Diligence Surveys Chapter 3: Testing and Launch

With your survey fully authored and programmed, you're on the cusp of rolling your survey out to qualified respondents. Before launch, make sure you follow our testing guidelines to optimize answer quality and limit errors. 

Testing

Testing during the authorship and programming process is essential for any survey you conduct.

Here’s what you should watch for during the testing process:

1. Proofreading: ensure all your questions are free of grammatical errors and that
   all proper nouns (companies, products, services, etc.) are spelled correctly to avoid
   confusion.
2. Content: are all your questions and data points from your client scoping call covered?
3. Survey flow: check for smooth transitions between survey topics. Additionally, check
   that follow-up questions and answer options display correctly based on prior responses,
   and that questions using words like “it” and “previously” make sense in all paths.
4. MECE principle: ensure that the options for your survey are “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.”
5. LOI (Length of Interview): time yourself when taking the survey, ensuring the LOI does not exceed 15 minutes.
6. Question repetition: repetitive question patterns are a major contributor to respondent fatigue. Make sure you limit your question loops to 3-5 iterations at most.

How to Test

If you’ve followed this guide to this point, you’ll already have clearly defined respondent personas and survey paths to inform your testing strategy. Here are a few additional testing ideas to help weed out final issues with your survey.

1. Ideal respondent: you should test all your predefined paths and personas, but you’ll want to pay particular attention to the ideal persona whose perspective you are looking to acquire.
2. Low information respondent: these respondents are those who barely qualify for your survey based on the screener section. Many of their responses will likely result in question skips (e.g. “none of the above,” “I don’t know,” etc.), which will help you ensure this skipping logic is implemented correctly.
3. All the options: test as a respondent who selects all options for multi-select questions (including or excluding “Other”). This will help ensure your prioritization logic is deployed correctly, as well as ensure you’re not penalizing power users with interesting insights.
4. Fewest options: on the other end of the spectrum, test by picking the fewest number of options in a multiselect question to see how follow-up questions appear.

Finally, be sure to leverage your platform’s automated testing features if available.

Launch

After programming and testing the survey, the next step is to launch the survey and put it in front of actual respondents. One tactic to enable smoother launch of a survey is to use a soft launch phase.

During soft launch, you’ll set the survey live to a limited set of respondents to test and modify the survey. This will allow you to confirm pathing, logic and questions are working as intended before officially launching your survey.

Most importantly, the soft launch phase allows you to sense check initial responses to make sure respondents aren’t misinterpreting questions.

Reporting

Once the survey is closed, you’ll need to gain access to the data collected. When considering platforms, make sure they offer file output in a format that works for you, whether that’s flat file data (for use in analysis programs like Tableau) or wide-file data, such as a .csv file. The best platforms also offer options for how you export the data— such as including or excluding data from terminated or in-progress responses.

Conclusion

The success of your client’s deal, and your firm’s relationship with that client, depends on delivering valuable insight based on reliable data in a timely manner. In an increasingly competitive M&A environment, survey offerings have become a baseline requirement for many due diligence projects, both from the client’s perspective and for the value they add to recommendations.

However, to utilize them effectively, you’ll need careful planning and effective execution to avoid costly project delays. Partnering with a survey provider can alleviate the stress and uncertainty surrounding surveys and even accelerate your launch time.

We hope you've found this guide to designing, authoring, and launching due diligence surveys a helpful resource. If you're interested in learning more about how Inc-Query can help, please contact us via the link below!