Surveys - Best Practice Guide

How to use surveys to increase staff and sales performance

Opmetrix Service Desk avatar
Written by Opmetrix Service Desk
Updated over a week ago

The Opmetrix survey module can be used in many useful ways. 

This guide describes best practise ways you can implement and benefit through using Surveys.

For a practical administrator's guide on how to use and maintain Surveys, check out the Surveys - Administrator's Maintenance guide.

Introduction

Surveys only take a few seconds to complete in-store, yet the information they capture can be a 'goldmine' for any business. Understanding the marketplace we are selling in, and how our staff are performing in-store quickly become key drivers for business change and business success.

The only way to discover this information (without paying huge dollars to outsource it to marketing companies) is to collect it yourself. If you have a field team, you have a ready made survey team! 

The key principals for surveys are:

  • Keep it short. A survey should never take more than one minute to answer.

  • Continually review and provide feedback to your team. Once they understand why surveys are important, they will happily do them.

  • Compare results for your sales cycle. Measure, report, make change, then re-survey. You will soon know the impact of your changes.

Three Common Survey Types

Business Discovery and Success Measurement

Surveys can be aimed at measuring business performance against a competitor, or discovering new opportunities for existing customers or prospects.

By understanding the market (e.g does a competitor sell items in the same outlet?) businesses can quickly adjust their sale proposition to a winning formula.

Field Staff Performance

Surveys can help enable staff to measure their own in-store performance. At Opmetrix we call this the 'Perfect Store Call' and this drives how teams improve their performance. Bench-marking how one person achieves a result helps to share knowledge and focus training to improve the whole team.

A self assessment of how the salesperson is performing in-store not only gives a manager the ability to train and improve their team, but also the opportunity to praise and congratulate when a salesperson does something great!

Form Based Surveys

Surveys can help reduce the amount of paper-based forms. Surveys are often tucked away in Opmetrix (not in the main task list) and can be completed whenever necessary. Common examples might be a health and safety near miss incident form, a customer change of details form, or a staff leave form.

Targeting - How Many People to Survey?

Getting a good target sample ensures accurate results. Many Opmetrix users create different surveys for a banner group. For example a survey at Coles will be different from a survey in a collection of IGA customers.  Likewise regions often change surveys. A New Zealand business may have a different set of questions and answers for North Island and South Island stores.

Opmetrix targeting is easy, so take advantage of getting the right questions to the right audience. Once a survey is live, it's important to track the Survey Task Completion. This is a fast way to see how many surveys are completed. Run the reports once you get to an acceptable target completion. We recommend at least 70% in a call cycle.

Reporting 

The whole reason for surveys is to get actionable insights. The right data allows the right changes to be made to get sales improvement, team improvement and to win in store and on the shelf.

Opmetrix has a range of survey reports and they are interactive. That is, you find something and then 'dig' down to get to the detail. Learning how to drive reports and automate them is key to success for you using the Opmetrix platform.  

Opmetrix has good photo reporting and photos are as good as police evidence! They can tell so much and help compare one store to the next. Once you understand the reporting outcomes, you will design better survey questions to get the data you need. 

Want to take it further?

Linking Opmetrix to Power BI can give you a one page executive dashboard of your survey. These are great to share back to teams and for management to get that 'helicopter view' of results.

See also

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