Survey Portal: Panelist Web Sites Increase Response Rates
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Mar 12, 2009
A survey portal is a web site which your customers or employees can visit to see a list of surveys they've been invited to, as well as to review or update their profiles. The portal is a convenient destination for customers to use to manage their interactions with your enterprise feedback management system.
Common components of a survey portal include:
- A list of profiles that panelists can complete. Well-designed profiles should be synchronized with your CRM or HRIS system.
- A list of surveys that panelists have been invited to. Outstanding invitations are listed.
- Completed questionnaires. For later review by the panelist.
- Shared survey results. Aggregate reports from completed surveys, as well as discussions of how the organization is responding to the feedback it gathered.
Some of our customers have reported that their survey response rates doubled once they added a portal! One advantage of portals is that even if a member
unsubscribes from receiving
survey invitations, they will still be able to log on to the portal and see the surveys that they've been invited to. While many survey portals are standalone, those survey portals that generate the highest response rates provide respondents multiple reasons for logging in: for instance, to check on the status of open support tickets, see vendor headlines and news, and access other customer-only documents.
Survey portals cannot be considered
MROCs because they do not provide a method for
panelists to communicate with one another. While they start as simply interfaces to panels, survey portals are one step away from reliance on email lists and
one giant leap toward online communities.