Zarca Interactive Blog

The Fine Art of Email Delivery

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?

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

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?

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.

Saying Thanks & Making Amends

Love getting gifts, but hate writing thank-you notes?

Whether you’re eight or 80, thank-you notes are something to tackle quickly and be done with, if only to stop the guilt trip from your mom — or your conscience. Of course, we all know it’s good manners to thank Aunt Edna for the birthday sweater or your boss for the holiday trinket box topped by a disturbingly furry reindeer, but, even more importantly, we know we need to maintain those relationships if we ever hope to receive another gift. Or a decent performance review.

Zarca is an expert in correctly managing relationships. With our new feature, Rules & Alerts, every one of your survey participants will be instantly thanked with little or no effort on your part. Simply set your desired condition — such as Completed Response Received — and a well-crafted thank-you note will instantly sail through cyberspace, landing in a duly impressed respondent’s in-box. After all, who doesn’t appreciate instant feedback, especially when it’s a courteous thank you?

But as important as it is to keep happy customers happy, it might be even more crucial to reach out to those customers or potential customers who aren’t so pleased to begin with.

For instance, I recently filled out a car rental survey, where I wrote about first being presented with someone else’s bill when dropping off my car (a good three times what I really owed) and then, once that was remedied, opening my credit card statement a month later to see I’d been double-charged. What response did I receive when I submitted my survey? None. What company did I rent my next car from? Not that one.

So here’s a real game-changer.

You receive a survey response that’s negative in some way. Maybe the answer option “Unsatisfied” was checked. Maybe an open-ended answer contains the word “Unhappy.” Or maybe, “Would you frequent our establishment again?” was answered with, “Highly Unlikely.” Reach out to that soon-to-be-former customer right now. Not in two weeks when the survey closes. Now.

Simply set your customizable condition, and you’ll instantly receive an email with the negative response. Then you can take appropriate action to win your customer back. Chances are, the recipient will be so stunned to hear from you that the original complaint will be forgotten — or at least forgiven. You may even find yourself with a customer for life.

We all want to feel like someone’s listening, that we’re not just whistling in the wind. Zarca’s Rules & Alerts makes it easy to open your ears, take immediate action and maintain those key relationships. (But, sorry, you’re on your own with Aunt Edna.)

Personalized vs. Anonymous Surveys

The Internet has allowed users to become connected to all forms of media in an unprecedented and personal way. For example, Google knows the sites that I visit most frequently and, therefore, caters to my tastes with its search results.

Unfortunately, the Internet also provides a level of anonymity that can lead users in a dangerous direction. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, check out the “Comments” section of any major news piece available online. Granting folks anonymity encourages candor, but it can also create a host of other problems.

So when you’re creating an online survey, should you offer anonymity?

Unfortunately, the answer is, “It depends.”

Each time that you create a survey, you must balance the pros and cons of anonymity with the impact of personalization. Here are a few things to consider before you launch an online, anonymous survey:

Full Candor from Respondents—Let’s be honest — respondents who feel “safer” knowing that you can’t identify them won’t be as inclined to hold back.
Response Rates—If respondents fear some form of retribution will follow the submission of their survey, they are likely to skip it completely.
Identity Protection—Studies have suggested that most drop-outs occur on survey pages that ask for personal information, such as demographics and email addresses. Many respondents fear that their sensitive information could be sold to marketing companies.
Inappropriate Responses—There’s always the chance that a bad apple will take your survey and use it as an occasion for vulgarity, bigotry, etc. Anonymity can increase this risk.
Ability for Follow-up—There may be times when responses will require further action on the part of the survey creator, whether to address a specific issue or adopt a certain policy. Anonymous surveys make it impossible to follow-up to responses.
Reliability of Results—While anonymity may encourage respondents to be more truthful in their responses, it can also encourage them to be less diligent in fact checking. Misinformation tends to spread far more easily through anonymous sources because accountability is impossible. However, highly personalized surveys may incur instances of what we call social desirability, respondents saying what they think the survey creator wants to hear.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create personalized surveys that were also anonymous? You can.

Anonymous surveys can be pre-populated to make the survey personal for each respondent. Also, Intelligent Reminders enable the survey creator to send reminders to non-respondents, even in an anonymous survey.

So when walking the line between personalization and anonymity, consider your audience, the data you’re collecting and, of course, what you want your survey to say about you.

