A company's employees, its clients, and its events all are a source of valuable and necessary feedback, best provided via surveys.
A feedback survey delivers exactly what its name states: important feedback, which can lay the groundwork for decisions and changes within and related to a business. It is an easy-to-use tool for gathering representative and relevant data that you can use to drive decisions, streamline workflows, improve management processes, make fact-based business changes, and so on.
Use a survey to maximize business effectiveness
Feedback surveys can be used for internal management, external interactions, and event management.
1. Internal use of surveys
In a business, chances are that many internal processes need better organization and streamlined ways of functioning to be more effective. Internal management in a company deals with employee satisfaction, employee recruitment, corporate culture, implementing decisions, training, policies, and others.
A survey can assist you in achieving all such goals. It can help you...
- Recruit new employees
- Organize training and courses for your employees
- Identify business problems, which you can then try to solve before they grow bigger
- Make data-driven decisions on future-driven company concerns
- Gather feedback from your employees.
Using 360 degree feedback surveys help you see how employees feel regarding management policies, employee benefits, employee workflow, general work environment, and many more matters specific to your business.
2. External use of surveys
Surveys are also very useful in analyzing a company's external environment:
- Market research. So that you can react or plan accordingly, get a look at your competitors and their products or services; at potential customers and their buying behavior; and at general market opportunities, trends, and threats.
- Branding. See how your brand is perceived by your audience so that you can make necessary adjustments if the perceived image differs from the one you'd like to project.
- Customers. Customer satisfaction (or feedback) surveys allow you to get to know what your customers want from your company, its products, and its services: how they perceive all of them, what would they like to see improved, and what you can do to increase their satisfaction. Furthermore, customer feedback can generate new ideas and suggestions. They can also be used in a crowdsourcing initiative.
- Sales leads. Surveys are always a good source of sales leads, because based on the information provided by respondents you can later follow-up with relevant content and tailored offers.
3. Event management
In event management, surveys can help you before and after the event. Before an event, you can run registration surveys, which can enhance the event—especially if they are fully customized for your specific needs and allow on-survey payments for those registering to a paid event.
Post-event feedback surveys are critical for event organizers so that they can see the good and the bad from the event and make improvements for subsequent events. You can find out what participants have to say about the overall organization of the event, invited speakers, event logistics, strong and weak points of the event and the presentations, what they've appreciated and what they didn't, what or whom they'd like to see at your next event, and so on.
Two businesses used feedback surveys to streamline workflow
HRG Worldwide Australia
HRG Worldwide Australia is the local office of a corporate travel management business. An international company present in 120 countries with over 12.000 employees, it needed excellent internal process management. Because the company wants satisfied customers, it knew it first needed to have satisfied employees. For that reason, it sought internal data so that it could raise the quality of its services.
The company needed an effective way to communicate new job opportunities as well as dismissals, and to gather employee satisfaction feedback. It launched a survey using features such as field rules to show only necessary fields to respondents, to spare them valuable time; customization options to match the company brand; and advanced fields that permit uploads, such as resumes. A bonus for the company was that it could use the same survey tool for gathering feedback from clients, as well.
Data was gathered in an organized and efficient manner. Internal processes where improved, allowing employees to communicate in a time-efficient way and collecting clients' feedback in an organized fashion. (See more.)
How To Web
How To Web is a business and technology conference based in Bucharest, Romania, and centered on Eastern European technology experts who want to run successful business startups. The event is intensively covered in the media and thus needs flawless organization.
The conference organizers needed post-event feedback to find out the strong points of past events and see what can be improved for future events. They decided to run surveys as an easy and quick way of collecting data; moreover, they needed to use both online and offline (print) surveys that are simple to complete and don't take a lot of time.
How To Web used surveys to evaluate each section of the conference, customized and branded according to their needs. It shared the online survey link in follow-up mails and printed the survey URL on conference flyers. Eventually, management generated reports based on the submitted responses and drew relevant conclusions for making improvements and changes regarding the issues they were interested in. (See more.)
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Are you using any surveys in your business?
