RE: Customer Satisfaction Survey

[mlist -at- safenet-inc -dot- com]

Al Geist suggested:
> Jennifer_Gidner -at- Dom -dot- com wrote:
> 
> >Our small (2-member) Technical Writing shop has been told 
> that we will be
> >measured this year by the results of a customer satisfaction 
> survey that we
> >must create.  Yikes!
> >
> >We need good numbers to justify expanding our group and to 
> prove that TWers
> >really DO provide a valuable and necessary service.  I am desperately
> >seeking hints/help from anyone who has created such a survey 
> in the past
> >(or anyone who has any ideas, really)!
> >
> Hi Jennifer,
> 
> The difficulty is not in developing the questions to be used, but in 
> getting someone to submit answers to them.  This is not to 
> say that you 
> shouldn't put thought in the questions.  You should.  But, 
> you also need 
> to look at methods that will get your end users to take the 
> survey.  At 
> a former company, we got our best results when we incorporated our 
> survey into the website (and announced it on the home page).  
> This made 
> it easy for users to respond (using radio buttons and 1-10 
> scales) and 
> it allowed us to  gather information as to the level of user 
> expertise.  

I'll note that Jennifer said merely "...survey that we must create."
But let's assume that her little group-of-two also gets to determine how the
survey is administered. The webbish survey gives them some control that they
(or a programmer borrowed for the purpose) could put to good use.

Set the evaluation scales for each question at 1 - to - 5.  Each time a
participant selects "5", go to the next question.

Each time a respondent chooses less than five, open a supplementary box,
asking what failing of the documentation caused the lower mark, and don't
let the respondent advance to the next question until they've entered at
least 20 characters in the response box for "Please explain, briefly, what
you found to be less than completely satisfactory about <the subject of the
current question>."

At the end, show a summary (ok, just a concatenation) of all that the
respondent wrote for all questions (that didn't get a 5) and ask: "Is there
anything additional that you can suggest might improve the documentation?"

If they get a 5 on each and every question, flash (in big letters) "A
perfect score? No faults?... wait a minute... Mom? Is that you?"

The questions, overall, would be the usual:

1) Were you able to find what you needed?
2) Was it readable and easy to understand?
3) Was the information complete (or sufficient to let you do what you needed
to do)?
4) Was the information accurate?
5) Did we any words out?
6) Where did you get that hat? Oh, sorry. Is that your hair?  Perhaps if you
cleaned the screen better...

OK, that last one was just to see if anybody read that far.

Kevin

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