It seems obvious to say but feedback is absolutely key to the continuing success of your business. Customer or delegate feedback can help you gage the success, or otherwise, of an event, a launch, a conference, a new product, existing products, customer service, your company as a whole and many, many other components of your business.
Collecting reliable feedback can be tricky and too many organisations rely on anecdotal evidence, attempt to analyse sales figures or base strategy on feedback from only a small section of their customer base. This can be dangerous as quality feedback can help shape the future of your entire company and year on year can inform large sections of your business plan.
So to collect the best feedback, you need the best tools. Luckily these tools don’t come at an exorbitant price, are relatively simple to set up and use and will give you the feedback that you crave. So what are these essential tools? Online surveys.
SurveyMonkey
As well as having an excellent name, SurveyMonkey is a stand up tool and one of the most popular around. The free version allows you to ask ten questions per survey with up to 100 responders though the customisation options are limited. If you were to sign up to one of their reasonably priced paid packages, you would unleash unlimited responses, a plethora of customisation options and downloadable reports.
dotSurvey
When you see the surveys that have been produced using the dotSurvey tool, you’d be forgiven for thinking that either a professional, or somebody with sophisticated design skills had produced it. They are stunning. Of course, looks aren’t everything but a professional looking survey does help add to your brand. It’s also exceptionally easy to share (via social media for instance) with dotSurvey and reporting is a cinch thanks to the built in dashboards and graphs.
Zoomerang
A little more expertise are required to produce surveys on Zoomerang but once you’ve got the hang of the interface you unlock many possibilities. You can produce mobile surveys, allow survey sharing via multiple users, and the all-important reporting is as extensive as you will find anywhere. This is a great tool for really drilling into your results, though it is perhaps a little too advanced for more general customer surveys.
SurveyGizmo
When you hear “low cost solution” you might expect compromises but SurveyGizmo have managed to offer some neat features (some of which, admittedly are offered elsewhere) for a relatively budget price point. These features include the ability to embed images and videos that are hosted elsewhere and the ability to then embed your survey onto other sites. It may lack some of the others’ more stand out features but as a “low cost solution” you could do worse.