Poll Vs Survey: Definition, Examples, Real life usage, Comparison

Customer satisfaction surveys are a way of finding out the company’s performance in terms of keeping their customers happy. Companies launch customer satisfaction surveys based on their entire journey with the brand or try to gauge transaction specific experience. The surveys provide the customer with an opportunity to rate their experience with the company on multiple aspects such as customer service, ease of navigation, relevance among other characteristics.

These surveys are designed as a checking mechanism that helps the company to understand the changes and trends in customer experience from time to time. By doing this, companies try to maximize customer retention while focusing on growth and expansion plans. It even allows the companies to highlight grey areas which need to be worked upon.

The break up of Customer satisfaction surveys factors in:

• likelihood of promotion
• perceived value
• meeting of expectations
• product ratings
• customer effort
• competitive analysis
• customer service studies
• recall and recognition research
• brand image perception

• Questions: Polls use a single question methodology to gain issue specific opinions. Surveys make use of a number of varied question types to conduct an extensive analysis on particular topics. This makes surveys an in-depth process as against polls which are issue specific base level questions.
•  Time consumed: Being a detailed procedure, conducting surveys are far more time consuming than polls. The time taken to conduct surveys depends upon the topic at hand, previously available knowledge and the decisions to be taken by the end-user. Polls consist of a one time question, and so data gets collected in a quick and prompt manner.
•  Purpose: The purpose of surveys is to understand, explain and provide market data for allowing end-users and other beneficiaries to make intelligent and informed decisions based on current knowledge. Polls, on the other hand, are issue specific questions that aim at estimating or predicting outcomes.
•  Usage: Surveys are used to plan out and frame detailed strategies and actions that companies take after studying and understanding the overall picture based on the data provided. Polls are used to make time based quick decisions  by efficiently gaining target audience perspective in a concise manner.
•  Analysis and feedback: Surveys collect large number of data points from a substantial sample. This  presents the need to organise and analyse the data to make it presentable for the end-users. Care also needs to be taken to use the correct tools so that the data is comprehensible, even for people without technical expertise and knowledge. Moreover, surveys ask for extensive feedback to provide respondents with the opportunity of highlighting the positives as well as negatives that they feel should be conveyed. This de-limits the respondent from sticking to a script as well as companies are able to get additional insights.
• Compared to this, Polls do not require such an extensive analysis and presentation. The results get compiled through a simple percentage that shows the answers given by respondents and which option has received the highest votes in the poll. These are fairly simple and do not require any technical expertise or skill to understand. Polls ask for immediate feedback which simple states the voters reasoning behind their choice of option.