I have recently made and distributed a series of surveys for my marketing classes and Economics classes in the Marriott School of Management. The school has a license agreement with Qualtrics which allows students and faculty to use Qualtrics’ on line survey software to build and distribute surveys. This survey tool is largely unknown, by both students and professionals in the field. I don’t expect this to continue for long.
The Qualtrics survey software is one of the most useful business tools I have seen, I would put it right close up there with Excel and Word. The array of question types was dazzling. They had the most commonly used question types twelve or so neatly organized and easy to find. They where so easy to add into the survey and to add question and answer text was a breeze. It literally took me just a minute to put in several questions. If fact the vast majority of my time was spent planning what exactly I needed to ask in order to get the data needed. Once I knew what I needed to ask, building the survey took almost no time in comparison.
But the time saving didn’t stop there. I could view the results in real time as they came in. The basic statistics where already calculated for me and reported in tables for each question. I discovered I could put in and take out the different calculations in these tables. I could also add different graph types to more visually show the results. I found that I could also drill down by the answers to certain questions, showing how those of ethnic Mexican decent responded in one way to survey while other ethnicities had different responses. I was then able to make my report public, which generated a link I sent to my group so they could go over the results before we met to discuss it. If we had wanted we could have talked over the phone while each of us looked at the results on our computers. I also found I could down load these reports into word, power point, or excel.
I have played with the system a bit and you can even down load the raw data in to excel or to SPSS to do the more serious statistical analysis. There are all sorts of other features, quotas, Skip logic, Conjoint analysis, etc. . . .
On top of all this the surveys I sent out were very sexy. It looked great! I had class mates emailing me asking how we were able to make such incredible surveys. I’m sure they thought that we had a team member who was minoring in computer science.
To my understanding Qualtrics now provides their online survey software to many universities across the U.S. and even internationally. USC, Columbia, Duke, Texas University, Texas A&M, Yale, Stanford UCLA, Bristol, University of Michigan, North Western University, Wharton College of Business, and on the business side Mercer, Royal Caribbean, Daimon, Toyota, HP, and Even Microsoft use Qualtrics online survey software.
The easy, power, and usefulness of this online survey tool dwarf any of their competitors.
