Online surveys are a highly effective way to efficiently gather information, suggestions and insight from employees, customers and other groups. Over the past several years many companies have transitioned from conducting paper and phone surveys to conducting all or most of their employee surveys and customer surveys as online surveys.

Benefits and reasons for conducting an online survey include:

1 - Most employees and customers of businesses use computers with Internet access at work and or at home, making it easy for them to participate in online surveys.

2 - Online surveys are significantly more cost-effective than paper and phone surveys.

3 - Online surveys are more accurate than paper and phone surveys. Employees and customers enter their answers directly without the need for data entry/transcription of paper and phone surveys.

4 - For employees that do not use computers to do their job, designated computers can be made available for them to complete employee surveys.

5 - Many companies have e-mail addresses of their business and consumer customers and it is to their advantage to collect and continuously update their customers' e-mail addresses in order to be able to send various kinds of communications, including surveys to customers.

6 - Where customer e-mail addresses are not available to companies, there are other ways to get customers to participate in customer satisfaction surveys / customer opinion surveys. Other approaches include putting online survey URLs on paper register receipts, mailing paper survey requests that include online survey URLs to customers, etc.

7 - Online survey results are available very quickly after the survey response period is ended because transcription/data entry is not required.

8 - Online surveys can easily be conducted periodically or continuously to track trends and identify changes in employee and customer perceptions as they occur.

9 - The cost for conducting online surveys is insignificant compared with the bottom line benefits when survey findings are acted on.

10 – Some of the other types of online business surveys include risk surveys, IT customer surveys, 360 leadership surveys, employee benefit opinion surveys and employee retention surveys.

Full-service survey companies provide significant value for organizations that want to conduct an online survey. A full service survey company provides the following benefits:

1 – They know what questions to ask and how to word the questions.

2 – They provide extensive reports very quickly, eliminating your need to spend considerable time generating reports using Excel when you use self-service survey software.

3 – They provide independent/unbiased expertise and experience analyzing the survey data for you, enabling your organization to get more value from online survey results.

4 – If you conduct the online survey periodically (e.g. annually), you will receive trend reports assessing progress made since the previous surveys.

The payback on online surveys can be very large for organizations ranging in size from well under 50 employees to Fortune 500 companies. Payback comes from prioritizing opportunities identified by online surveys, creating survey action plans and taking action to achieve results.