Best Practices to use a Survey App to Collect Data and Get Feedback

You need to take decision wisely on buying your Survey App and then use it in the best possible way. Let's review how you do this.

1. Choose the right device for conducting surveys

Using a Survey App effectively also depends on the device you choose on which you will be using the app. Survey apps can be used with the help of multiple types of devices like iPads, iPads, Android Tablets and Mobile Phones. But you need to choose that device which best suits your requirements.

For instance, if you want to take feedback at a dine-in restaurant, a 7 inch tablet (Android or iPad Mini) would be great. They're easy to hold and pass around. For market research and for feedback on-the-go, you can hand over mobile phones to your staff to get customer feedback. They're non-bulky, cheaper and won't be a lot of effort for your staff.

Likewise, at an event or at a quick service restaurant or a mall, you'd rather place the tablet on a kiosk stand for unattended feedback. When putting up kiosks, 10 inch tablets work great since people of all age groups come to use those and 10 inch tablets give you larger font and are easier to read especially for kids and elderly people.

2. Create Device-friendly Surveys

While on-boarding customers at Zonka Feedback, we have noticed that a lot of customers tend to replicate their existing paper feedback forms on the Zonka Feedback Survey App. While keeping the questions is a great idea, especially if you're using your old data for comparisons, I don't advise you to always copy the survey word-to-word. Utilize the technology to help you get better response rate. Here's how -

• Make your surveys less wordy
• Add skip and hide logic to create a better user experience
• Keep text fields and input fields only where necessary
• Make your surveys visually appealing
  
  

3. Make White-labeled and good-looking surveys

Most survey apps let you create white-labeled surveys. White Labeled Surveys means that you're adding your company logo and branding to your feedback form. You can customize the look and feel of your survey along with your own brand logo. Using a Survey App with white-labeled surveys helps you present feedback forms that your customers and respondents can relate to and contributes to your brand marketing. 

Moreover, keep in mind that nobody wants to spend much time on a form that doesn't look good. So, always try to make your surveys visually attractive and good-looking in order to get a better response rate. Good looking surveys with clearly defined questions help you engage your customers better. 

4. Introduce your survey purpose & end with gratitude

Most survey applications give you the option to add a Welcome Screen and an Exit Screen to your surveys. These are great opportunities to engage with your audience better. Use the welcome screen to tell the respondents about the purpose of the survey, about how much time they may take to complete the survey and request for their participation.

In the Exit Screen, thank the respondents for their time and share any other crucial information you may want the respondents to know. For example, if you're opening a new store, or if you'd like to add an additional email address or website for getting more detailed feedback - you can use the Exit Screen to do that.

Using Welcome & Exit Screens add a personalized and human touch to your surveys. 

5. Pick a Survey App that works Offline

We all get stuck with bad internet connectivity a lot of times. But lack of internet connectivity should not create a hindrance in capturing data and customer feedback. This can be possible through an Offline Survey App.

Make sure while selecting your survey tool that it works as an offline survey app. An Offline Survey App essentially continues to take feedback and save responses locally in the device and then syncs the responses automatically once the Internet is back up. This creates a seamless experience for the respondent and lets you capture data even without WiFi. 

6. Choose a Survey App that helps create Anonymous Surveys

Anonymous Surveys are those that enables the respondents to respond to a survey without sharing their identity. At times, you need to create Anonymous surveys to get honest feedback and actual and more reliable survey response data.

For instance, you may need to capture Employee Feedback where the employees do not feel secure to share feedback with their identities. You may need to collect Patient Feedback from the patients that want their information to be confidential. You may need to capture Student Feedback wherein an students are not comfortable sharing their identity  and want to give honest feedback.

Moreover, there can be customers that are not comfortable sharing their personal information with others. Anonymous surveys are best in such situations. So you must choose such a Survey Software and app that enables you create Anonymous Surveys, and switch off the respondent tracking whenever needed.

7. Turn on one-app mode in your device (through App Pinning or Guided Access)

Both Android devices and iOS devices (iPads and iPhones) offer default modes to turn on one-app mode, which essentially means that when you're using one app, the respondent won't be able to exit the app. On Android devices, you can do this with App Pinning option and in iOS Devices you can do this by turning on Guided Access. 

• It helps in ensuring that people stay on the app and don't exit the app and start using the tablet for other purposes. 
• It makes it easy for staff to manage the app as well, else they would constantly have to turn on the survey app.

8. The survey should auto-restart after it finishes

The survey software nowadays enable you to create such survey which auto-restarts when one survey finishes. Especially in case of unattended kiosks surveys, it is very important that you use this feature of your survey app so that when one person finishes his survey and submits it, the app automatically prepares it for the next person.

Moreover, if a person leaves the survey in between, the survey should close automatically so that another person cannot give any false answers in the same survey. So if the feedback from remains untouched for seconds, your survey app closes it and displays another fresh survey for the next person.

9. Train your staff on the app you use

Last but not the least, you must train your staff to use your survey app. If your staff don't know how to use it, how will they guide the customers to do so? Therefore, train your staff to use the survey app so that they can assist the customers in using the app and also fix it in case of any small issues.

Despite all these best practices, there is an important practice which you need to do i.e. to choose the right Customer Feedback tool or Survey app. This is a very crucial decision which will effect the success of your survey.

So, choose wisely a powerful survey app which lets you follow the above best practices. This means that it should enable you to customize your survey and make it visually attractive along with your brand logo, provide offline support, auto-restarts after a survey is completed, provides kiosk support and so on.