Should you send surveys during a crisis?
Should you send surveys during a crisis?
Since social distancing makes it more challenging than ever to check in with the important people in our life—friends, family, students, employees, and customers—the last thing you'd want to do now is to lose a connection. More than ever, this is the right time to use surveys to ask people how they're doing and how you can help them.
Remember:
Surveys are fundamentally about communicating with people at the scale. That makes them an important tool for getting opinions and feedback during this time of separation.
Show humanity
If you are asking for feedback, do make sure you are doing it for their benefit so it does not appear to be exploiting the situation. People are worried about numerous things right now, so they are likely to have less patience for self-absorbed companies.
Make it a point to design your surveys in a way that customers and employees recognize that you care about them and are not just going about doing business as usual.
Change your metrics
Large-scale disruptions like these impact how people are feeling and the sentiments they want to share. Think about shifting your focus from tracking existing business and focusing more on gathering actionable insights about the current situation.
Ask less, listen more
The normal way you frame and ask survey questions and the general rules of thumb we follow may not be applicable right now. Go against the norm and try asking more open-ended questions like "How are you feeling?" and "How can we help you?". In these circumstances, you need to know more than what people's opinions—learn exactly what's going on in their minds and what help they seek. Rather than carrying on with a bunch of defined questions that you use just for the sake of reporting, using more open-ended questions can be insightful for you to understand what people truly feel.
Accumulate your response skills
You need to be more prepared now than ever to quickly make changes based on what you learn. You could call it something similar to an "immediate response skill." Make sure that you act swiftly as an organization based on the information you receive through your surveys, because these are times of crisis when help and outreach are needed ASAP.
A survey is a tool that ensures that organizations are connected with their employees and communities. The data and insights learned from surveys can help in developing practical applications to help us sail through these difficult times.
We at Zoho Survey want to do our part in assisting the global community with this pandemic.
If you are planning to survey related to the coronavirus, we are offering a 50% discount on Zoho Survey. In addition to this, we are offering several other discounts that you can check out here. We understand that in such a time of constrained resources, it is important for us as software providers to lend a helping hand where we can.
Let us support each other as we continue to toggle between fear and optimism. We sincerely believe this crisis can be overcome with the right data, the right information, the right efforts, and, of course, the right spirit.
