Survey Invites
Posted by: Erini Mantis on: March 6, 2012
I recently returned from a weeklong business trip. After two flights, three hotels and a handful of events, I returned to an inbox flooded with customer satisfaction surveys. While I’m always up for putting in my two cents — regardless of whether the experience was great, terrible or mediocre — I was struck by how amazingly uninviting some of these emails looked. No personalization, no customization, just plain old text with a link. I couldn’t help but think, are they serious?
One easy way to avoid the delete button and increase response rates is to customize your survey invitations. Using brand colors and including your logo shows effort and legitimacy, while personalizing your email sets the right tone for this big event, a.k.a. your survey. After all, would you attend a party thrown by someone you kind of know after receiving a lazy-looking invitation? I know I wouldn’t.
Zarca Interactive has many tools in place to help you customize your survey invitations. You can pull the color scheme directly from your website or pick and choose your own colors. You can also select fonts and borders that best reflect your company’s brand. Adding a logo is the final touch to creating a great first (or second) impression. The invitation is the door to your survey, so it should be as welcoming as possible.
The Responsibility of Inviting Feedback
Posted by: Desiree Tunstall on: February 14, 2012
Have you ever had a discussion during which a friend asks for your thoughts on a particular issue? You think carefully and provide the best advice you can muster. Your friend “listens” and, when you are done says, “Yeah, but I think I am going to go ahead and…” You think to yourself, “Why did you ask my opinion if you already knew what you were going to do?”
When friends engage in this behavior it can be a mere annoyance, but when you engage in this behavior with your customers it can be detrimental to the relationship. Obtaining feedback from your customers is an awesome responsibility.
While you cannot and should not comply with the opinion of every person who participates in your surveys, you should go into the initiative with an open mind, prepared to change positions and alter your approach. What you thought your customers needed may not in fact be the case. The rewards program you were planning to end may be a greater draw than you previously anticipated. The factors that you thought motivated your employees may not matter after all. Be prepared to revise the plan. Otherwise, why are you even asking for feedback?
Creating Complex Reports Quickly & Easily
Posted by: Peter Abramov on: January 24, 2012
Surveying is a valuable way to communicate with customers and employees, while providing insight into their thought processes. But while most companies can easily collect survey data, it’s much more of a challenge to make sense of all the responses and ultimately create powerful reports.
Before 2009, most businesses simply didn’t have the expertise and time to properly filter and quantify survey data. Therefore, it was nearly impossible to use that data in strategic decision-making.
Over the past few years, Zarca Interactive has refined tools to address the painstaking process of creating reports, charts and analyses, with particular emphasis on minimizing the steps required to create complex reports. This means that reporting can be done by any employee in your company, not only those in your research department.
In just a few moments, you can easily create complex pivot tables, pie charts, statistical analysis, segmentation reports and much more — all via Zarca’s wizard-driven, point-and-click reporting tool. And, once you’ve generated those reports, you can easily email or share them in nearly every major format or on any website.
Zarca helps you quickly and easily create and generate complex reports — allowing you to use those reports to make informed, strategic business.
Survey Security, Minus the Pat-Down
Posted by: Ashley Miles on: January 19, 2012
Getting the old holiday pat-down by a TSA agent last month got me thinking about security. Here at Zarca Interactive, the protection of your data is our top priority. We’ve recently moved to a highly secure office space and installed high-resolution cameras within our office to ensure that your data has more protection than Britain’s Crown Jewels. Our safeguards are in place, but are you doing everything possible to ensure the safety of your survey data?
Enabling SSL (Secured Socket Layer) in your surveys adds an extra layer of encryption to all transmitted data. SSL is essentially the TSA of the online domain. It serves as a checkpoint, only allowing your participant’s browser and our web servers to interact after we have given proof of our authenticated SSL certificate.
The SSL feature enables a uniquely encrypted channel for private communications. When participants submit their survey responses, you can rest assured that nobody’s eyes but yours will see the data — you get full-scale security without the full-body pat-down.
Planning Ahead with the Survey Calendar
Posted by: Meaghan Pyne on: January 10, 2012
My 2012 New Year’s resolution is to become more organized. This year I’ve made a conscious decision to clean my desk, make my to-do lists, and start thinking one step ahead. Just as our personal lives need an occasional re-examination, a survey project also needs a well-defined plan and basic organization to be successful.
Zarca Interactive makes it easy to organize your survey from creation to deployment with the Survey Calendar. The Survey Calendar helps you create a strategic plan, which answers several important questions about each survey, including the intended audience, the department(s) involved, and what will be included in the final report. Not only does the Survey Calendar make it easy to plan ahead, it ensures that you won’t over-survey any of your participants.
Once you’ve created a calendar of survey deadlines, you’ll be able to see whether you risk over-surveying. If one department is planning to send three client satisfaction surveys each month, and a manager is going to send bi-weekly post-event surveys, your participants will quickly suffer from survey fatigue and stop responding altogether. Begin planning every project on the Survey Calendar, and watch your response rates soar!
Stop wasting your time trying to organize the details of each survey by hand. Just like my desk dividers, pencil holders and daily planners are helping me manage a variety of projects in 2012, the Survey Calendar is a powerful tool that will improve the way you approach each new survey.
Hello, I Must Be Going . . .
Posted by: Rochelle L Levy on: January 5, 2012
You know that uncomfortable feeling when you pass the same person in the hall over and over and over? You go from saying a friendly “Hi!” to a more subdued “Hey” to an interior “My head’s down because I’m pretending to check my BlackBerry” as you stealthily slink on by.
You may not have any control over how many times a day you run into certain co-workers, but you can ensure that you don’t wear out your welcome with survey participants.
