In the IT industry, surveys are one of the most effective tools to understand the kind of experience your employees or customers are having through the products or services provided by your organisation. In this article, we shall discuss the benefits, drawbacks and best practices to involve named surveys in your quest to monitor employee experience and/or customer experience.
We have previously covered the advantages and disadvantages of using anonymous surveys so please check that out as well, if you like.
What Are Named Surveys?
Named surveys, as opposed to anonymous surveys, require the participants to share information that can be used to personally identify each of them. These may include basic information such as the participant’s name, age, gender, email, etc. Furthermore, it may also include details such as the participant’s department within a multinational or global organisation, employee ID number, etc. for accurate tracking.
Benefits Of Named Surveys
Helps Address Negative Comments Effectively
One of the biggest objectives behind taking surveys is to look into the feedback and take effective actions in order to improve customer experience or employee experience. Suppose a participant talks about a specific issue that is leading to a decline in their productivity at work, however, the issue is local to the participant and not spread across a larger scale.
If you have the details of the participant, you can directly get in touch with them and help them resolve their issues much faster and more efficiently. On the other hand, if you’d decided to go ahead with an anonymous survey, the lack of direct contact details would make it borderline impossible for you to help them, especially if your sample is in millions, thousands or even hundreds.
Post-Data Collection Flexibility
On the basis of what you want to do with the result of your survey, it may be possible that you would want to take additional actions after going through the data. These actions could involve following up with the participants and discussing whatever it is that’s bothering them in a close and effective space. Named surveys, therefore, allow you the flexibility to target your follow-ups - a luxury you will not be able to enjoy with anonymous surveys.
Deal With False Data
There will always be a few people in organisations who have personal grievances with their colleagues and may be willing to give false data and manipulate the end result of surveys, especially if they know that there will be no that could be traced back to them. Such manipulation can have a snowball effect and can lead to some extensive damages such as the company investing millions of dollars on technology that may not be of use or could not solve the problem that your organisation may be going through.
But when the participants are aware of the fact that the survey analysts will be aware of their names and other important details, they are more likely to provide genuine data that can be used to deal with the right problems.
Drawbacks Of Named Surveys
Hesitation In Participating
One of the biggest disadvantages of conducting a named survey is that it may lead to participants not being comfortable sharing their details, thinking it may end up landing them in trouble. For instance, if you are trying to boost productivity among your employees, a very small portion of them would voluntarily say that they are less productive at work than they could be… for whatever reason it may be.
Lower Response Rate
Proper surveys require a big enough sample size in order to come up with a non-biased end result and even though the sample size is subjective to your goals, named surveys usually attract fewer responses as compared to anonymous surveys due to reasons mentioned above - fear of getting into trouble, essentially.
Social Desirability Bias
Even if you may have clarified that your survey responses will not receive any direct or indirect incentives based on how positive or negative your inputs may be, many employees may give biased responses just to get into the “good books” of their managers. This is known as the social desirability bias and it is, without a doubt, a big enemy of accurate data for survey professionals, regardless of whatever industry they may be from.
Best Practices For Named Surveys
Have you made up your mind that named surveys may be the tool to carry out your investigation about the employee experience and/customer experience you provide? Great. Please consider these best practices before putting your survey in front of participants:
Specify That It’s A Named Survey
You must make it as evident as possible to the participants that the survey they are about to take be recording their details like their name, age, gender, or whatever data that’s befitting to your research. The last thing you want is an employee or s customer surprised and shocked to get a follow-up call based on their honest feedback.
Use A Trusted Surveying Tool
When it comes to surveys that are collecting sensitive information about the participants, data security is of the essence. Whatever software you wish to use for your survey, double-check the details about the servers they store such information in and exactly how secure are these servers. A breach in data security not only exposes your organisation to lawsuits, it may also jeopardise the participants.
Explain Data Safety Procedure In Detail
Most survey tools share a list of FAQs that may answer the participants' queries related to data protection procedures. These may include information regarding the duration for which their data will be saved in the servers for the purposes of analysis before being permanently deleted from all the records. It could also address the implications, additional benefits, etc that tag along with the participant’s decision to fill in the surveys.
Still having trouble with surveys? We Can Assist You!
Finding the underlying problem hiding within a survey might often be more difficult than it appears. It may look to be a simple issue to solve on the surface, but when you try to figure it out, you may find yourself stuck in a loop. This is where Bright Horse steps in!
We have extensive experience designing and implementing customer satisfaction/ user sentiment surveys, which are used to gather data about the user experience.
Sign Up To Receive Our Weekly Posts On Improving Employee Experience