Online questionnaires are used extensively to collect information about customer preferences, employee satisfaction, and other business-related topics. But a growing number of creative individuals are applying online questionnaires to tasks that have nothing to do with traditional business purposes.

They are using these powerful tools as convenient, cost-effective aids to education, communication, personal organization, and just about anything else they can think of.

Surveys in the Classroom
Online surveys have found a variety of applications in college classrooms, in subjects ranging from statistics to sociology.

For courses in statistics, students can apply the statistical principles they are learning in class to surveys they construct themselves. This type of exercise gives them an eye-opening appreciation of how abstract concepts can be used to make sense of real world data. Mineful’s questionnaire software allows students to employ some basic tools of data analysis, including such things as cross-tabs and frequency distribution. The professor can create and upload data and all students can access this information and do homeworks and analysis based on this data.

Online questionnaires are also becoming widely used for courses in sociology and political science. They provide an easy, relatively inexpensive way for students to conduct research on political opinions and a variety of personal preferences. By seeing first-hand the complexities involved in sampling public opinion, students can gain a healthy skepticism about survey results they see reported in the news.

Academics pursuing research in public health are using online surveys to learn more about such topics as exercise habits, drug use, and eating patterns. Just about any type of research involving human activity can benefit from online surveys.

Surveys as Communication Tools
Businesses have traditionally used surveys to collect information from customers. Now, with the growing popularity of social media, surveys are also becoming a communication tool.

For example, a hotel chain might send a quick survey to all of its Facebook “fans” asking about their favorite vacation destinations. Typically such a survey will take less than a minute to complete, and respondents will have a chance to win some type of prize. Respondents will be encouraged to check back in a few days to see the results of the survey. Using tools such as those offered by Mineful’s questionnaire software, the company can easily compile the results of the survey and present them in eye-catching charts.

Such a survey serves several purposes. It reminds customers about the company’s hotels. It shows customers that the company is interested in their preferences. It encourages customers to come back to the company’s Facebook page. And it serves the more traditional purpose of collecting information from customers.

Your Personal Database
People are even using online surveys to keep track of personal data. For example, they might use an online survey as a spreadsheet to keep track of their weight or time spent exercising.

Serious dieters might use questionnaire software to record the number of calories they consume, even when they’re traveling.

Online questionnaires offer a number of advantages as personal organization tools. They are easier to use than most spreadsheet programs, they produce colorful charts with just a few clicks, and they can be accessed from anywhere.

Like so many other digital tools, online questionnaires are finding a wide range of applications that their creators never intended.

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) January 26, 2010 -- Marketing professionals are making better use of consumer feedback, demographic data and purchase history. By understanding the relationship between consumer characteristics and opinions businesses can better target marketing campaigns, understand consumer needs, and improve current products and services.

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The past few years have seen explosive growth in the use of online surveys. The reasons for this development are obvious. Online surveys cost less to conduct than in-person or phone surveys, response times are faster, and the results are easy to compile and analyze because they are already in a digital format. But no survey method is perfect, and online surveys have been criticized by some as being biased because they collect information only from people who have access to the Internet.

Is Sampling Bias Inevitable?
In fact, most surveys must deal with this type of bias. For example, telephone surveys collect information only from households that have land lines, a shrinking percentage of the population. Paper surveys require that respondents have a certain level of literacy. Online surveys have the same requirement, as well as the obvious additional requirement that respondents have access to the Internet. As Internet access becomes more and more widespread, this is becoming less of an issue. According to recent estimates, more than 74 percent of people in North America have access to the Internet, and the number is growing steadily. Still, there is no question that Internet users represent a more affluent, well-educated segment of the population.

Online surveys must also deal with the common sampling problem of non-response bias. In most surveys, a certain percentage of those solicited will not respond. Survey administrators must somehow determine if non-respondents skew the survey population in some way.

Survey administrators must also have some means of excluding responses from people outside the target population. Because the Internet is such a wide-open, boundary-less medium, the response to a survey may be coming from a broader population than the administrator intended.

Finally, survey administrators may have to deal with sampling bias because of the sites they use to solicit responses. For example, the population of Facebook users includes more women and young people than the population of Internet users in general, so it seems likely that these groups would be over-represented in a survey conducted through Facebook.

Removing Sampling Bias
Mineful software offers a simple but effective way to deal with sampling bias. Post-stratification allows a survey administrator to correct for groups that are over-represented or under-represented in a survey population. Here’s how it works.

Survey respondents are divided into homogeneous subgroups (strata). For example, respondents might be divided into the strata male and female. Responses are recorded separately for men and women, and then a sampling fraction is applied to give each group its correct weight in proportion to the target population.

