The ultimate guide to analyse Survey Data

You went through the process of making the survey and of receiving responses, congrats, the biggest part is done! Now you have a number of responses and you don’t know what to do with it. We are here to help you. First of all, always keep in mind that the rapport/synthesis you do out of the responses has to be driven as part of the decision process. Always ask yourself what does this information teach me? How is it enlightening my decision making? One isolated response does not mean anything.

Here are some advices to help you analyse your responses.

Find the right tool

The first step when analysing your data is to find the good tool to export your results. Brew Survey exports your results into a CSV file that will make your life easier while analysing your responses. Brew Survey also enables you to see useful graphs, percentages and trend analysis of your surveys.

Calculate first insights

Second step of analysis. Start by calculating the average, variance and standard deviation for each question. It will help you having an idea of what your survey reveals. At this point you can start comparing the results with your previous expectations.

It is very important to write down your expectations before looking at the results in order not to be biased. Having expectations helps you understand if what you think is right or wrong and what you need to change.

For example, let’s say you broadcast a survey to know on which social media your customers are more responsive. You expect that 80% of them will say Facebook. But your responses show that only 60% of them say Facebook. As a consequence you realise that you should give less importance to Facebook than what you expected. Be careful not to interpret responses to match your expectations though.

Segment your responses

Focus your analysis on two types of responses: 1. the very satisfied respondents: see what the respondents liked, what made a difference.
2. the unsatisfied respondents: why didn’t he liked your service, product, etc. Focus on what you can improve for him.

You can also analyse your responses according to the segmentation you did of your audience. For example is you segmented your audience according to age. You will focus on one hand on the responses of the 25-35 years old, and on the other hand, focus on the 35-45 years old. You will understand what decision you have to make regarding this particular group, and what decision you need to make regarding this other one.

Segment your questions

You have to consider the weight of every question. Some are more important than others and as a consequence you should give them more importance in your analysis. For example demographic questions are not very important in the analysis. They are like tool to help you with the survey but are not the main part that you want to analyse.

Consider the number of results

You should be aware of the possible lack of results. If you see that your results are less than what you expected and you can’t draw conclusions out of your survey, you will have to drive a complementary survey. It is important that you consider the lack of responses. Otherwise your final results may be biased.

To conclude, best decision are made with a global vision of a situation. As a consequence, think to compare your results with objective indicators. What can you compare it to? Your sales report, Google analytics data, some previous survey you made, etc. Your survey has to be weighted according to the other data you have. The more objective your report is the best it will be to drive to the right decisions.