Using Online Surveys to Tailor the Most Useful Sharing Sessions and Courses for Customers
Maximizing the value surveys bring to users and providing more professional, attentive service has always been SurveyCake's goal.
To share a wider range of survey applications and help users across fields unlock SurveyCake's value, we interviewed enterprise users from various industries about their experience and how they use SurveyCake to advance their business goals. We are deeply grateful to these industry leaders for their generous feedback, which helps us keep improving our service.
Leading Enterprise Digital Transformation with Cloud Technology
From day one, eCloudvalley Digital Technology has been committed to helping customers use the cloud for digital transformation, applying mature cloud technology to deliver smart, automated, secure cloud hosting. As a born-in-the-cloud expert, it focuses 100% on cloud consulting and technical support, covering cloud migration, moving core enterprise systems to the cloud, big data analytics, AI and machine learning, next-generation cloud hosting, and cloud education and training, thinking about the future of enterprises digitally.
As of October 2020, eCloudvalley's consulting and technical team had served more than 1,000 clients across manufacturing, retail, finance, entertainment, and internet industries, with sales presence spanning Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.
In recent years, more and more people have come to value digital transformation, cloud migration, and security. But since every enterprise's needs and environment differ, how does eCloudvalley, committed to building digital transformation services, use online surveys to grasp customer needs and deliver the most professional service and consulting advice?
Before SurveyCake
Q: What was your original survey method?
We previously built online surveys using WordPress's form feature, but overall it wasn't very flexible, and viewing responses wasn't real time either. To respond, we had to first host the survey on the website and guide respondents into the site to fill it out. Because of the site's architecture, the survey always took a long time to load, resulting in a poor response experience.
As for viewing responses, while we could set up an email notification after each submission, imagine everyone responding at the same time right after an event ends. The system would receive a flood of emails at once, and we'd have to go through them one by one just to see the status of responses, which was troublesome and unintuitive.
"SurveyCake's dashboard lets us view complete survey responses in real time, while also offering a faster, more intuitive response experience."
Q: Why did you choose SurveyCake?
At the time, we faced a survey load time that was too slow, hurting the response experience, and responses that were hard to review in one unified place, making statistical analysis difficult. We thought: SurveyCake itself is one of our service clients, so since they're already our client, why not deepen the collaboration?
Because we have offices in both Taiwan and Hong Kong, when a local marketing team needed to build a survey, they previously had to hand it off to Taiwan headquarters to build and then receive the relevant data back. These access control issues dragged the process out. SurveyCake Enterprise's permission management feature makes our event management far more efficient.
"Team permission management lets us set different access for every member, extending the space for team collaboration and making communication more efficient."
After SurveyCake
Q: How do you design and promote your customer needs survey?
Take a digital transformation event as an example. Going from AWS to full digital transformation involves not just IT, but also sales, finance, marketing, and PR departments. We need to understand what obstacles customers face when driving digital transformation. So when designing the form, we list out questions about the challenges customers face, such as cost, management's conservative attitude toward the cloud, the cloud environment currently in use, and the costs already invested.
Once we understand customer needs, we can not only adjust our subsequent marketing communication, but also pick a few key themes for events, or adjust the topic of the next event, so our courses and events better match what customers actually think and solve their pain points.
"Effectively grasping customer needs to tailor event content."
Q: How do you design and promote your event satisfaction survey?
We regularly hold online or in-person courses and seminars to help customers understand AWS further, inviting technical speakers to share advanced use cases and details of AWS, and collecting feedback from customers who attended afterward.
Small to mid-size events give us more control over response rates. We also offer incentives to respond, such as the slide deck or a small gift, and customers usually fill it out before leaving the venue, so we essentially achieve a 100% response rate.
We also follow up based on what customers write, such as a phone call or an eDM. Also, compared to paper, an online form at least ensures you can actually read what the customer wrote.
"Offering an incentive to respond easily raises the response rate, and SurveyCake's online forms effectively eliminate typos and handwriting errors."
Q: How do you analyze and apply the responses collected?
