Editor’s note: Sam Goodner is CEO of Inquisite, an Austin, Texas research firm.

The satisfaction, loyalty and referenceability of customers directly impacts corporate growth and profitability. Therefore, measuring and managing customer relationships is critical to effective day-to-day operations and long-term strategic planning. Optimizing employee satisfaction is equally key to an enterprise’s success, since satisfied employees are more productive and provide superior service to the company’s customers. Frequent customer and employee feedback initiatives — something as simple as a survey — can provide management with valuable input on both short- and long-term decision-making, giving companies critical operational and strategic advantages over their competitors.

Why use the Web?

Today’s fast-paced, decentralized business environment and increased worker mobility have combined to pose unique challenges for companies of any size when gathering critical customer and employee feedback. The emergence of Web-based survey solutions enables enterprises of all sizes to achieve a new dimension in efficiency by integrating Web survey technology with existing infrastructure such as CRM and HR information systems. Today’s Web survey solutions are designed for the non-technical business user and make it easier for enterprises to take advantage of technology that gathers the data needed to make better business decisions and to transform a B2C or B2E satisfaction initiative into a practical, cost-effective reality.

The single greatest advantage in utilizing Web survey tools is the ability to rapidly acquire the customer and employee feedback critical in identifying issues, concerns and trends that contribute to dissatisfaction and attrition. Rather than the weeks or months required to distribute paper questionnaires and receive the results or to contact respondents by telephone, the Internet allows responses to be collected in a matter of hours. Bolstered with this information, organizations can take necessary actions to implement strategic and tactical solutions to increase satisfaction, reduce employee attrition and increase client retention.

Another obvious benefit of using the Internet is significant cost reduction. Web survey technology eliminates the production and mailing costs associated with conventional paper surveys. Research has shown that because Web surveys are easier to complete, response rates are significantly higher, resulting in increased data accuracy. Survey responses can also be validated during the completion process, minimizing data entry errors. And because survey results are automatically collected, they are available for immediate analysis.

Online survey administration, which allows users to manage the survey process through a common browser, is another Web-enabled capability that delivers concrete benefits. With this functionality, users can perform a range of administrative tasks, including activating and deactivating surveys, setting response limits and cut-off dates, purging surveys, viewing reports and publishing results on the Web. Users also can access and distribute reports to multiple appropriate audiences or export data to popular reporting tools like Microsoft Excel and SPSS.

Choosing the right technology

Awareness of the benefits that can be derived from a survey initiative based on Web technology is just the beginning. Faced with an array of survey tools in an expanding market, how do you make the optimum choice for your business needs? Based on input gathered from executives across the country, the following overview highlights some of the key features that should be evaluated when selecting a survey system.

Ease of use

Not surprisingly, a tool that requires substantial technical expertise will quickly become shelfware. An easy-to-use program lets virtually anyone create, deploy and manage a survey, which minimizes the learning curve, reduces IT support and simplifies the survey process.

Installation options

Survey tools can be installed either as a hosted application service provider (ASP) solution through a third-party Web site or as a licensed product directly installed on a customer’s server. The installed option allows the client to exert maximum control over IT performance and custom configure based on their security requirements. An ASP option generally speeds implementation, minimizes upfront ownership costs and can overcome a lack of IT staff and infrastructure.

Survey appearance

A great-looking survey invites more responses than one that looks unprofessional or is too time-consuming to complete. A higher response rate improves the accuracy and resulting value of the data. A good survey tool allows you to customize the exact look of your surveys to match your corporate identity and existing collateral by adding backgrounds, images and HTML templates. Whether a user opts to start from scratch or to take advantage of provided templates, many Web survey applications can produce professional-looking surveys at minimal cost. Question design and planning

Question design and planning remains one of the most challenging aspects of survey research. Web-based survey solutions offer a variety of features that help users with question design. Multi-scale questions allow users to design survey questions that can measure several related factors simultaneously. A traditional dual-scale question might measure, for example, the satisfaction rating a respondent gives a company’s help desk as well as the importance the respondent personally assigns to help-desk support.

Answer randomization allows users to improve the validity of surveys by removing the statistical tendency of respondents to select some answers more often than others based on their positions within the list of available answers.

