Does anyone survey their customers?

[Mark_A]

I was looking into this today.
An online questionnaire and results in an excel like format.

There seem a few companies offering free basic and more elaborate paid options.
Some have awful trust-pilot reports which makes me wary.

Has anyone any experience of a free or low ish cost option?

[graeme_p]

Have you looked at self-hosted instead of SaaS options?

Depends somewhat on your existing platform how easy it would be to deploy, but there are open source self hosted options out there.

[tangor]

In the past I have conducted user surveys and polls on the site server and run my own analysis afterwards.

What I did discover is surveys or polls need to be short, sweet, and a "one click" option per query. Anything more elaborate and you get no takers. The other thing noticed is about 1-6% of traffic even played the game and that makes it difficult to extrapolate what the other 99-94% actually think. Sample size is too small.

Scripts in php, perl and probably all the others as well, litter the web. Find one and try it out.

[Mark_A]

Hi graeme_p & tangor, I was hoping for a saas / cloud solution, because our web is run by an agency, so we would have to pay them for anything server side. But it isn't impossible so I will ask the questions.

As to a small sample tangor yes you are right we need a reasonable response for it to be meaningful, that said, to taste soup you don't have to drink the whole pot :-)

[engine]

It depends on numbers. There is a free, low number option on Survey Monkey. It doesn't cost too much to upgrade if you need big numbers.

[Mark_A]

Hi engine, yes 10 questions are free on Survey Monkey, not sure for how many respondents? their trustpilot reviews are not so great though.

[engine]

I've used the free option to great effect, and never had any issues. I guess people demand a lot from the free option, which is only meant to be a taster.
They have cut back the number of respondents over the years, but then, they are selling a service.
Try it, set up a free account, and see if it suits your needs for low numbers.

[tangor]

Bear in mind a survey is only as good as the questions asked. And HOW they are asked. The ones that give the best answers are NEUTRAL to viewpoint. In these days and times that kind of survey is getting harder to produce. (sigh)

Yes/No is specific. If options are offered the data is a bit less precise in small samples, unless there's a fudge judgement applied on the back end, which means the survey was flawed from the start.

Things to consider.

I do use surveys ... most are ONE QUESTION Y/N and get a 25%+ response (which is quite good). These are also ON PAGE, not a timed pop-up ("We'd appreciate you taking a short survey to tell us how we're doing"). Rarely successful.

If the survey is by a third party at least 25% of visitors with script/ad blockers will never see it.

Know your users and go from there.