Making Information Work for You

The increasing need for information and intelligence in business and government is driving the need for businesses and government departments to regularly carry out surveys internally and externally. The aim is to collect as much data as possible, including information about customer needs, staff attitudes and stakeholder opinions so that they can provide first class services, manage resources effectively and provide first class return on investment to their shareholders. There are three key ways of carrying out surveys and this document looks at the key benefits of each survey process.

Paper vs Electronic Surveys

With the increase in popularity and the move towards greater use of the Internet, companies and government offices are increasingly aware of the need to use surveys as part of their business strategy.
This helps them differentiate themselves from their competition, improve the services offered to their customers and to involve their staff in the decision making processes that affect their working environments.

An important consideration when assessing technology for surveys is to ensure that the paper based and electronic based surveys can be created using the same solution and that the responses can be collated, analysed and presented in the same way. The following overview will help customers to make an informed choice:

• Web Based Surveys
  Running surveys either on an Intranet or Internet Site are becoming increasingly popular and have the advantage of being accessible by any user having access to a computer.

The advantages of web-based surveys are that you will receive a higher number or responses and if where respondent anonymity is important, and is an integral part of the survey, the quality of response and subsequently the quality of the data will also be higher.

• E-Mail surveys
  This has the advantage of being sent to specific addresses and can allow
  users to reply off-line...

The main advantage is that the survey is sent directly to the respondent
and, providing advanced notice has been given by phone or by email,
the response levels and quality will generally be high.

• Paper based surveys
  Paper based surveys are the traditional method for carrying out surveys and are still effective when used as part of CATI or in face to face survey environments.

It is not unusual for paper and electronic surveys to be used in combination as this has the flexibility to suit the requirements of particular locations or business needs.

Other Survey Considerations

There are other things to consider when planning a survey and these include methods of gathering and assessing the collected data.

With electronic surveys the responses and data will be automatically transmitted back to your survey database but paper based surveys will require some user intervention and management.

Options such as OMR (Optical Mark Recognition), and ICR (Intelligent Mark Recognition), working in conjunction with a scanner are a powerful and easy to use method for collecting data and transferring it to your database.

Optical Mark Reading (OMR)

Works with paper-based forms that are simply marked (using a dash or a cross) to answer a question.
There is no need for special equipment to mark a form, other than a pen/pencil, and very high throughput speeds can be achieved with very low error rates (less than half percent). There is more administration needed to gather data, but the specialised scanners can speed up and simplify this process.

Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR)

ICR works with paper based forms on which names, dates etc. as well as marks can be entered.
Relatively low cost image scanners can be used to collect the ICR data. ICR can be slightly slower than OMR as there is more user intervention required in verifying the collected data.

Summary

In summary it is essential to have a single product that provides all of the functionality that you need to meet the key steps of a survey, namely, design, publication, data collection, analysis and presentation, which when combined with OMR or ICR solutions and a scanner will provide you with all of the tools necessary to carry out surveys when and where you need them.