BlockSurvey - The next generation of Surveys

[rombright]

Introduction:

Conceiving shorter and more meaningful surveys and rolling them out via user-friendly and secure survey platform is more likely to entice survey participants to complete online surveys. BlockSurvey was created exactly to solve this problem. This is the arrival of future of surveys.

What's wrong today?

Big fonts, too blurred, slipping out of screen??

Aah, the trials, and tribulations of reading content from a non-mobile friendly website.

If reading content can be a pain, imagine what it entails for someone to participate in an online survey that is not mobile-friendly? Big Pain.

Online surveys are on and will continue to play a major role in how organizations gain access to what their customers, competitors and even their employees think about them. Surveys are a powerful way to understand, study and analyse on how the world thinks about a person, a brand or an entity – they are powerful information gathering tools. No second thoughts on that.

The question, however is -

What lies for the future of online surveys?

Let’s observe some trends, drivers and factors that will influence the future of online surveys –

User-friendly is a ‘Must’

Surveys must be user-friendly. Period.

About 30-35% of online surveys are now taken on mobile devices making it a much more essential for survey companies to build a mobile-friendly survey platform. And yet, many survey platforms do not somehow conform to the norm.

How often have you faced difficulties in completing an online survey via your mobile phone? Quite often isn’t it? You are not alone.

Sometimes, it’s the font size or the website slipping beyond your mobile screen, other times it’s a slow painful page download – survey participants have enough reasons to be frustrated even as they attempt the survey.

End of the day, the survey participant becomes a victim of a poorly built survey platform and yes, the methodically conceived survey misses its mark and suffers a defeat. Survey companies will continue to lose out on these areas if they do not adapt to the mobile device requirements of the modern-day survey participant.

A bad thing that can happen to a great survey is when participants leave it mid-way and this is even worse if participants abandon survey because it is not mobile-friendly. More often than not, participants end up not even beginning the survey or leave it half-way through because of a stressful and frustrated experience.

Going forward there will be a marked shift in the way survey platforms will be built – very user-friendly and technologically sound or in other words – surveys will be device agnostic.

Survey-fatigue is a big ‘NO’:

Gone are the days when surveys were too long to be interesting and engaging. The modern-day participant is short on time, almost always. Adding to the mix, s/he is also short on patience levels. Capturing the attention span of such participants for a few minutes, if even, is a big enough achievement and how does one plan to do that?

Shorter and meaningful surveys:

Longer surveys – surveys that run more than fifteen minutes, give raise to survey-fatigue and survey respondents are more likely to abandon ship much before the destination. Longer the survey, higher the dropout rates.

Shorter surveys – ones that open up as soon as visitors land on the website are a great way to entice them to participate. Another interesting and innovative method is a pop-up survey of 3-5 simple questions that adorns the mobile screen right after a purchase. Survey companies should ensure that the survey form or the questionnaire does not hog the entire mobile screen but rather, pops-ups and ‘sits’ somewhere at the edge of the mobile – attractive enough but not disturbing enough.

AI begins to influence:

Enough has been said about the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) on processes and operations in a tech environment. Coming to online surveys, AI and ML can help researchers code open-ended responses in a much faster time frame and in a more efficient manner. This will help researchers save a lot on time and efforts which can be put to use in data analysis and drawing out meaningful insights.

Qualitative Research becomes priority

With the advent and massive spread of the internet, organizations now desire a direct connect with their customers. They wish to have the information right from the ‘horse’s mouth’. Organizations are eager to see how their brands have performed or will continue to perform and online surveys become important for gathering qualitative data. Online surveys are the best way to gather direct information from customers – they help save on time, money and efforts.

The future of online surveys will see combined efforts on optimizing both the structure of the survey and the technology support required. Online surveys will continue to be one of the most powerful and direct ways to gather and access organic and perhaps, authentic information.

They will be a step ahead from the traditional survey format as they can be laid out to a vast number of participants and across different geographies, in almost no time. And yes, collection of information from participants is much quicker resulting in shorter timeframe for analysis, gathering insights and taking the right and value-driven decisions.

Today, BlockSurvey is working towards providing the next generation surveying experience to peopole. Product Link: https://blocksurvey.org