Month: January 2012

Creating Complex Reports Quickly & Easily

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

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

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 . . .

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.