Zarca’s Touch Rules Management allows you to filter out certain people who have already received a certain number of survey invitations from you, or who have already participated in a certain number of your surveys on or after a particular date.
By managing your participant lists with Touch Rules Management, you show your respondents that you not only value their feedback but also respect their time. So, when they do hear from you, they’ll be more likely to participate in your surveys.
Avoid over-surveying with Zarca’s Touch Rules – your participants will remain loyal, and you’ll enjoy higher response rates.
The Fine Art of Email Delivery
Posted by: Desiree Tunstall on: December 13, 2011
You built a survey so powerful that you sent test invites to all of your colleagues with the subject line, “Look How Amazing Linda Is!” Your colleagues agreed, so you’re ready to launch your organization’s annual compliance study. It is imperative that everyone participates because the data obtained must be shared with the federal government. This survey is a big deal.
Before you hit the “Send” button, however, ask yourself if you developed a launch plan and attended to the email delivery logistics. If this sounds unfamiliar, here’s what you should do:
a) Determine a date and time to launch the survey, and inform prospective participants that the survey will be released then. This way, people know to expect a survey and can contact you if they don’t receive it.
b) Inform the company’s email administrator that you’re planning to launch a survey and provide the specific date and time in advance.
c) Present the email administrator with the Zarca Readiness Plan. This document includes valuable information to ensure email delivery.
d) After the Readiness Plan is implemented, confirm with the email administrator that both Zarca’s mail server and application server are white-listed. (Essentially, you’re looking for a “yes” to both items.)
e) Speak with the email administrator about threshold limits to determine the number of emails the mail server is prepared to process at one time. If you’re planning to send a survey to 10,000 people and the threshold limit is 500 per hour, you’ll need to consult with the email administrator regarding the launch plan.
Once the launch plan is in place and you’ve sorted out the logistics, send the survey to yourself and your colleagues. Participate in the test run to ensure that everything goes smoothly and according to plan. Once you’ve confirmed that everything works properly, distribute your survey.
Good luck and happy surveying!
Does Friday Feel Like Monday?
Posted by: Rochelle L Levy on: December 6, 2011
Everyone has a bad day at the office. Even the co-worker who greeted me daily with a way-too-peppy, “Good morning, Sunshine!” occasionally did so through gritted teeth. Nobody should expect to love their job every minute of every day.
But if you — or your employees — are having more bad days then good, and feeling an overall sense of dissatisfaction and lack of motivation, then action must be taken. According to Aon Hewitt, the global human resource consulting and outsourcing business of Aon Corporation, global employee satisfaction is at its lowest level since 2008. Worldwide, 44% of all employees feel a disconnection between their individual roles and their employers’ organizational goals.
It’s no wonder, then, that a majority of new visitors to the Zarca Interactive website are searching for information about Employee Satisfaction Surveys. Just in the U.S. alone, businesses are losing $370 billion annually to apathetic employees, yet 70% of leaders have no engagement plan or strategy.
If employee satisfaction is a topic of concern at your company, let Zarca Interactive help you get to the root of the problem so you can take appropriate action. We’ll work with you to ask just the right questions, monitor employee responses with real-time reporting, and create and run customized, powerful reports.
Get started by checking out best practices for conducting Employee Engagement Surveys. After all, the only thing worse than an office full of unhappy employees is an executive suite full of oblivious managers.
How to Increase Survey Responses: Understand Motivations
Posted by: Dr. Russ on: December 1, 2011
The critical ingredient for a successful survey project is a group of motivated respondents. There are some people who are naturally motivated to answer a survey, eager to share their opinions. Others couldn’t care less. So, how do you inspire every survey respondent to participate?
The study of human motivation has a long history in the fields of psychology and economics. One prominent way for businesses to look at motivation is the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA).
Companies measure costs such as money, time, and reputation before sending a survey. The benefits are usually measured in anticipation of increased business and improvements to the bottom line. Successful surveys do not just improve the company, they improve your customer relationships and communication practices.
Whether we realize it or not, we as individuals use CBA to make daily decisions. For survey participants, the costs are the time and effort used to complete a survey. However, the benefits for survey participants are often unclear or meaningless. You’ll always have narcissists who get a thrill at the chance to share their opinions. But, if you want to increase your response rate, then you need to share the benefits, or survey recipients won’t bother.
You may know the survey benefits for your company, but what’s in it for your respondents? What are their benefits of taking your survey?
Want to learn more? Please read my report: Maximizing Survey Participation
What is a Strategic Account Manager?
Posted by: Peter Abramov on: November 22, 2011
At Zarca Interactive, we take pride in our robust, user-friendly platform. Our clients tell us how easy our system is to navigate and how much they enjoy the ability to create complex reports in very little time. Features such as real-time feedback, social media integration, point and click multi-level pivot tables, and wizard-driven SPSS import/export are just a handful of complex tools offered by Zarca.
However, much like any software system, the power of Zarca’s features is dependent upon user expertise.
If you need to gain crucial insight from your employees or customers, but don’t know how to go about wording your survey, whom to survey, or even the type of survey to deploy, call our Client Support Team. If you want to incorporate media into your surveys or collect complex information, but you’re having difficulty applying these features, just call. If you have collected data successfully, and now you want to create complex reports, share reports selectively with coworkers or post charts on social networks, but are overwhelmed by the options, please call us.
Every one of our clients is assigned a Strategic Account Manager (SAM). This person gets to know you and your survey goals, becoming an invaluable member of your team. SAM team members work with clients in various industries including retail, finance, healthcare and higher education. Our SAMs provide guidance and expertise for everything from proper question types to assessing strategic survey deployments.
No matter what kind of assistance you need, we are here to support you in all aspects of your survey project.
