As a consultant to the IT industry, I am asked regularly by my clients to evaluate and recommend various types of software packages. I have spent countless
hours talking to users and assessing their needs. Once I have a firm understanding of the users requirements, I start researching products available in
the market to find the one that matches those needs best.
Once I have a list of packages that seem promising, I download and install every package or use the online version of the package, and try all the available
features. This process requires substantial time and effort.
Recently, one of my clients wanted to collect feedback from their customers about the effectiveness of their support team. They asked me to recommend
a survey software package. After going through this long and tedious process, I decided to create this site to share my findings with others as well as
to give myself an incentive to keep the information up to date. In the future I am planning to review other types of software packages.
When I go through the process of selecting a package, I usually find it very helpful to compile a categorized list of all the available features across
all the software packages. I then assign an importance number to every feature. Three is assigned to highly important or must have features, two for moderately
important features, and one for not so important features. I then add up all the factors for each survey to come up with an overall score as well as a
score for each category of features.
Your host,
Emily Johnson
Contact Info
Survey Software
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comparison of survey software packages
Survey software is becoming very important as an effective tool to gather feedback from customers, employees, users, readers, visitors, etc. At a high
level, survey software allows you to create surveys with different types of questions, branch questions based on user responses, collect and store the
answers, analyze the collected responses, and generate reports.
There are two ways to get started:
- Subscribe to an On-line or On-demand or SaaS (Software as a Service) site. Usually, these sites allow only one user to login to design surveys and
to deploy them to collect responses. An online service is a good option if you are the only person responsible for designing the surveys and analyzing
the results and you are comfortable with keeping your data stored at the service site.
- Buy a software package and install it on your own server. These packages usually allow you to add and manage multiple survey designers, allow you
to create an unlimited number of surveys, deploy the surveys on to your web site, collect responses while keeping full control of the data.
Survey packages come into two flavors:
- Web-enabled software packages where you can deploy the application once on your web server. Users (including designers and respondents) access the application
using their web browsers.
- Fat client software applications require you to install the main application on every designer’s computer and deploy the finished surveys to the
web.
Surveys can be used to collect feedback from many sources. These include: employer surveys, employee surveys, client surveys, consumer surveys, patient
surveys, alumni surveys, student surveys, visitor surveys, etc.
Other types of surveys include: benchmark surveys, exit surveys, feedback surveys, internet surveys, job satisfaction surveys, market research surveys,
marketing surveys, needs assessment surveys, satisfaction surveys, opinion surveys, product surveys, and service surveys. |
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