data being collected (e.g. that they’re being judged negatively by the customer’s responses). If employees are not engaged in the process, they are likely to view it with suspicion or cynicism. This can lead to lack of motivation and in some cases even attempts to manipulate the customer survey.

• Survey Length – The shorter the survey the more likely you will have a higher response rate. This is always a challenge, balancing the need to ask the required questions to achieve your survey objective, yet keeping the length of the questionnaire appropriate to the environment in which you are soliciting feedback. This is especially the case in highly-trafficked areas. For example, if you are capturing feedback after a customer’s visit, or have a kiosk adjacent a queue line, the questionnaire should be quite short. On the other hand, if your customers are waiting for services, a longer survey instrument may be appropriate.

• Using Incentives – There are many ways to use incentives to encourage survey participation and increase response rates. In fact, Opinionmeter provides several incentive options within the SurveyManager software (Winning number and Winning Quiz). In many cases simply explaining why you’re conducting the survey and the value of their participation, provide far more benefit than an incentive. If you plan to use an incentive, you should test the incentive to see if it results in a higher participation rate without sacrificing quality of the data. On the other hand, the more complex and taxing you make the survey (“survey friction”) the more likely you’ll need to incent your customers to participate.

• Feedback resulting in Action – It’s critical, especially in environments where you have repeat customers, to inform them of the actions being implemented based on previous customer feedback they have provided. This can be done through simple signage placed at the survey station, even on the introductory screen of the survey itself or through a company newsletter, website, etc. Customers need to know their feedback is not only being recorded, but is resulting in actions taken to implement change. Customers are imbued with a sense of ownership when they are included in the feedback-loop process: Feedback -> Discovery -> Change -> Re-Evaluate. By including the customer in this process it communicates a very strong message: “We’ve heard your concerns, we’ve understood your opinions and now we’re going to act.” This is an excellent method for building customer loyalty.

Although the continuous improvement process is well understood, and the value of real-time data is appreciated, not enough attention has been paid to the importance of how the process itself begins: when and where the customer feedback is gathered. No matter how sophisticated your feedback process, your conclusions and change implementation will be handicapped by the quality and freshness of the incoming customer feedback. I would argue the most important step in the feedback look is how the process begins.

Capturing real-time customer feedback as close as possible to the time and place the customer experiences your business is critical to ensure fresh, spontaneous and accurate feedback data. We at Opinionmeter refer to this as the Point-of-Experience (POE): the time and place of the customer forms a purchase decision or experiences your business’s products and services. The goal is to get as close as possible to the POE when soliciting customer experience feedback regardless of the touch point – be it on the shelf, at the cashier, online or in the waiting room, feedback can be solicited using a variety data collection tools. All these touch points should be capturing continuous, real-time feedback creating a rich stream of input to initiate the feedback process.

In addition to ensuring quality input into your feedback process, when you have a spontaneous real-time POE data stream directly from all touch points across your enterprise, you then have an extremely rich conduit directly to the customer: Voice of the Customer from the POE!

We’re thrilled to be introducing the “Opinionmeter Blog” where we hope to create a forum for discussion and insight into everything having to do with customer feedback research and methodologies. We hope you will check in from time to time and contribute to the discussions as well as keep up to date with the latest musings from Opinionmeter contributors. We encourage you to participate and provide us with your input, insight and feedback!

Let us begin at the beginning: the genesis of Opinionmeter dates back nearly 40 years when Bob Strickland needed to collect consumer market research data for his MBA thesis paper.  He asked himself a simple question:  How can I automate the collection of all this consumer data I need to gather?  In that moment, the Opinionmeter concept was born.

Let’s fast forward to the early 1990’s when Bob’s son, Morgan Strickland, built upon his father’s invention to start a business and transformed the company into what is known today as Opinionmeter International. 

Throughout these years, Opinionmeter has evolved from capturing offline feedback using a programmable calculator (HP48) to the introduction of remote programming (via a dialup modem) for survey creation and real-time reports.  From here, there was the decoupling of the software/hardware – pulling the software into the cloud and engaging 3^rd party hardware solutions.  And finally arriving where we are today – using the hardware clipped to an increasing number of hips – most recently, the Smart Phone. Opinionmeter technology now runs on a wide and every growing range of device types – from mobile phone to PDA to tablet to kiosk, as well as paper and online survey distribution. Opinionmeter’s approach is author once, distribute anywhere. 

In this spirit of iterating our way into whom we are today by utilizing emerging technologies, we will be monitoring adjunct industries/technologies and will be discussing how they may impact our industry with our readers as well.

Samplings of these are:  The smart phone market, social networks, tablet computer; Industries such as Healthcare, Retailers, Municipalities; and segments such as Consumer Insight, Patient Feedback, Market Research, and many more.

Please join us in this conversation and give us your own insights.  We look forward to conversing with you!

Author Once, Distribute Anywhere

Finally, you can manage all your surveys in one place. Opinionmeter’s feedback management platform provides multiple methods for distributing surveys to your customer’s point-of-experience, whether they are onsite, online or both. From in-store surveying with survey kiosks, or intercept surveying through a variety of mobile research tools or online web surveys, Opinionmeter can manage your survey needs all from one survey management platform. Learn more>

Featured Industry Solutions

Healthcare Opinionmeter is a world leader in providing real-time point-of-care patient satisfaction feedback and service recovery solutions for healthcare organizations of all sizes. Read more >

Government Opinionmeter technology provides city, state and federal governments the ability to measure workforce and customer satisfaction levels across all public service programs simultaneously. Read more >

Education Campuses are taking full advantage of Opinionmeter’s mobile feedback tools, from campus dining and student activities to student health and auxiliary services, with student satisfaction feedback surveys. Read more >

Opinionmeter International is a leading provider of technology-based customer satisfaction feedback and market research tools. With a range of interactive survey devices we enable our clients to capture real-time ‘voice of the customer’ satisfaction feedback at the point-of-experience (the moment the customer experiences the product or service). All survey devices are web-enabled and remotely managed through the web-based SurveyManager application. Being web-based, the SurveyManager has the ability to automate the delivery of customized ’voice of the customer’ reports and provide real-time customer satisfaction feedback alerts. Opinionmeter’s technology makes the collection of customer satisfaction survey feedback and market research easier, quicker and more cost effective.

All customer satisfaction surveys can be customized, survey questions changed or edited on the fly, and professional reports generated and delivered in a variety of formats. All customer satisfaction feedback and market research reports can be fully customized and either generated on-demand or scheduled for automatic delivery by email. The SurveyManager’s reporting tool provides the ability to segment ’voice of the customer’ data based on locations and sub-accounts, as well as generate rollup reports to compare customer satisfaction feedback activity across the entire enterprise.

Government Case studies

	“There is no easier or cheaper way today to capture customer data.”
	London Underground
	“We are stunned by the response rate“
	“The Opinionmeter is one of the best investments we’ve made to assess patient satisfaction.“

Healthcare Case studies

	“There is no easier or cheaper way today to capture customer data.”
	London Underground
	“We are stunned by the response rate“
	“The Opinionmeter is one of the best investments we’ve made to assess patient satisfaction.“

Customer Success Stories

	“There is no easier or cheaper way today to capture customer data.”
	London Underground
	“We are stunned by the response rate“
	“The Opinionmeter is one of the best investments we’ve made to assess patient satisfaction.“