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I wonder how she might flush out the "value add" part in the survey. As
we've recently discussed, good tech writers often experience end-user
problems first and are able to stop the show long enough to address
these issues prior to roll-out.
How would respondents know anything about Jennifer and her associate's
involvement in such matters unless they somehow lead the respondent?
I think this is important for as many of us know, few in our companies
have any clue that we provide a far larger service than being glorified
typers, er, typists.
> Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+cmorton=caiso -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+cmorton=caiso -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf
Of mlist -at- safenet-inc -dot- com
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 6:59 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: Customer Satisfaction Survey
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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