While online focus groups gain some momentum as an effective qualitative measurement, some organizations prefer a more traditional digital research technique: the online survey.
Aflac has been using online surveys for the past several years, and counts on them for polling stakeholders before launching major communications initiatives. “We did a survey with brokers in 2008, asking how they felt about Aflac and if they were likely to recommend us to clients,” says Missy Wood, second VP of insights and competitive intelligence at Aflac. “We now use that survey as a baseline for an annual poll of brokers.”
Other continuous survey efforts, says Wood, include brand awareness tracking and consumer polling on specific products and services. While surveys may seem cut and dried, they can be tricky to successfully execute. Here’s some suggestions from Wood on how to make the most of an online survey:
• “Having a clear objective sounds simple, but if you don’t have one for a survey, you’ll ask all the wrong questions.”
• “Even with the right questions, you might not be talking to the right audience. Align yourself with a good research company that has access to your target stakeholders. Then work with them to ask the right screening questions.”
• “The questions are everything. For perceptions, satisfaction and loyalty do scaled questions (1 to 5, for example). Use a few open-ended questions for opinions, and never ask a question that a respondent will have no answer for. It happens.”