Running Your CRM Surveys

Market researchers are often debating how to draw conclusions from the data they collect in surveys. One of the primary points in this debate is the idea of objectives – namely, is it important that you know in advance what you hope to find with the survey, or is it better for you to look at all of the data you have on hand and use that data to form both your hypotheses and your conclusions.

One of the reasons that surveys are such a useful form of data collection is because data itself is impartial. Provided you conformed to all of the best practices in survey research, the data you have on hand won’t have any bias, and it doesn’t have any alternative motives. It’s simply data, and within that data you can find any number of interesting and unique connections from which you can derive conclusions that may help fuel your business further.

The pro-objectives in research stance disagrees points out three main problems with the idea of collecting loads of data and analyzing it without a clear goal in mind: Data itself can still be misleading. When you don’t have any clear relationships in mind, you may find relationships that aren’t there, simply because the sample you’re using appears to have a relationship that may or may not exist within the entirety of the population. Drawing conclusions from data samples simply because you found what appears to be an interesting relationship may not be a good move for your company.

One of the best practices in survey research is the idea of limiting the amount of questions that respondents are supposed to answer. You can’t necessarily do that without having clear objectives and creating questions that relate to those objectives.

Finally, when you analyze data without a clear focus, you may also miss important relationships or trends because they didn’t stand out while answering a question. Sometimes a lack of interesting data is itself interesting, but if you don’t have any clearly defined objectives, you may not realize that you’re witnessing numbers that are important for your company. It’s hard to say which is better, but right now a pro-objectives stance seems to have the most logic on its side.

Analyzing massive amounts of data from surveys without a clear plan may be interesting, but it’s less feasible and may cause you to miss out on equally important information.