When buying any new product nowadays, customer surveys of some sort always end up tagging along with the product. These are the companies’ way to receive feedback and gauge how their well their products are received by various customers. Many times these surveys are quite typical asking basic questions such as why a customer bought the product, how the customer found the product, income level, gender, etc. Companies appreciate feedback, however; is feedback from user surveys useful and relevant? Or do users just fill them out as fast as they can?
Just ask yourself, would you devote a precious amount of your time to fill out a survey that you may receive no direct benefit from? Many people would answer this question with a no. Still, companies persist with these questionnaires. Personally, I think that user surveys have severe limitations. Either people with extremely positive opinions or extremely negative opinions are prone to fill out user surveys. With data from essentially the two extremes of the populace, it is unreasonable to think that surveys can produce valuable information. A significant portion of users are not providing opinions and statistically the pool is not a sufficient representation of the population.
If a company does in fact rely heavily on user surveys, then it should provide incentives for its customers to fill out surveys. Companies can not take customer participation for granted. When mentioning incentives, price probably comes to mind quite quickly, and rightly so. However, once prices come into play executives need to ask themselves whether or not the information is valuable enough. If the information is valuable, then incentives should be provided and if not then the user surveys should be scrapped.
cdt5097
Good. I agree, although if you keep them short and interesting it is an easy way to get data of some use. The important thing is to know how representative a sample is and what other limits there are. Survey experts are pretty smart and can tell you if you ask. They certainly know about any biases
There must be a way to scale that image down. I guess you could use Paint before posting