If you wish to collect
employee feedback or obtain demographic data, you are advised to take advantage
of online survey software. However, to benefit from the software, you must
ensure that it at least has the following 9 features:
- Secure encryption: Whether you talk of your employees or the customers, they are going to provide you with their data only if you can secure it. Ensure that the software uses encryption.
- Branding control: For getting more responses, you need to personalize the surveys you create. Logos, colors and other such things can help. Ensure you can use them.
- Multi-language support: Not everyone uses English and therefore, it’s important to ensure that the designer/authoring tools are available in other languages as well. And you should be able to take surveys in different languages.
- Spell checking: Spelling mistakes can change the context of your questions, mislead the respondents, and make them leave the surveys incomplete. Check the spellings and create impressive surveys.
- Response deletion: For various reasons, you may have to delete the responses. Ensure you can delete all the responses, if needed.
- Archiving: It’s always a good idea to archive old surveys for future reference.
- Tracking: Some participants respond to surveys anonymously, while others have no qualms in getting identified. Ensure you can track all of them and even the semi-anonymous ones. Also, the software must enable you to track the IP address.
- Resumption: Sometimes, the participants may not wish to complete the surveys in one go. So, you got to provide them the freedom to resume the surveys later. For this, find out if the software has some provision of saving the surveys for resumption.
- Designing: When you take a closer look at the survey software features, makes sure you specially focus on designing. Find out if you can preview surveys during design mode, copy and move pages, important questions from other surveys, etc.