Automated content guidance

Sample survey content, like question-and-answer scales, can be selected from the product library, or users can create their own questions and archive them for use in future surveys. And the optional use of survey wizards (automated shortcuts) provides step-by-step guidance for the non-technical user. After guiding the user through a few questions, survey publication wizards can make the distribution process as simple as a mouse click. Once a survey is ready, it’s easily deployed to the Internet.

Invitation management

Some survey tools will allow you to manage the entire survey invitation process by loading e-mail addresses into a database, distributing survey invitations at specified times, tracking responses and sending e-mail reminders.

Analysis and reporting

One of the greatest advantages of Web surveys is their ability to immediately analyze and report survey results. Online reports typically include counts and percents, descriptive statistics, ranking summaries, pie graphs, bar charts and text responses. Reports can be viewed online or published to the Web. In addition to viewing survey responses in a browser, many survey products will export data to reporting tools like Microsoft Excel, Adobe Acrobat and SPSS formats. Scalability

When evaluating a Web-based survey solution, managers should consider both the current and future needs of the organization. Tools designed to support an unlimited number of surveys and respondents are more appropriate for a growing company or a larger organization surveying across a global corporate enterprise. Security

A feature like respondent authentication allows only designated respondents to take a survey and precludes their responses from being collected more than once - without identifying questions. From an IT perspective, users can control access to administrative functions, reports and data through passwords. Security lockout features can be used to disable access after a failed number of attempts, such as using an incorrect password.

A few Web survey tools offer security features to protect the integrity of the data, such as use of the Secure Socket Layer (SSL), so all communications with surveys and the administrative site can be encrypted to protect the information as it travels over the Internet. Stored survey responses can also be encrypted to protect the data from unauthorized access.

Return on investment

Although the target audiences were different, two industry leaders recently shared how they embraced Web survey solutions to gather the data they needed to make better business decisions. By using a Web-based survey tool, both companies were able to rapidly acquire customer and employee feedback critical to identifying issues and making real-time changes.

Wheels, Inc., a large full-service U.S. fleet management company with annual revenues of more than $1.5 billion, has begun using Web-survey technology to gauge the quality of service its customers receive through the company’s national network of authorized automotive repair and maintenance facilities. Based in Des Plaines, Ill., Wheels manages the life cycle of fleet vehicles, from acquisition and operations to maintenance and remarketing, for more than 450 customers in the corporate, government and service sectors.

Likewise, executives at Cleveland-based KeyCorp, a large bank-based financial services company, know that optimizing employee satisfaction is key to the success of this Fortune 500 company. KeyCorp uses surveys as part of its business-to-employee (B2E) strategy to gauge the effectiveness of its training and benefits programs among a workforce of almost 22,000 employees across 45 states.

The use of a Web survey solution has enabled the KeyCorp team to significantly increase the number of employee surveys administered. Since the solution’s implementation in early 2001, KeyCorp has nearly doubled the number of internal surveys it conducts - without significant staffing increases. In 2000, just prior to the implementation of a Web survey system, Key Market Research deployed 70 surveys. In 2001, that number grew to 100, and more than 150 surveys were completed in 2002. Although the number of survey projects continues to rise, only one additional analyst has joined Key’s staff of four research project managers since the implementation.

In July 2002, Wheels began using a Web-based tool to poll drivers who have been involved in accidents or who require routine maintenance about the quality of service they are receiving at the more than 90,000 facilities in the company’s authorized service network. Drivers are asked by Wheels to rate the quality of service for all aspects of the repair process - everything from the knowledge and responsiveness of the shop personnel to the speed and quality of the repairs to their vehicle. Drivers also are given the opportunity to recommend whether vendor locations should remain within the service network.

Prior to the implementation of a Web survey application, Wheels used paper surveys to poll drivers on the firm’s various customer-service initiatives - a process that could take eight weeks from beginning to end. Web surveys now serve as the source of benchmarking data used to identify areas needing improvement in fleet operations. By using the Web, Wheels’ survey process has been reduced to just two weeks, eliminating aspects of conventional survey deployment such as customization, design, printing, postage and manual data entry. Wheels conducts between 25 and 50 customer surveys annually and fully expects this number to grow.

Make better decisions

The advent of the Web-based survey enables enterprises of any size to quickly gather the strategic intelligence necessary to make better decisions. As the foundation technology of many successful B2C and B2E strategies, Web-based surveys can help CRM and HR initiatives achieve new standards of accuracy, impact and cost-effectiveness.