Advantages of online customer surveys
Compared with offline surveys conducted using paper questionnaires or interviews, online customer surveys offer a range of advantages:
- Easy access to participants via websites, newsletters, email, social media and other channels
- Short data-collection period, with no postal delivery and no manual entry of responses
- Surveys can be completed at any time and from any location
- High data quality, with no manual-entry errors and plausibility checks available during data collection
- Short customer response times
- Greater acceptance and therefore higher response rates
- Automated, targeted and personalised reminder and thank-you emails, with no postage or telephone costs
- Savings on printing and postage, as well as less work through automation and digitisation
- Simple and quick implementation without a lengthy learning curve
- A varied range of question types:
- Sliders and scale questions for continuous response values
- Drag and drop for ranking items
- Multimedia content, including videos, images and audio
- Skip logic, conditional visibility, redirects and branching question paths
- Required questions, randomisation and filters
- Item rotation to prevent order effects
- Plausibility checks and automatic validation of open-text entries and responses
- Real-time pretesting
- Collection of metadata such as operating system, browser and completion time
- A high level of participant anonymity can be ensured
- Graphical analysis at the click of a button and live results while the survey is still running
Disadvantages of online customer surveys
Although online customer surveys had some disadvantages in the past, these are now barely significant. Nevertheless, we would like to explain the perceived disadvantages so that you can form your own view.
- Limited access to the target group is often cited as a disadvantage. This assumption is now outdated because internet use has increased rapidly and the vast majority of customers can be reached online without difficulty. The same applies to representativeness: virtually all demographic groups relevant to surveys are now represented online.
- High dropout rates were also regarded as a disadvantage of online surveys in the past. These have improved considerably compared with offline surveys, and online surveys generally achieve even higher response rates. This is partly due to their increased acceptance and partly due to the varied design options available. High dropout rates can also be prevented through pretests and quality assurance using dropout analysis.
- Finally, survey tools used to be perceived as complex. Today, however, there are tools that enable users to create online customer surveys quickly and without prior knowledge.
Tip: If not all your customers can be reached online, you can supplement your online survey with offline surveys and subsequently combine the results in the online tool.
