Survey Software vs. Enterprise Feedback Management

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

How do survey software applications typically differ from enterprise feedback management solutions? 

Survey software is typically designed for the individual user, working on one or more survey research projects.  Core functionality includes:

• Survey Creation - Writing multi-page web surveys with open-ended and closed-ended questions.
• Templates - Starting with a wide selection of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, course evaluation and other standard survey instruments to choose from.
• Basic Conditional Logic - Skipping over certain questions and pages based on the answers to other questions.
• Multi-Language Support - Fielding one survey in multiple languages.
• E-mail Invitations - Sending out invites with hyperlinks to potential survey respondents and following up with periodic reminders.
• Basic Reporting - Viewing a frequency report or a list of verbatim responses for each question.
• Exportable Data - Saving survey data to file formats such as Excel and text files.

Vovici knows survey software well.  The PC Magazine roundup of six survey software applications in February 2000 featured three products - Perseus SurveySolutions for the Web, Websurveyor 2.0 and EZSurvey 99 for the Internet -  that are all part of Vovici's heritage (Vovici was formed from the merger of Websurveyor and Perseus Development, and purchased the Raosoft EZSurvey assets).  While Vovici knows survey software well, we've made a business of supporting customers as they've outgrown the needs for such software.  Vovici pioneered enterprise feedback because so many survey software customers needed more functionality.

Today, enterprise feedback management systems typically extend the core functionality of survey software with:

• CRM Integration - Where users grow tired of exporting email lists from their CRM system, CRM connectors can keep the EFM system in sync automatically.
• Advanced Analytics - When users want to drill down on results in detail, EFM survey analytics go beyond  simple reports.
• Triggers & Alerts - When users begin to think about survey processes, rather than projects, they can set up email alerts triggered by specific answers to the survey.
• Report Distribution - When users want to share results widely across an organization, or customize reports for different audiences or even for each individual, EFM report distribution can save time and energy.
• Quotas - When users want to limit participation in surveys, for purposes of offering incentives or for balancing responses by key segments, they can easily set survey quotas.
• Panel Management - When customers or other key constituencies are complaining about receiving too many surveys, panel management can be used to set up limits on frequency of surveys.
• Page Rotation - When respondents complain about surveys that are too long, page rotation is one tool for shortening the questionnaire from the respondents' perspective.
• User Management - A key part of sharing usage of surveys throughout an organization is defining different roles for different types of users:  some can write questionnaires, some can create reports, some can only view reports, and so on, as appropriate.
• Workflow Management - Users can draft surveys and then submit them to reviewers to edit, approve and publish, thereby by ensuring that research best practices are followed.
• Online Communities - In the past year, EFM systems have expanded to support online communities, providing better qualitative research than ever before.
• Advanced Branching - As questionnaires grow in sophistication, authors often add more complex rules around which questions are shown to respondents, so that they are answering only the most relevant questions and do not have to manually skip over questions that aren't appropriate to them.
• Response Randomization - Finally, to remove any order bias, the choices for questions can be shown in random order.

If your organization has any of the above needs, it is time to consider moving up from survey software to enterprise feedback management.