Mode refers to how you reach your customers to invite them to your surveys and how they return the completed survey to you.
To send invitations, your options include:
- In-person meeting
- Telephone
- Hand-delivered written invitation
- Direct mail
- Link/attachment/note in email
Irrespective of the method of invitation, customers may register their responses using any of the following modes:
- Face-to-face interview
- Telephone
- Hand-delivered written responses
- Written responses delivered via direct mail
- Faxed written responses
- Written responses sent via email/email attachment
Obviously, the most efficient means of doing this may be to deploy surveys online and invite your customers via email. However, you may not have email addresses for everyone. It is tempting to post a link on your website and invite every visitor to your website to participate in the survey. The obvious problem with this approach is loss of control over who completes they survey. Such loss of control leads to GiGo (Garbage In Garbage Out) – a fancy way of saying you can’t trust the results of your survey since the raw data is questionable.
Even if you don’t have an email address for every customer, it is the rare customer who may not have internet access – particularly in the US, Canada and Western Europe. So even if invitations to participate in the survey have to be sent via direct mail, it would be vastly more efficient to invite them to a website to complete the survey instead of sending back paper surveys that need to be scanned before data can be analyzed.
