A lot of announcements emanating from those two companies on their social media come across as detached and faceless. I wonder if it is a sign of management in transition or change in direction at both companies.

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Image by Shutter wide shut via Flickr

If you know how to ask someone if you are good-looking and get an honest answer, then consider yourself a master craftsman of the proxy question. 

Go ye, therefore, and storm the world by crafting the best, small, and most nimble surveys and polls the world has ever seen! 

To know the mind of your customers and the mind of your employees is to rule the fate of your business. Enter the proxy question and the online survey tool. Start today by using a free account by zoomerang.com or surveymonkey.com 

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Use a proxy question when you suspect that your customer or employees might try to tell you only what they think others would say is the right answer. A proxy question is a safe substitute to the real question we want to ask.

Many times we have been culturally conditioned to say one type of answer, whether or not that answer reflects our real belief or behavior. In order to get the right answer, you have to ask a roundabout question that will give you the same end-result. This requires you to be in-tune with the culture around you so if you are not a native, you may want to cross-check with someone who can tell you the right way to ask a delicate question. Remember, the purpose of a survey is to discover what your customers or employees are really thinking and doing and not just what they are saying.

A proxy question requires you to use your intuition and to be in tune with the spirit of the times. Be creative in addition to methodical in the crafting of your questions. Like a puzzle, there are different ways you can approach putting together an accurate picture of your customer's thinking. As you become more in tune with your business and customers, your survey questions will become more and more effective.

For example: if you are trying to find out how often your customers eat out at fast food restaurants, you might get misleading answers if you ask the question directly. Many feel guilty about eating at fast food restaurants and so will often be evasive in answering. Instead of asking of asking "For your evening meal, do you prefer eating at a fast food restaurant?" you would want instead to ask something similar to this: "For your evening meal, how many times in the last week did you eat at a fast food restaurant."

Image via Wikipedia

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A Small Business advantage in running surveys is that you as the survey creator are usually already intimitately knowledgeable about the likes and dislikes of your customer base. Take advantage of your intuition and educated guesses to craft short, pertinent questions that are founded on good relationship assumptions.  

Contrast your advantage to that of a manager at a large business organization. It is very common for the survey creator in a big outfit to have had little or no interaction with the customers and is therefore forced to ask a lot of tangential and orientation questions before being able to ask the real questions. This is why the very format and opening questions in surveys emanating from big corporation often come across as disconnected to the customer.

As a Small Business survey creator, you can conduct surveys that are much shorter in time and length and much smaller in distribution size. You can spot intuitively which questions will have a good response rate and which ones will not. So stop asking those questions for which answers you already have a good grasp of and focus on being nimble and fast and frequent.

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The IFRAME code provided at first by ThePollTaker.com didn't include the needed height, but after a request from my twitter account @TheSurveyMentor on how to do it, the developer @SetSocialDotCom promptly wrote a new snippet to include enough height. As you can see in the window below, the poll now fits nicely within this Posertous hosted blog:

I appreciate this vendor's willigness to communicate with its users so quickly via Twitter. Thanks!

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This is a test post using ThePollTaker.com survey tool. They provide a tool that can embed a poll into your various Social Media networks and websites. Your friends and followers can easily see your poll request and start clicking answers back right away.

I created a poll asking college graduates if they would go through college (if they had to repeat it all over again) at a faster or slower rate than what they experienced it at. I copied and pasted the provided provided iframe code into this Posterous hosted post:

I had no problem embedding ThePollTaker tool into my personal Facebook page (see pic below). I wanted to embedd also into one of my business Facebook Pages, but there was no such option proferred.

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Do you have a purpose for your survey? If you do, then use that purpose to drive the creation of specific questions. This sounds like an obvious statement, but most surveys fail in sticking to a purpose. That's because a hundred voices in your head will want you to insert other questions that are not related to your immediate goal. Resist those voices and filter out everything that does not get you closer to getting information that is relevant to your purpose. If you are not strict with yourself, you will loose the goodwill of your customers. The length of your laundry list of questions will be a put-off and customers will ignore your next request for information. In addition to protecting customer goodwill, you need to protect your creative energy. Save your energy instead for creating fewer, but better crafted questions.

With tightly crafted questions, you will get meaningful and actionable answers. The opposite is sloppy questions generating vague and irrelevant answers. A stack of irrelevant survey answers is what you will get, if you are not careful.

Example: you are a laundromat owner and want to know if you should increase the stiffness of the finished work shirts for better customer satisfaction. So you create a survey to elicit the as yet un-articulated preferences of your customers. In the process of crafting your survey, you see a show about new fashionable garments that require special handling. You are then tempted to insert a question to find out the fashion preferences of your customers. Do you do this? No, not for this survey. It is not relevant, because the answers to the fashion question is not an actionable item related to increasing or decreasing shirt stiffness.