For example, suppose that a survey administrator wanted an equal number of responses from men and women. As it turned out, sixty percent of respondents were men and forty percent were women. The sampling fraction would allow the administrator to take all responses into account, but would give proportionally more weight to the response from each woman. This would allow the survey results to be an accurate reflection of the target population: half men and half women.

The same method can be applied to correct for imbalances in race, education, age, and other factors. The key to using post-stratification is to identify areas of potential sampling bias and then use survey questions to determine if respondents accurately represent the target population. In the example we used, the survey would ask about gender. Such questions would allow the survey administrator to use post-stratification to reduce the effect of sampling bias.

Before you commit thousands or millions of dollars to an ad campaign, you would like to have some reassurance that you will be getting a decent return on your investment. The best way to predict whether a campaign will be effective is to do some upfront advertising evaluation.

In the past, pre-testing ads was a cumbersome, time-consuming process, typically involving focus groups and in-person interviews. Today, online surveys offer a fast, cost-effective alternative to traditional testing methods.

Advertising Evaluation

What should an online survey measure? Most advertisers would agree on these eight parameters:

1. Recognition. When advertisers test recognition, they are just trying to determine whether respondents remember seeing an ad before. For example, a survey might show respondents several ads and ask which ones they remember.

2. Recall. Advertisers use the term recall to describe what a viewer gets out of an ad. For example, a survey might show respondents an ad with the brand name removed and ask what brand the ad is promoting.

3. Attitude and opinion. These questions are meant to determine how respondents feel about a product based on an ad.

4. Comprehension. Questions about comprehension test how well respondents understand an ad. These questions are particularly worthwhile for ad campaigns that rely on allusions or subtle messages.

5. Credibility. These questions are meant to determine what portion of respondents believe the claims made in ad.

6. Persuasiveness. Questions in this category are meant to determine to what extent respondents are persuaded to adopt a viewpoint promoted in an ad.

7. Buying predisposition. These questions may take a variety of forms. For example: “How likely are you to buy this product in next month?” “How do you think this product compares to specifically named competitors?” These questions are meant to determine how much an ad encourages participants to take the next step and make a purchase.

8. Ad rating. This is a subjective overall measure of what respondents think about an ad. Do they find it amusing, annoying, aesthetically pleasing?

Depending on the circumstances, advertisers may decide to weigh some of these parameters more heavily than others. For example, if an insurance company is trying to counteract stories about unfair treatment of policy holders, it may value credibility more than other parameters.

Making Sense of Survey Responses
Responses to questions in each of these categories can be useful in themselves, but they become more useful when viewed in relation to each other. For example, what topic correlates most strongly with buying predisposition? How is comprehension related to recall? A statistical tool called conjoint analysis can help advertisers understand these relationships by showing how specific variables interact.Conjoint analysis can also show how different features of an ad affect the eight parameters discussed above. For example, respondents might be shown different versions of an ad and asked questions intended to measure recall. The goal is to determine what combination of features in an ad has the strongest positive effect on a given parameter.

Mineful’s software makes advertising evaluation easy to perform, giving advertisers valuable guidance before they invest in major new campaigns.

Customer satisfaction scorecards are becoming an increasingly popular way to make critical information available to a broad range of employees.

A scorecard or dashboard in a management information system serves the same purpose as the dashboard in a car. It displays complex operating data in a way that is easy to read and interpret. Dashboards require no special knowledge of statistics or information technology. They use widely understood presentation methods such as line graphs and bar charts. Their ability to summarize large amounts of data make them a powerful tool to help managers track customer satisfaction.

A typical customer satisfaction survey asks people to express their opinions about such things as quality, price, and ease of purchase. To be useful, the data generated by such a survey needs to be summarized and interpreted in a way that managers will understand. Dashboards perform this important function. A typical scorecard might track three categories of data on customer satisfaction: Key Indicators, Overall Satisfaction, and Reasons for Dissatisfaction. Instead of trying to analyze responses to 15 or 20 survey questions, a manager can tell at a glance how the company is doing in keeping its customers satisfied.

Slicing and Dicing Data
Dashboards offer simple ways to sort data. For example, a dashboard used by a chain of craft stores might display “helpfulness of sales staff” as a key indicator of customer service. Marketing executives could use this indicator to determine which stores are doing a good job of helping customers and which stores need to provide their staff additional training. This key indicator might also be sorted by customer service representative or by type of product purchased. Marketing executives might discover that some customer service representatives are not doing a satisfactory job, or they might find that customers want more help when shopping for certain types of products.

Customer satisfaction scorecards can also show how key indicators are related to overall customer satisfaction. For example, a dashboard might show that “knowledgeable staff” is more directly correlated with overall satisfaction than “ease of purchase.” This information might lead managers to devote more resources to training customer service representatives rather than adding cashiers.

