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I've been involved in these both from product marketing and documentation
perspectives. A couple of tips I can offer are:
* Offer a prize. People love a bit of swag, whether it be mouse pad, t-shirt
or stupid, glowing yo-yo.
* A 10% return rate is nirvana. I've put documentation surveys in boxes that
were sent to roughly 5000 customers and not one was returned. It could have
been a lousy survey, but it indicates how few people do them.
* Be brief. I read somewhere that 8-10 questions was pretty much the upper
limit for the casual survey-taker.
* Unless you're a politician, don't ask questions with vague or relative
answers. Asking if users if their satisfaction level is low/medium/high or
if they use a manual never/rarely/often/always generates useless data. The
more empirical, the better.
Hope that helps. Thanks. DB.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael_Cohen -at- hyperion -dot- com [mailto:Michael_Cohen -at- hyperion -dot- com]
>
>
> Hi all:
>
> We are considering setting up a Web server to provide
> Web-based feedback surveys to our customers.
>
> I am interested in hearing about other people's experiences
> in this area. For example: What kind of hardware and Web
> server software are you using? What kind of response rates do
> you experience? Do you use third-party survey software or
> just simple HTML forms and help from your IT department in
> setting up response-forwarding scripts?
>
> Any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
>
> - Michael Cohen
>
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