There are a range of approaches to gathering information about your visitor and business depending on your resources. Customer Surveys are a good place to start.
You can conduct surveys:
- Face-to-face - with your customers when they make the booking, while they are visiting or on the phone after the visit. However, you do not want to make it obtrusive and this does require staff time.
- Print – this could be a simple A4 double-sided piece of paper left in a hotel room with an envelope for the visitor to put it in, a leaflet racked in reception, included in a menu card on the table of a restaurant or a postcard included with the bill.
- Online – the major benefit and strength of online surveys is cost effectiveness, with the ability to set up your own in-house capability by purchasing/leasing/subscribing to one of the many branded survey software packages that are available – for example, Survey Monkey www.surveymonkey.com; Smart Survey www.smartsurvey.co.uk; or Snap Surveys www.snapsurveys.com, to name but a few. A general internet search on “online survey software” will identify and demonstrate the range of packages available, costs and their features – questionnaire creation, survey broadcast, data capture, analysis of results and the customer support that the software suppliers provide. To do this effectively you will need to be collecting customers’ email addresses and asking permission to contact them.
It is always a good idea to incentivise people to respond with a prize draw to thank them for taking the time to take part in your survey. This way, you will get more entries.
Here are a few points to consider when designing a questionnaire:
- The questionnaire needs to be well set out, and the spaces and boxes for entering the answers should be of a good size and positioned well.
- The questions should be phrased in a simple way, which can easily be understood by the respondent.
- Keep questions short and avoid jargon.
- Read over the questions and check whether they can be misinterpreted. For example, the question: ‘Have you visited the children’s play area recently?’ doesn't mention a specific time period, so it is up to each respondent to interpret the word ‘recently’. This could be a visit made in the last week, month or year.
- Open-ended questions (where the opinions or motives of the respondent are being sought) are difficult to answer and difficult to code and analyse. It’s a good idea to limit the number of open-ended questions to about two or three per survey.
- If you would like to assess attitudes or views on a certain topic and don’t want to use an open-ended question, consider using a scale. An example of this would be, ‘How would you rate the cleanliness of the public toilets?’ with the possible options being ‘very good/good/average/poor/very poor’.
- Take care when wording personal or sensitive questions; it’s better to say, ‘Please could you tell me your age on your last birthday?’ and allow the respondent to point to an age band printed on the questionnaire than to ask them directly, ‘How old are you?’.
- During a face-to-face interview, it’s possible to show the respondents pictures or maps if it will help them to answer the question more accurately. These are known as ‘show-cards’. Show-cards can be a useful interviewing tool, but, to keep the interview simple for the interviewer, it’s best to use them sparingly.
- Think about the flow of the questions. Put questions about similar topics together.
- Do not make the questionnaire too long – a successful face-to-face interview lasts no longer than ten minutes.
Here are some sample surveys we have prepared to help you get started:
Sample Attractions Survey (pdf)
Sample B&B Survey (pdf)
