Panel Management 101

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Why should you consider adding panel management to your survey software?

• Your response rate to web surveys (the percent of people who complete the survey) is declining.
• Your respondents, like those of this auto manufacturer, are complaining that they are being sent too many surveys.
• You need to easily target surveys to segments and subsegments of your customers for detailed survey analysis.
• Your respondents are complaining that surveys are too long.  You have to ask respondents questions you already know the answer to, such as the products of yours that they use and the services that they subscribe to (for consumers: their gender, age, location; for businesses: their size, industry, region).
• Your survey authors have to wait on IT to export mailing lists from your other systems.

Panel management assists with each of these items:

• By empanelling all potential respondents in a central database, you eliminate the need to rely on IT resources to generate recipient lists.
• By centralizing "touch management" for your survey research, you can make certain not to oversurvey panelists. Oversurveying is a leading cause of declining response rates.
• By profiling potential respondents in detail, you can segment "on demand" when sending out survey invitations.
• By integrating respondent profiles with CRM systems through CRM connectors, you can embed that customer data as hidden fields within a survey, streamlining the survey from the respondent's perspective.

Once usage of surveys has spread across an organization, panel management is a logical next step to begin to bring that research under control, while moving along the path to implementing online communities and true enterprise feedback management.