One of the major reasons why people conduct surveys online is that it is easier and cheaper than contacting everyone individually and asking them all the same questions.  In an instant, an online survey can be delivered to hundreds and even thousands of people at the same time in exactly the same way.

Whilst this is great, one of the mistakes people often make when doing surveys is forgetting that convenience can be a trap.  Sure, it is easy and convenient for you to create and publish a survey for the world to answer, but if the data isn’t meaningful, and doesn’t lead to a correct insight, you won’t be able to make the best decisions.

At best this is a waste of time.  At worst this leads to making incorrect decisions which create all sorts of other future problems.

That’s why at Tandem we encourage people to use open-ended questions to understand context.  For example, instead of simply asking someone to rate the satisfaction of a product or service on a five point scale, you could ask ‘What was your first impression of our product’ or ‘What didn’t meet your expectations?’, or any relevant question.

But doesn’t this create more work for me?

This is usually the first thing that comes to mind upon the realization that asking open-ended text questions means trawling through lots of text-based answers.  Normally, this is a time-consuming and confusing exercise because everyone has answered the questions in different ways.  What are the common themes?

This is possibly the most important feature of our Premium Plans, the ability to analyse and summarise text-based data into common themes and suggested actions.  Through the power of Artificial Intelligence, it’s like having another team member do it all for you, but completed almost instantly at a fraction of the cost.

So remember to include text-based questions in your surveys and make use of our AI Summary feature in our premium plans.  To learn more about how you can get more from your surveys through text-based questions, simply contact our support team.