Want to know what consumers think? Put down the comment cards and poll them online instead.
Don’t trust online polls. That’s what traditional-minded researchers have been telling business owners for years. The Internet isn’t diverse enough to be a valid testing ground, they argue, so data gathered online is bound to be skewed.
If that argument was ever valid, it no longer is. Consumers of all stripes are giving feedback to businesses online. One out of every four American Internet users–about 33 million people–has rated a product, service, or person online, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an initiative of the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center. That number is expected to grow as consumers become accustomed to having more interactive relationships with companies, says Lee Rainie, director of Pew Internet. “We’re well past the time when this was an activity of early adopters,” he says. “This is how consumers want and expect to communicate with businesses.”
At the same time, new technology offered by companies such as SurveyMonkey, based in Portland, Oreg., and WebSurveyor, based in Herndon, Va., is making it easier for companies to conduct online polls. The polling software aggregates hundreds of responses to multiple-choice questions into easy-to-read documents, complete with graphs and charts, that can be mined for information on everything from customer satisfaction to product development.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20051001/handson-technology.html
