Simplifying Web surveys

IT services and solutions provider Dimension Data has chosen a new Web survey software solution to help collect, manage and analyze feedback from its benchmarking reports.

The firm, located in South Africa, publishes an annual survey containing input from 400 global contact centers. The survey contains more than 155 questions and covers eight different areas of contact center business including: customer management, operations, performance, strategy, financials, procedures, human resources and technology. Collecting such complex and detailed information from so many companies was a long, time-consuming process. Dimension Data's previous benchmarking report system fell short of meeting all the company's needs. The application was cumbersome, and questions were difficult to update. The old system also lacked the ability to track respondents' progress through the survey and did not effectively validate respondent answers. Often, respondents had technical issues with the survey, which resulted in user errors that compromised the integrity of the data.

 "Thousands of data components are pooled for each survey," explains Cara Diemont, marketing and consulting director for Dimension Data's contact center business. "Apart from receiving complaints about the survey's ease of use, we couldn't change and update survey questions on demand. We needed an expert survey tool that we could take in-house, which gave us greater control and flexibility." The new system from Inquisite enables Dimension Data to build, deploy and conduct surveys quickly and easily. In addition, the solution provides the following benefits that weren't available previously, according to Inquisite. They include:

• a respondent tracking portal (allows Dimension Data to monitor survey completion, and allows contact centers to assign responsibility to various departments for such categories as HR, IT and finance);
• a simple WYSIWYG interface; and
• user error controls.

"Building and deploying the global contact center benchmarking report survey has been simple and easy. We expect to save months of time when we roll out the survey next year," Diemont says.