How to Design a Survey to Help Make Management Decisions

Should I Stay or Should I Go?  To be or not to be?  Who am I?  Some of the great questions of all time.  Yet when it comes to answering some of our own burning questions we often feel just as stumped as the great philosophers.  Most businesses do one of two things, they look inside their organizations and come up with some answers, or they ask outside the organization.

There are so many online survey tools and templates out there that you might feel tempted to just take one, adapt it and run with it.  Don’t.  Take a few minutes to think it through and do it right.  It will save you more time and effprt than you could imagine.

Here are some guidelines for figuring how to get the right information to make the best management decisions.

1. Set Your Objectives.  Put simply, be clear about the decision you’re trying to make.  Set criteria for your decision i.e. if more than 60% of our customers prefer product X, we will launch this year. Another way to put this is what do you want to learn? 
2. Who will you ask?  This is an important decision.  Don’t just default to every customer.  Choose your respondents carefully?  If you’re trying to find out how people buy, then you want to be sure to include everyone in the buying decision – that could mean marketing, purchasing, engineering, etc.  Ask profile qualifying questions to be sure that you’re targeting the people that can provide the best, most honest feedback.
3. What vehicle will you use to get the answers and in what order.  Don’t just throw together a survey and launch it.  Think about doing some in-depth-interviews or focus groups to test the different questions you’re considering asking.  This is the best time and money you will ever spend.
4. Develop your questions.  BEFORE you go out and start using the pre-designed templates out there, outline your survey questions.  Plan out the survey like you would a road trip.  Think about what qualifying questions to ask up front.  If you’re looking to get responses from women between the ages of 25 to 35, then make sure you eliminate respondents who do not fit the profile as early into the process as possible.  If there are questions that are a high proproty, place them up front, in case people drop out of the survey early on.
5. Test. Test. Test.  Test your survey with respondents then pretend that those are the actual answers.  Can you take action?  What actions would you take.  If the answers leave you confused, then change the questions.

What was your best survey experience?  What was your wors?