Surveys can be instrumental to the success of your company. But because people tend to not like them, many companies might shy away from trying to use them in the first place. Are surveys and the information you can get from them useful to help you develop a strategy? In short, “yes”!
There are a handful of caveats though that you need to keep in mind.
In this article, we’ll talk a bit about surveys and information from your customers. We’ll go over why making the effort to get surveys done can be instrumental in a successful business strategy. And we’ll go over some general information about how to implement surveys.
What is a survey and why does it matter?
Basically, a survey is when you take a group of people (often called a sample) and ask them questions. These questions can be almost anything, but are usually directly related to a topic you want to know about.
In politics, for example, these are called polls and are used to learn about many issues. Polls are commonly performed to learn about support for candidates or issues.
But surveys are done for many things. Anything from “how was your dining experience” to “is a product too expensive” are common questions.
A survey is useful to learn about clients and can help companies tailor their product lines.
Why would a survey be helpful?
As noted, surveys can be very useful. But how?
There are two major reasons why you might want to use them. First of all, data. You company might not need all the data that you wind up getting in a survey, but you can get some surprising information. For example, imagine that your proposed price point for the article processing charge of your journal is $2000. Now imagine that your survey tells you that none of your potential customers would pay that rate.
This is useful to know because you can adjust your price before you launch the journal. As an example, what if you also learned that your potential clients would pay $1700? This is also critical information to have.
A survey can help you to establish a strong foundation for your journal, based on actual data. Having information that is actionable can help you to be successful.
What questions should you ask in a survey?
This is the most important question to ask yourself when you’re planning a questionnaire. What you put on a survey hinges on what you need to know.
Let’s evaluate a few things that you might want to consider asking about:
- Pricing
- Reasons for publishing
- Customer expectations
- Experience
Any of these things might seem unimportant, but for a possible author, it might make a massive difference in how they view your journal.
Pricing
Of course, people want to pay the least amount of money possible. In some cases, an institution might set a limit on how much can be spent. In other cases, processing charges for a publication come out of the author’s pocket. When this happens, they want to make sure that their money is being well spent.
In addition, there could be other factors such as universities or institutions not having enough funds to pay. You might learn about what a pain point is for an author in terms of prices. Perhaps a discount might be helpful or perhaps you need some form of financial assistance.
Reasons for publishing
As strange as it might sound, not all authors want to be published for the same reasons. Different authors might have different motivations, and these motivations might have an impact on their choices. For example, imagine if an author wants to publish because they want the experience of publishing to be easy and manageable? What if money was no object? Conversely, authors who are financially limited might need to choose journals that they can afford to publish in. They might also seek out traditional publishing instead of open access if there are barriers due to finances.
Vanity publishing is also something that individuals might want to do. While there is a negative connotation, this doesn’t inherently mean it’s bad. All manuscripts you publish should still have strict peer review processes.
Customer expectations
Authors publishing in a journal might have different expectations of what they want to see in the experience. A survey can help to understand what these might be. Do they want a round of English editing included? Layout perhaps?
Knowing what a potential author wants can help you to know what services you should provide. Using a survey to help you make money by providing services that your authors want and need can help you to be successful.
Experience
While similar to to customer expectations, this is slightly different. Experience is generally something that you can ask about after the publishing process is completed. This kind of survey is extremely useful as it helps you to find points where the authors felt there were problems.
Perhaps this was a failure to communicate something important. Maybe you need a more straightforward submission process. It’s possible that the deadlines you’ve set are unrealistic. Whatever the case may be, authors are the ones that will feel those pain points the most. It is critical for you to learn as much as you can about the publishing experience from the author’s point of view.
Getting people to take a survey
This can be challenging, and while we will go into more detail about this in a future article, it is important to understand that you might not always get as many replies as you’d like. Surveys are not always tasks that people want to do, and this is why companies will often do things like offer some form of compensation.
This could be a gift certificate. Or a free round of English editing. It all depends on you.
Take time to plan out your survey, and make sure that the questions that you ask are datapoints that will serve you in growing your journal.