Dashboards can also highlight trouble spots. For example, Mineful’s software can provide a robust analysis of “reasons for dissatisfaction” along with simple displays to identify areas that are most in need of improvement.

Tracking Trends
One of the most useful features of dashboards is their ability to illustrate trends. Businesses typically use dashboards to identify changes from month to month or from one quarter to the next. Is “overall satisfaction” trending up or down so far this year? Are the main reasons for customer dissatisfaction different from what they were a year ago? Which of our stores has made the greatest gains in customer satisfaction since we initiated our new training program? These are the kinds of questions that can be easily answered with dashboards.

Customer Satisfaction Scorecards from Mineful
Mineful’s dashboards enable clients to determine what types of information will be available to different types of employees. For example, a store manager might see data sorted by customer service representative, while a regional manager might see data sorted by store. The key to getting the most out of dashboards is to provide the right information to the right people in a format they can easily understand and use.

Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year to you and your loved ones.

We have been busy at Mineful and are ready for some time away with our loved ones. Before we do that, we wanted to let you know about our newest feature.

Everyone who drives a car understands the importance of a dashboard. How fast are you going? How much gas do you have left? Are there any warning lights flashing? Survey dashboards provide one consistent view of product and customer opinions. This allows decision makers to see what's working and what needs to be changed.

Watch our 3-minute video on how to create dashboards with Mineful:
http://www.mineful.com/video/survey_dashboards.html

Characteristics of Mineful's Survey Dashboards:

• Access from anywhere there is internet.
  
• It takes 3 seconds, not 3 hours, to understand the key information you need.
• Tabbed dashboards make navigation easy and intuitive.
• Dashboards are automatically updated with the latest available data.
• Dashboards allow you to export charts to use in presentations.
• Dashboards can use data from multiple surveys simultaneously.
  
  

If you have further questions, contact us info at mineful.com.

Enjoy the Holidays as we prepare for an exciting new year.

The Mineful Team

It's time to take Mineful to the next level! We are looking for a talented software engineer to join our team in Downtown Chicago. Join Mineful from the early stages and leave a mark in the product. Your contributions will not go unnoticed.

You can apply here: http://bit.ly/4xEUJ7

Here are the details:

A start-up marketing analysis software company located in downtown Chicago is looking for a highly motivated engineer. The entrepreneurial engineer should be willing to give up the big bucks in the short term for a stake in the company in order to reap the benefits in the long term. Ideal candidates will have the experience and skills in the full range of user friendly, scalable front-end systems to back-end technologies that will scale to millions of transactions per day. Your contributions will directly impact performance, customer experience, and the growth of our business.

Requirements and Technologies:

• 2+ years java application development preferably in a fast-paced and dynamic environment
• Ability to manage all aspects of the software development lifecycle
• Experience with Java, Hibernate, Spring, Web Services (RESTful)
• Working knowledge of a web framework
  - We use JSF and SEAM, but experience with other frameworks is OK
• Expert Javascript/HTML/CSS/Ajax coding skills
• Experience with relational databases like MySQL
• Strong command of web standards, CSS-based design, cross-browser compatibility
  
• Good understanding of web technologies (HTTP, Apache) and familiarity with Unix/Linux
• Ability to work in the UI layer as well as the backend
• Excellent communications and analytical skills
• Self-motivation and the ability to work under minimal supervision are a must
• Demonstrated ability to leverage open source tools to increase productivity
• BS in computer science, engineering, or related field
• Master of the AJAX toolkits.
  - If you know Dojo, ExtJS, Scriptacoulus you rock!
• JUnit, TestNG, or any other testing frameworks
• Ability to Learn and go outside the box to find a solution

What will set you apart:

• Working knowledge of OO analysis and design

- You can create and read UML diagrams

• Knowledge of SEAM (JSF), EJB3, JPA.
• Working with R, S, or SAS
• Knowledge of Flex or OpenLazlo
• Knowledge of artificial intelligence principles and business rules engines
• Knowledge of statistical and mathematical principles

Culturally we believe in:

• Evidence based thinking: gathering data to make decisions
• Team based collaboration: bringing diverse ideas to shared problems
• Emphasis on delivery: ownership, execution and follow-through
• Self-starter: take initiative, drive consensus
• Think creatively: There is always a way to get there
  
• Take pride in your work
• We work hard, but we have fun and flexible with work hours.
  

What we offer:

• This is a full-time position
  
• Annual salary between 30 - 40K (If you are looking for the big salary from day 1, then we are not for you.)
  
• Health, dental, and life insurance
• Paid vacation
• Equity in the company

If interested, send us your resume and cover letter.