When searching for meaningful data about your prospects or collecting interviews through your clients, you need a reliable and useful survey software. What is the best one for achieving your goals?
Well, that depends on what exactly your goals are. Different softwares lead to different results, so choose carefully. The best survey software needs to be flexible and customizable on your own personal requirements.
What do you want from your survey software? Set your goals!
First of all, you should know what you want out of your survey software. You want to conduct a survey in order to collect results: what is your most important target to reach? For your survey software to really be useful, it needs to be adaptable to your needs and easy to use, even with little training.
So, when searching for the best possible choice, keep in mind these features.
- Flexibility: the tool you choose should be customizable on your needs, which may change from one survey to another. A perfect blend of CATI, CAWI, CAPI modes will easily adapt to your needs.
- Security: when collecting data online, privacy and security should always be your number one priorities. Be sure to try a professional software company that will store and protect prospects’ personal data at all times.
- User-friendliness: remember the main survey software users will be your own staff members. You want them to be at ease when conducting interviews and collecting answers, and most of all you don’t want to spend too much time, energy and resources on their training.
- Easy-to-use dashboards and reports: after conducting your surveys, you’ll want accessible, quick and easy-to-use reports to consult. So your favorite survey software needs an intuitive results dashboard and easily readable reports.
Absolute flexibility is key
Your interviewers’ staff is made up of professional people who are comfortable with customer relationships and interviews, but they may be used to a very different approach. A mixed mode which uses both digital and analogical features could be difficult to use for them. So your main goal is to make it easier and more intuitive.
You can reach this goal through a flexible tool which will bend to your own level of expertise and needs. With a survey software like that, your staff will have total control on how and at what pace to conduct their interviews.
For instance, they can customize the survey with a clever mix of open-ended and multiple choice questions, and even changing and adapting the questionnaire as they go. The best survey softwares allow you to steer the interview one way or another based on the previous answer. This is a very good example of digital tools and human reactions perfectly working together in order to achieve the sharpest results.
Creating a survey on your own
When searching for the perfect survey software, try to analyze their features through a free online demo. You can explore each and every feature and, most of all, you can try to create your first personalized survey. The best survey software allows you to easily design questions, store the results and more.
Clever combinations of open-ended questions, true/false, fill-in-the-blank will create a natural, organic dialogue between interviewer and prospect and that will give you the best, most honest, most accurate answers you are looking for.
Organizing calls, appointment and time zones
Another important feature for a good survey software is a sharp system to organize calls and appointments. You should have a flexible and easy-to-use contact list, and maybe even a predictive dialing system to automatically transfer calls to the first available agent.
A cool and interesting add-on to this system could be the smart management of time zones, in order to never waste time calling people at the wrong hour. This way, precious time and energy will be accurately spent and your agents will always be productive and able to record multiple responses at the same time.
Smart way to collect data in your survey software
With your questionnaire you probably want to learn meaningful data from interviewed people. So what’s the point, if you can’t store and collect them right away? Whether yours is a commercial questionnaire, a customer-satisfaction survey or anything else, you need to instantly see the results in the most accurate way.
A well-designed survey software should allow you to see and study results in many different ways, so that you can choose the most suitable one. Charts, statistics and written reports will be available to you at any time, right after each interview has been completed. This will surely help you use these results as you see fit: to change something in your customer experience, to conduct market research, to analyze employees’ satisfaction and more.
