Your Ultimate Guide To Survey Software

Businesses and organizations can benefit from high-quality survey software to gather crucial information for their decision making processes. There are plenty of different options on the market when it comes to survey software. Before you choose one, it’s important to know which are the best survey platforms and what survey solutions are available for your needs.

This will help you to choose the best survey software and help you drive your business in the right direction.

What Is Survey Software?

Survey software serves as a professional market research tool designed to efficiently collect data through web-based, face-to-face, and telephone surveys. Its primary purpose is to enable businesses to seek input from their target customers, allowing them to tailor their strategies based on the insights collected.

For instance, in the context of launching a new mobile device, the software facilitates the process of understanding customer preferences, such as the desired size, camera quality, or the acceptable price ranges. By obtaining responses to such pertinent questions and confronting results, businesses can obtain an accurate and comprehensive understanding of customer preferences and their willingness to spend.

Survey software is a versatile tool with a wide range of applications, not just market research. Companies can use it to collect feedback from customers about products, services, brand perception, or overall customer experience or to measure employee satisfaction, engagement, and opinions within the organization.

Universities and educational institutions often use survey software to conduct surveys for research purposes, such as collecting data for academic studies, dissertations, or scientific investigations or simply to measure the student and academic body satisfaction.

Another common use is for political polling to gauge public opinion on political candidates, social issues, or policies.

Survey software often provides tools for data analysis, allowing users to generate reports, charts, and graphs to interpret and visualize the survey results. These reports can be shared with the team or with the client usually with a web link or by exporting them.

Professional survey software are usually offered both on cloud and on premises to meet the needs of all users, even those with more stringent security requirements, such as banks or healthcare institutions.

Breaking Down Survey Tools For Research

Survey tools offer researchers the means to design, distribute, and analyze surveys tailored to their specific objectives. We can divide the main features of a software survey into three macro areas:

DESIGN

• Questionnaire creation via GUI or code for maximum flexibility
• Unlimited questions
• Unlimited answer options
• Unrestricted logical conditions based on previous responses, variables and quotas
• Ability to use a variety of question types. From simple ones such as single or multiple choice to more advanced ones such as NPS, Max Diff, rating, slider, multimedia, for example.
• Simple or complex randomization of all questionnaire items
• Text piping of previous responses, sample data, quotas
• Integrated management of sample quotas
• Multilingual questionnaire management
• Sample management

DISTRIBUTE

By phone

• Integrated dialer and softphone for quick and easy setup at the interviewer stations
• Automatic management of calls and appointments
• Attempt limit
• Management of multiple numbers per contact
• Call priority
• Sample filtering
• Key-entry to speed up answer entry
• Integrated click-to-call
• Predictive dialing
• Dashboard for live monitoring of telephone agents
• Integration with web and face-to-face modules.

Online

• Generic and authenticated links. 
• Management of multiple links for each survey to track the source of respondents.
• Email and sms distribution, panel, social media, qr code. 
• Template customization (font, logo, colors, graphics). 
• Customization of entry links with variables in urls. 
• Integration with phone and face-to-face modules.

Face to face

• App for android and ios devices.
• Offline. 
• Data synchronization when connected. 
• GPS tracking for quality control.
• Silent Voice Recording for quality control.
• Collection of audio, video, photo, signature responses. 
• Anonymous or list-based distribution. 
• Integration with web and telephone modules.

ANALYZE

• Export of raw data in different formats, such as excel and spss.
• Tool for creating custom reports.
• Quality control section to validate valid interviews.
• Export reports in most common formats, such as pdf or ppt.
• Share results online with a simple link.
• All common chart types (bars, lines, area, pie, stacked bar, gauge, word cloud) and tables.
• Ability to cross-reference results from two questions or with one variable. 
• Ability to analyze data using crosstabs.

A key feature of a professional software survey is that related to licensing. The survey tool must offer a scalable and flexible formula that allows it to adapt to the workload of different business realities without compromising results. 

Pay close attention to licensing policies because often the most affordable solutions include hidden and onerous costs when you have to manage more advanced and sophisticated projects.

Summing Up

The right survey software will make your life easier and will enable you to manage complex projects in a simple yet professional manner.

When selecting a new survey tool, all you need to do is assess the main characteristics and check that it offers all you need for your projects.