7 Reasons Not to Survey on Paper: Find Out Why
If you're about to run a paper survey, here are 7 reasons that might just make you change your mind.
There’s no doubt that times change. Even though satisfaction surveys remain a key tool for businesses, the methods used to get them answered have shifted.
Who doesn’t remember being offered a service, or paying the bill at a restaurant or hotel, and being handed a small sheet of paper, often bright yellow, that instantly told you: I’m a survey.
For years, those brightly colored sheets captured the customer’s perspective. However, with the rise of technology, those printouts have almost been forgotten. I can’t recall seeing one in a long time.
Read: Technology and Your Business
This shift is completely understandable, since technology has firmly established itself in the market and leaves nothing untouched, and the world of surveys is no exception.
That’s why, if you’re about to create a survey and print it, here are 7 reasons that might just make you change your mind:
1.- A lot of manual work. It requires a great deal of effort from the team, since someone has to manually read and transcribe respondents’ comments, and after all that, they’ll most likely have to chart the data and present it in some corporate format. Phew! A long, unnecessary process by today’s standards. With technology, you build the survey, deploy it, and it delivers results so you can simply analyze them and make decisions about your business. Great, right?
Read: What to Ask Your Customers
2.- Saving time and energy. Paper surveys require a major investment of time on top of their cost, and in business, time is money. Keep in mind that the manual work can take hours that could be better spent serving your customers. So I wouldn’t risk it. What’s more, by the time you have the analysis and the results, time will have passed, and you could lose a lot of time and customers in the meantime.
3.- You can put technology to work for you. By far, digital surveys have won out over paper ones, since they can be interpreted using technology with a simple data dump. You can also chart super fast and calculate percentages with certain digital programs.
4.- Flexibility. Considering that your company or product should be constantly evolving and growing, it’s important for satisfaction surveys to be updated through their design, questions, length, and so on; in other words, a makeover. Reprinting the entire volume of surveys would be tedious, whereas with technology, making those changes is just a few steps away. So much wasted paper.
Read: 5 Common Mistakes When Creating a Survey
5.- Analytical reports. Paper surveys require someone to interpret them and create performance reports for management and the team. To do this, the quality manager has to spend many hours in Excel producing static reports. Digital surveys produce intuitive, detailed reports that let the team filter and segment information according to the operational aspects they need. On top of that, responses are sometimes incomplete or impossible to read.
6.- Pollution. One of the strongest and most important points is the pollution paper causes to the environment. In many cases we see surveys left behind on the streets or outside establishments, which is the clearest proof that customers want another way to access the survey. The environment will thank you for not using paper for surveys that, in the end, just get stored after the complete data is collected and take up a lot of space in your offices.
7.- Creativity and design. The more eye-catching the survey, the more attentive the customer will be, capturing their attention and, with any luck, getting you very favorable results. Remember not to overwhelm the customer with harsh colors like neon, since they’re very likely to close the screen on your monitor. Use friendly, simple colors that look clean and project professionalism, all depending, of course, on the type of business.
Read: Why It’s Better to Survey at the Moment of Purchase