Your Survey Says “WHAT?!”

Posted by Kelley LearcloseAuthor: Kelley Lear Name: Kelley Lear
Email: kelley.lear@redmoonsolutions.com
Site: http://blog.redmoonsolutions.com
About: Kelley is a member of the executive leadership team and leads our sales and marketing efforts at Red Moon Solutions. Kelley’s extensive experience in project management, product management, and consulting with Fortune 500 and Global 1000 clients is extremely important in this role.See Authors Posts (127) on Feb 7, 2012 | 6 comments

I just recently shared a post called “Going Undercover – Do you Really Need To?”.   The gist of the article touched on the fact that you shouldn’t need to ‘go undercover” like the CEO’s in “Undercover Boss” on CBS’s popular television show.  You should be able to employ some simple techniques and tools to be able to keep your pulse on what is going on your team, in your department or within your organization.  If you are a tax professional within an organization, it is easy to get caught up in the daily grind of tax compliance cycles, tax and regulatory updates, and audits.  Often times, we know that we should be able to make marked improvements in our processes, however we rarely have the time to dedicate to this effort.  Further, we may not know what key areas we should focus on, and are not exactly sure where and how to get started.I offered up in the aforementioned post that SWOT Analysis and Surveys are two great quick and practical ways to get to the heart of some of your most significant issues, and to help you prioritize and put together a practical plan of action to improve your tax department.  I have already shared some thoughts and guidelines on how to conduct SWOT Analysis workshops…here I thought I would provide you with some possible tool sets you could use that would allow you to quickly create a survey for your tax, accounting, finance, treasury, regulatory, and internal audit folks. 

It is important to note that survey’s can extend outside your core tax department to others that also touch your tax compliance, provision, planning and audit cycles.  And for my CPA Firm readers, you can also utilize surveys with your customer base.  It really depends upon the objective of your survey.  If you are not sure where to get started, you may survey your tax department first to better understand where they think the biggest risks lie, where the most manual processes are, where they believe the most time is spent and/or where the largest volume of errors are. 

Some quick tips for creating your first survey are the following:

•  Make sure you have an objective – and state that objective for the survey.
• Keep the survey as short as possible (and still come away with meaningful data).  This will take a couple passes at reviewing your survey questions to make sure you have really put forth relevant, measurable and clear question sets.
• Determine how you will be collecting and measuring the data – radio buttons, drop downs, measuring satisfaction with 1-5 scoring, etc. 
• Make each question as precise as possible.  Do not use complex wording or structure, compound sentences, overly complex vocabulary words, unfamiliar terminology, or other idiomatic expressions (as you may lose folks), or end up with data that is open to multiple interpretations.   Use simple sentences and vocabulary appropriate to your audience that will not result in open ended and vague answers/results.   
• Once you write down your first round of questions, run this by one or more of your team members as a pilot to see if your questions are good, you get the answers you are hoping for, and that your question is not easily misinterpreted.
• Make sure you do not ask “leading questions” that will make your team assume you want them to answer in a particular way.
• Make the survey anonymous.  You can collect face to face data in meetings, workshops and other brainstorming sessions.  Make sure that your survey allows for a safe, open sharing of communication!

The great thing is that there are a multitude of tools out there that are extremely user friendly, inexpensive and don’t require an extensive procurement process and IT involvement.  In addition, the reports and analytics you get are exceptional and will allow you to use the data with your teams to enact change.  I have personally used several of these tools such as Constant Contact, Survey Monkey, Poll daddy, etc.  and will not be making a specific recommendation, but will share some thoughts that will allow you to research what is right for you . You will also want to check internally to see if you already have a solution in-house that tax can use (this may be also implemented in Sharepoint and other enterprise software). 

Just a few of the many survey solutions out there:

1. Constant Contact – we use this solution a lot as we can also use it to send out content rich emails as well as surveys.  It allows for easy uploads of contact details and provides solid reporting starting at $15/month.  There is a 60 Free Trial on the software as well as over 40 survey themes/templates you can use.  The only downside is that once in a while they “go down” and it takes them a while to get back up and running.
2. Survey Monkey – Also very easy to use. Offers a Free (Basic) version which allows you to create 10 question surveys with 100 responders per survey.  They also have a $17/month and $25/month option which provides additional features, responses and amounts of surveys. 
3. NoviSystems – Offers a Free version that allows only 25 responses in a one month period and very little additional features.  However, the Basic, Advanced, Premium and Dedicated versions are priced at $18, $48, $98/month and $6,990 per year, and allow for alot more functionality.  Software grids on these sites show the feature/price comparison for each membership level (this is consistent across most of the software listed).
4. Polldaddy – Free version allows for 200 survey responses per month on 10 question surveys.  Two other options are Professional and Corporate at $200 and $899 per year.
5. SurveyGizmo – Free 14-Day free trial, or $49/month, $159/month or $7,888/year. 
6. FeedbackServer – Offers pricing at one time fee, with a perpetual license which is either $1999 or $2499 depending upon how many survey administrators you want that will create surveys on their own.  This solution also provides for multi-language support, so it may be handy for you global organizations that may have questions which get lost in translation…

Have you employed the use of surveys in your tax department?  Have they worked?  What have you used?