For analysis, the statistical charts automatically generated in SurveyCake's dashboard are extremely helpful. For numeric answers, it automatically calculates the median, mean, mode, and more, helping us see the data distribution at a glance after excluding outliers. This visual chart is so convenient that we can just screenshot it and drop it directly into a slide deck for reporting.
Surveys occasionally receive invalid responses too, like an unrelated person answering randomly, or an internal employee testing the form. To keep these from skewing the analysis, I put them all in the quarantine area, separated from the genuine answers, ensuring the exported data stays accurate and reliable. SurveyCake saves us a lot of time on response quality, since we no longer have to delete invalid answers one by one. I think this feature is fantastic.
"Visual statistical charts automatically account for outliers, and separating invalid answers effectively raises response quality."
Q: Beyond event satisfaction and customer needs, what other survey applications do you use?
We'd like to share a great solution here. eCloudvalley previously worked with a government agency, needing to help them survey the background of event participants, such as the company's responsible person, capital, and main business line, and the number of questions alone filled 4 pages of A4.
The original plan was a paper survey, but since some participants attended online, they simply couldn't fill out a paper form. Also, asking attendees to handwrite answers to so many questions on-site would predictably result in a very low response rate. But converting to an online form raised two problems for us:
1. Responses needed to be confirmed as answered personally by the respondent
2. Responses needed to be imported into Excel for further analysis
Among all the online form services on the market, SurveyCake successfully solved both problems for us with ease:
1. Confirming responses were answered personally: SurveyCake's detail export page automatically shows each response's IP address, letting us confirm by comparing IP addresses whether a given response was actually submitted by the target company's representative.
2. Importing responses into Excel for analysis: after collecting responses, the government agency needed them exported to Excel for follow-on analysis. With a paper survey, every response would need to be manually keyed in, which consumes a lot of labor and time. SurveyCake supports Excel export, letting us export all collected responses to Excel in one click for effective, in-depth analysis afterward.
"SurveyCake automatically records the respondent's IP for effective response verification, and one-click Excel export makes in-depth analysis easy."
Q: What costs has SurveyCake saved eCloudvalley?
As a cloud company, we care about corporate sustainability, so using online forms effectively saves on paper printing and collection. Using SurveyCake also effectively saves us time building surveys. Making a survey used to mean pulling up a Word table, pasting in questions, formatting, adjusting, printing, and so on, which took about 1 to 2 hours in total, so SurveyCake saves us a great deal of time designing surveys.
"SurveyCake effectively saves paper costs and labor time, letting us truly spend our time on designing good questions."
A Word for SurveyCake
Q: How has SurveyCake helped you?
SurveyCake lets us easily control access to survey content or results. We can set permissions for our internal team to view a survey, and also share specific results with partner vendors, letting us discuss results with them without leaking user personal data.
We recently partnered with a large security vendor, wanting to share security-themed event content with users. Since it was our first collaboration, we weren't sure what content users wanted to see, so we built a survey asking about user needs, including their current security infrastructure, security awareness, and current level of satisfaction with security, to design an event that fits their needs most closely.
After collecting feedback, we use SurveyCake's hide results feature to hide personal data such as company name and industry, sharing only specific responses with the security vendor to discuss event details. Hiding results not only speeds up discussion between both sides but also effectively protects user personal data.
Q: What do you like most about SurveyCake?
eCloudvalley promotes digital transformation, emphasizing agility, speed, and unlocking employee potential, so the focus of a survey should be its content, the questions you design for customers to answer, not its presentation, spending huge amounts of time on layout and adjustment. SurveyCake handles the presentation of survey design very well, letting us truly spend our time thinking.
Learn More About eCloudvalley
Grasping Customer Needs for More Effective Marketing Communication
Our thanks to eCloudvalley for taking the time to share their experience and candid feedback, helping us understand the platform's current strengths and weaknesses so we can deliver a better survey service. As a success story, it also shows peers how to use surveys for feedback collection and effectively raise response rates.
Sign up for a free SurveyCake account today. Build your own customer needs survey or event satisfaction survey, understand what respondents are really thinking, and find real insight in your data.
