There is no doubt that in today’s data driven world, organizations have access to and gather more information on their audience than ever before. Fortunately, customer feedback contributes to this valuable intelligence that helps brands make better informed business decisions as they strive to constantly delight their customers. 

There are different ways, or “engagements” available to gather customer feedback, where surveys and comment cards are a couple of the primary avenues. Does it matter which engagement method you pick? The answer is “yes”, and here’s why. Each engagement type serves a purpose, and using the right one in the right circumstance can yield very powerful results. The question is, how to know which one to choose, and when? 

Your company has decided it's time to gather customer feedback, and you have been tasked to find a vendor. You have a limited budget and you don't have much experience in market research, if at all. You search online, and ask some of your peers which solutions they have used in the past. You decide to go with one of the many survey platforms out there, because they offer a bunch of question types and, even better, they have templates for all kinds of research topics you might want to run. So off you go creating your first survey, using the questions provided in one of the templates, and maybe adjusting or adding a few to the best of your ability. A few things might happen: 

1 – Your project is a success. You easily breeze through creating your survey and are pleased with the results when they come in. Of course, this is the best scenario.

2 – You have questions specific to your business that you want to ask, but are not sure how, and the templated questions available don't take you where you need to go. So you stall. Or,

3 – You write your research (with which you are more or less pleased), deploy the survey, and start getting results. But you realize that the results don’t really answer the questions you had in mind, or that maybe there was a better way to ask the questions. But you don’t know how, and now the project is over so it's too late.