5 Reasons Why Your Enterprise Should Strongly Consider Moving From Paper to Online Surveys

As much as some of the reasons for moving from a paper based system to an online based survey feedback system might seem inherently obvious, it is worth remembering that having used a paper based system for so long that changing to another system will require transitory effort.

No matter how clear it might be on the surface for an organization to move to an online system to the outsider, there are a number of things that one needs to do in order to make a seamless transition to an online enterprise survey system. Among these include moving to an online survey system in mutually agreed upon stages or steps, or having some members of your organization experiment with online surveys or evaluations at first and getting others to transition at various points.

Now the tactics that one should use during this transition process may vary depending on how ingrained paper surveys/evaluations are in an organization, or on the culture of the organization. But regardless of how you make the transition, here are 5 reasons why you should make it as soon as possible.

1. Cost: 

   Obviously once you have purchased and installed a software system, there are no paper, telephone, printing or postage costs for sending out, completing or collecting surveys.

2. Efficiency: 

   A good enterprise survey software system allows you to not only deploy a survey or a feedback form multiple times, it also allows you to quickly deploy multiple versions of the same survey.

3. Quality of responses:

   While in theory both paper and online survey software allow for open ended feedback, automated feedback systems allow the user to save and come back to their surveys/evaluations at a later time.  This means that people have time to consider their responses and add to them in.

4. Speed: 

   This holds true not only for the fact that surveys or feedback forms are deployed quickly, but that data can be tabulated, analyzed & presented instantaneously and in a variety of custom formats.  Reporting options can include demographic analysis, cross tabulations and more.

5. Anonymity:

   It is much easier to ensure not only confidentiality when submitting a form online vs. submitting a paper form.  As a result, you are more likely to get completely honest and well thought out responses, which potentially give you insights you might otherwise have.