Want Quick Feedback? Take a Poll

Whether your fashion blog begs the question, “Who wore it best?” or your customer service forum is interested to know, “Was this helpful?” embedded polls are a great way to get quick feedback about a single topic.

Like many of the other features in our platform, the Poll feature uses a simple wizard design that practically holds your hand through the process of embedding a poll into your blog or website. It really couldn’t be any easier.

However don’t confuse “easy” with “simple.” Our Poll feature is incredibly powerful. In just a few quick steps, your custom poll can be translated into several languages and matched to your company’s site. You can even display the results to participants immediately after they submit their responses.

Not only does a well-positioned poll help you gather valuable feedback, it also lets your customers know that you care about what they think. The more easily customers can interact with your website, the more likely they are to come back.

How Effective is Your Social Media Strategy?

According to several new studies, companies are not communicating effectively with their customers through Twitter or Facebook. Jan Rezab with Econsultancy Digital Marketers United writes about a study that clearly shows, on average, businesses respond just 5% of the time when customers pose questions on popular social media sites.

Maintaining active communication not only strengthens the relationship between consumer and retailer, it also improves brand equity in the public eye. Nothing sends a stronger message to the consumer than a company willing to stand behind their product and provide an open channel of communication and feedback. There’s a common misconception that all a company needs to be social in the digital age is a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Not so, say many researchers. The truth is that companies have to go beyond that first step and begin responding to those who show interest in their brand.

Nowadays, companies spend a lot of money attracting and luring new customers. Interestingly, consumers have actually become companies’ biggest brand ambassadors. I remember a time when identifying with a top retailer was considered selling out. This paradigm shift has put companies in a position that most do not seem to be managing well.

As business owners, some of the most valuable information we can glean from social media is consumer perception of our brand, products or services. The advent of technology has given us a platform to not only gauge feedback, but to have a direct line of communication with our end users. The moment our constituents feel wronged, technology allows us to instantly and immediately reach out.

Maritz Research surveyed an online panel of just under 1,300 U.S. consumers who use their Twitter accounts to communicate about products, services and companies. Nearly half of the respondents expected the companies to read their tweets, but only one-third received a company response to a tweeted complaint. Of the remaining two-thirds who did not receive feedback, an overwhelming 86% would have “liked or loved” to get some type of company response.

The message is clear and well-received by forward-thinking organizations such as Dell. The result is a stronger allegiance to brands, increased sales and the best kind of marketing a company can buy — an army of brand ambassadors.

How May I (Not) Help You?

A few Fridays ago, a friend and I made plans to meet at a local restaurant for a few games of pool after work. I knew this place sometimes closed the pool table rooms for private events, so I called ahead to make sure the tables would be available that night.

Me: “Hi. I just want to make sure there’s no private event tonight and the pool tables will be open.”

Employee: “They’re open now.”

(It’s 12:30 on a Friday afternoon.)

Me : “Hmm. Well, I’m at work now. I’m calling to see if they’ll be available tonight.”

Employee: “I don’t know.”

Me: “Could you maybe [hate to inconvenience her] . . . find out?”

Everyone has a frustrating customer service story where you’re left wondering if the company is purposely trying to drive away business. Conversely, customer service that goes beyond expectations can turn around a bad experience.

For example, my teenage son loves going to a certain restaurant even though the kitchen almost always messes up our order, and we have to wait a really long time to get our food. But, without fail, the manager comes to our table, apologizes profusely and gives us a free appetizer or dessert. The last time we ate there, the kitchen once again had to remake my order. But, this time, the manager insisted on comping not just that one dish, but our entire bill. This restaurant obviously has a systemic problem in its kitchen, but their outstanding customer service is what stays foremost in my mind.

As part of Zarca’s marketing team, I often speak to clients about their experiences using our online survey software. Yes, they love our advanced features and flexible pricing and real-time reporting. But what I hear over and over is how impressed our clients are with our customer service.

Whether they are signing a contract with our sales team, training on the platform with our account managers or troubleshooting with our technical support staff, here’s what our clients are saying:

“Extremely helpful.”

“Beyond professional.”

“Always quick to respond.”

We could have the most innovative, cutting-edge online survey platform in the world (and — admittedly biased — I believe we do), but apathetic, discourteous customer service could instantly trump all the hard work of our design team.

So remember to put as much energy into the client-facing side of your business as you put into your product or service. One positive or negative experience may be all it takes to win or lose a valuable customer.