Surveys for Startups, Small & Medium Size Businesses

How can we help Startups, Small & Medium Size Businesses?

There are many ways that startups, small and medium size businesses can use online surveys and questionnaires. Below are a few examples. As much as possible, an online survey should concentrate on one of these subjects and be targeted to the proper audience. Trying to cover too many subjects in a single survey will result in confusion, which leads to inaccurate results. Furthermore, it will lead to a long questionnaire which can significantly drop the participation rate.

• Current Customer Needs - You can create an online survey to determine how your services can be improved to fulfill your existing clients' requirements and objectives. This type of survey can be used to get ideas on how to improve your services, but most importantly, on which improvements should be made first.
• Potential Customer Needs - You can create an online survey to determine what potential clients for your products and services are looking for. You can find out if there are must have features or options that you are not currently offering.
• Potential Customer Loss - If you have a high number of interested clients, but none eventually close a deal, you may want to survey them in order to determine why they did not select your product or service. By asking what solution the lost client finally adopted, you can get some information on what you were missing. Since the client used the product or service of a competitor, you should keep this type of survey very short in order to increase the participation rate.
• Customer Satisfaction - Determine how satisfied are your current clients and customers are. Click here for more information on clients and customers and satisfaction surveys.
• Concept Testing - Before making changes to your products or services, you can use this type of survey to get information on what clients think about the proposed modifications. This type of online survey can be very useful. First, you can obtain assurances that the proposed changes will not result in unintended consequences for certain clients. Furthermore, it can server a notice to clients that changes are on the way, to avoid surprising your clients with the changes.
• Product/Service Usability - This type of survey can be conducted to get information on the difficulties that clients face when trying to use your product or service.
• Website Usability - It is important that clients have no trouble finding what they are seeking for when visiting your website. If the site's navigational structure is inadequate, many visitors will simply leave your website. Click here for more information on Website Evaluation Surveys.
• Quote Questionnaire - Clients can use an online questionnaire accessible from your website to request a quote. By using skip logic, you can create an intelligent questionnaire that will enable you to collect all the relevant information you need to provide your potential clients with a quote. Another advantage of this approach is that if you need to make modifications to the quote questionnaire, you do not need a programmer to make the changes. You can do them yourself using Interceptum.

How much does it cost?

The cost to carry out an online survey is far less than the cost billed by market research firms who carry out surveys through phone calls or on paper questionnaires. The cost can be as low as $0.30 per participant for an online survey, whereas the cost can be as much as $20.00 over the phone and $40.00 on paper (you need to pay individuals to print, distribute, collect, and enter the responses in a software application for analysis). If you subscribe to Interceptum for 4 months at a cost of $100.00 and you survey 400 participants to get the most reliable statistics, the cost per participant is only $0.25.

How long does it take to prepare an online survey?

Once the survey's questionnaire is drafted, the online survey can be put in place very rapidly, compared to phone or paper based surveys. Completing a phone-based survey takes a lot of time, since many phone calls must be made. Paper-based surveys are even longer, since you must take into account the time to distribute the questionnaires, the time participants will take to respond, and the time taken by the participant to return the questionnaire. Even worse, some participants might complete the survey, but never return it.

The longest task is to create the online version of the questionnaire, that usually takes between 1 and 2 hours for approximately 15 questions. The time required to create the online version depends mainly on the length of the questionnaire, the number of languages in which the survey is conducted, and the complexity of the skip logic used, if any.

Once the survey and all the questions are ready, an email invitation can be sent to participants in a few minutes. It is also very easy to send a reminder to invited participants who have not yet completed the survey.

Can you help us create and deploy our online surveys?

We offer a turn-key solution for online surveys. We can create your questionnaire, create the online version, and invite your participants, and analyse the results and produce reports. If you are interested in this service, click on the image below and use the contact us form to let us know what your survey requirements are.

If you want to cut costs, you can draft your own questionnaire, and we can review it to ensure you avoid certain common pitfalls, such as including too many open-ended questions that makes the analysis of results difficult.

What should my sample size be?

Ideally, in order to have reliable statistics, your sample size should be about 400 customers. However, a sample size of 200 can also be sufficient. See our publication on calculating sample sizes for more information. Increasing the sample size will not provide more reliable statistics, and in fact is counter productive because it induces survey fatigue. If you have multiple hundred clients a week, you should only survey a certain percentage of them.

How can we invite people who visit our website to participate in our online surveys?

You can invite people who visit our website to participate by using a type of survey known as an intercept survey. An intercept is a mechanism by which certain web site visitors are invited to participate in an online survey. By combining an online survey with an intercept, it is easy to find a target audience that should be invited to participate in the online survey. The interception of web site visitors can occur only on certain specified pages of the web site, so that only visitors who have viewed particular pages are invited to participate. Furthermore, other parameters, such as, the amount of time spent on the web site and the number of pages viewed on the web site can be used to invite only the participants that are more likely to participate in the web survey. Click here for more information on Intercept Online Surveys.

Case Study: Devine Beauty

We worked with the Devine Beauty to create a market research survey for a proposed business in the cosmetic services sector. Ms. Balepa drafted her own question. The questionnaire included questions on what products potential customers were interested in and price ranges they were willing to pay.

What Interceptum did for Devine Beauty

The first thing we did was to provide them with feedback on their questionnaire. The questionnaire included common mistakes such as not including a "Not Applicable" option on certain questions.

Once the they approved the modified questionnaire, we created the online version of the questionnaire and provided Devine Beauty with the web address (URL) of the questionnaire so that they could give the address to their potiential clients.

Testimonial

I am building my own business and Interceptum gave me professional advices for doing my survey. It was exactly what I expected. The results helped me to have accurate information about the price on the market. Beside that the team of Interceptum was available when I had questions.

Sonia Balepa

Devine Beauty, Ottawa, Ontario

Follow-up

The results obtained by Ms. Balepa convinced her that her plan would work. She has since started her own business named Devine Beauty.

Case Study: Fabienne Courtial

We worked with Ms. Courtial to create a market research survey for a proposed business in the cosmetic services sector. Ms. Courtial drafted her own question.

What Interceptum did for Fabienne Courtial

Ms. Courtial did almost everything on her own. We mainly answered her questions and provided some feedback on her questionnaire.

Testimonial

As the creator of a new service for women's nails, I needed to do some market research in this sector. Interceptum is the ideal product! Intuitive, with lots of functionality and the possibility to send emails to participants, it is by far the tool with the best value for money.

Furthermore, when I had a problem, the Interceptum team was very quick to respond and very professional. In a nutshell, I recommend this tool for large and small operations.

Fabienne Courtial

creator of a new nails service in Chalain Le Comtal, France