Online surveys let you create a survey within minutes. They eliminate the need for expensive scanning of bubble sheets or labor-intensive and error-prone manual data-entry. Online surveys thus guarantee savings of time and money. That’s bound to excite anyone. But there is more to online surveys…let us show you how.
When you conduct a survey, you are doing more than just data collection. Here are a few ways our online survey solution goes beyond:
- Not just data collection – Intelligent data collection. Being online, you can let computers do data validation, i.e. ensure the answers submitted by respondents are valid in the context of your survey. E.g. If you are asking people’s age, the system can verify that participants are entering numbers and that too within an acceptable range. You can eliminate bad data resulting from user error. With Zarca’s online survey platform, you are guaranteed a best of breed data validation.
- Surveys require Data Analysis. Data analysis means looking at the data you have collected from different angles so that you can understand what survey participants are saying. You may have heard of or felt the need for “slicing and dicing the data.” In the old days of surveys one person collected data and (later, sometimes much later) someone else (sometimes an external consultant) did data analysis. All that is changing now. Timelines are shrinking. Bosses want everything now. They want the data sliced & diced. They want interpretation, they want graphs and charts. They want it inside their PowerPoint presentation and newsletter. Zarca’s solution is designed with such users in mind. When data comes in you can slice & dice it on-the-fly. No waiting. And these complex reports are available to you without first getting a degree in statistics. You can get an overview of your findings or drill down to zoom into “areas of interest.” Zarca’s online survey solution is fully integrated with Microsoft Office solutions – so your reports can go straight into your newsletters and PowerPoint presentations.
- Share your findings. We rarely work alone. We need to collaborate with other stakeholders. Such collaboration used to have a significant overhead. In today’s world we collaborate with people across the hallway and across the world. And everyone wants the “latest and most updated” information. How do you keep everyone up to date? Zarca’s solution was designed for such collaboration. We support enterprise architecture. This means different users can log in to the same system yet see only what has been allowed to them based on permission levels. Collaboration becomes easy by allowing people easy access to what they need and restricting access to everything else. All this is handled through a simple point and click interface. Secure collaboration is another way Zarca’s online survey solution is easing the tasks of survey administrators.
- Integrate your existing data into surveys. Why you ask? So you get deeper insight, an expanded view of things. By using your existing data you can eliminate some questions from your online survey thereby making your survey shorter. All things being the same, shorter surveys have higher response rates. Secondly, by using data that you know to be accurate, you are not risking survey respondents providing it to you and inadvertently making a mistake. You have more data, you are confident it is accurate and you ran a shorter survey thereby getting a higher response rate.
- Automate. Repetitive tasks are best left to computers. You do not want to log in every morning to a system and check a certain report when the system could email you the desired data automatically. You do not want to check and see if a certain type of response was received or some thresholds were met when the computer could monitor that for your automatically and let you know as soon as that happened. What is the satisfaction level of your key customers? Have reports from critical surveys emailed to you every morning. And then ask the system to let you know as soon as a client indicates they are not satisfied with your organization.
- Avoid Over-Surveying. No doubt online surveys make the process of surveying easier. But that could be a double-edged sword. Given the ease, everyone can easily do twice as many surveys for half the money and time. The problem is each time you ask someone to participate in a survey, you are using up a little bit of your “relationship capital.” If you are not careful, you could cause "survey fatigue" in your audience. Zarca Interactive is proud to introduce the concept of Touch Rules Management. Each time you email someone (or touch them electronically) asking them to do something for you (participate in a survey), there will come a point where this person might feel you are over-doing it and stop responding to your requests. Abuse of Touch Rules is the reason many organizations are seeing a marked decline in response rates. Our system keeps track of each person you survey. The system can automatically restrict survey invitations based on how many times someone has been invited to or participated in a survey.
Thus, there is more to effective utilization of online surveys than merely data collection. Newcomers to online surveys experience these as practical challenges fairly soon after their initial surveys. Zarca Interactive addresses these challenges through a well-designed, easy-to-use solution. We have built the next generation online survey solution.