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When using a scale in a customer survey, use a scale on which the customer can easily orient himself. You as the survey creator are the expert in all the subtle descriptive terms of your offering, but your customer is not. That means you need to make it easy for the customer to be able to give you true feedback. Do this by providing a reference point in the scale that he easily recognizes.

An excellent way to create that recognizable reference point is to assign the middle-point of the scale as referencing the quality of the product or service as they have currently received it. From that orientation point, the customer can then easily provide graduated feedback as so many points less or more from what he knows confidently to have experienced. Be careful though not lead the customer to parrot back what he thinks you want to hear. Provide labels that indicate preference rather than an indication of what you do or don't like as the vendor.

An example in this screenshot of such a scale is for a specialized skin care product. The vendor wants to know if the customer would like it harder or softer to the touch than the one they have currently purchased and tried. The middle point of the scale references the product as they have currently experienced it.

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Survey timing is important. Typical mistakes are to send too soon or too late. Too soon and the customer has not had a chance to truly evaluate. Your collected responses would not be dependable and would no longer reflect the true pulse of what customers think. Too late and the customer can no longer remember the details. The latter would leave you with vague, irrelevant answers.

Your customer has his mind full of many other products and services and yours is just one in a constellation of juggling priorities. So if you want to make it easy for the customer to respond quickly and accurately, establish the timing logic of sending a survey request. 

Example: A friend had called Vista Print to explain that a print order arrived with image reversed and needed to be fixed. The customer service team of Vista Print addressed the problem by reshipping. Within the hour, a survey request arrived in the email inbox asking to evaluate the level of customer service. That's an example of good timing.

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Create a comment box for those survey questions that don't have a definitive categorization in their answers. In this attached example, my wife took a survey for a business we run together, but the question inadvertantly omitted the possibility that a product could be a digital product for sale instead of a physical product. There  was no easy way for my wife to answer, but she would have provided a clear answer had their been a box to leave comments. Make it easy on your vendors to give you answers.

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Do not raise red flags by asking questions that are not necessary. Do not require a phone number in the customer survey if you are conducting an online survey.

An email is enough for contacting the customer if necessary. If you must ask for a phone number, make the field optional. I recently filled out a online giveaway entry form for Jacques Pepin cooking book. I provided my email as requested, but hesitated to continue when the phone number field was a required field to fill out. Do not create surveys in which your takers might hesitate completing and therefore abandon.

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Using a survey scale labeled "Unacceptable" on the far left to "Outstanding" on the far right is a great way to make the customer disclose their true perception of a service you are providing. I recently took a survey from a new term-life insurance company in which they asked me to rate their service. They used the scale system three times in their online survey and it is used very effectively. I think the company will get honest feedback from that survey because they are making it easy to provide negative feedback.

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I just got off the phone from declining a random survey request by the IRS for answering questions on how the IRS should improve. This survey request was either a scam to get me to disclose private information or it was in fact the IRS, but it was setting itself up to make decisions on a very poorly framed survey.

This is an example of what NOT to do if you are looking for meaningful and relevant survey results. This is the equivalent of an employer asking directly his employees what they think his management skills are like. Such an employer would be a fool to believe and act on the results of that type of survey. The context in which a survey is conducted is just as important as the questions themselves. If you really want to know what subordinates think, there are much, much better ways to conduct a survey. Stick around to find out how to really get into the mind of your customers and employees.

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Going forward, I'm changing the focus of this blog from project management in general to providing specific tips on how to use surveys to gather information quickly and cheaply. For old times sake, I'm posting my original blog header in this post. Thanks iStockPhoto for your wonderful choice of graphics!

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I had fallen in love with a particular attribute of project "Deep Butter" and around it was built a number of key relationships that were going to hopefully build an added revenue stream. However as I got closer to the launch date, my gut was telling me that the market segment that would take advantage of this had now moved its attention elsewhere. A number of subtle cues from our customers were telling me that this would not be a money maker after all and that if we pursued with the launch we would be loosing money instead of making money. But the structure I had built was so perfect in my mind and so carefully built that I had fallen in love with my business creature. Agile project management also means killing original ideas as much as creating them, but when it's my own original idea that I have to terminate, it is not a fun task. So I ate humble pie, talked it over with my wife (and ever so lovely business partner!) and come to a decision to stop and kill a key part of "Deep Butter" now before it developed any further.

However, as I write this, project "Deep Butter" has already re-oriented itself to supporting a new strategy for our business and now I am so glad I Deep Sixed it.

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Zombie projects gradually work away even at the souls of everyone who works on those projects. If your project has no name, you might be in danger of losing your soul. This may explain why you have been listless lately.

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