Using Others Survey Results

It’s well established that you need to conduct your own surveys, especially for things like customer satisfaction. On a basic level there are obvious reasons that this is the case. Your company and your products are not the same as someone else’s, and there are substantial factors outside of your control that may affect how people view your product or business.

Indeed, something like a restaurant, for example, will have plenty of things that affect whether or not a customer will keep coming back, including location, time, competition, marketing – even something as unusual as close friends that enjoy going to the restaurant regularly that push their friends to go. There are ample reasons that something like customer satisfaction is going to differ from business to business while also affecting revenue differently as well.

But another reason that you cannot trust someone else’s survey results – and something that is not often talked about – is the lack of testing that goes on before each survey. In the past, it’s been widely assumed that researchers do good testing before a survey begins – not just in standard market research, but also scientific research as well.

But there are several issues at play here: Rarely does any researcher publish the results of their pre-testing, and whether or not it uncovered any problems. Rarely does any researcher publish how they pretested, and the method they used may not have been effective at locating errors. No pretesting method is currently a guarantee that it removed the survey’s problems, no matter how well the study was run.

Now, the issues that may have been affected by the survey’s pretesting may or may not have had any effect for the business that ran the survey. For example, if the way that a survey was conducted increased or decreased a score by one point, but that point had little effect with the interpretation, then the survey may still have suited their purposes.

But that does not mean that the results of the survey are going to work for you. It’s simply a bad idea to take someone else’s survey results at their word, because you do not know the history of the survey or how well it was conducted. It’s interesting, certainly, but performing your own research is necessary if you want to ensure that the results have any type of meaning for your business.