Surveys can be a valuable tool if you want to understand your customers’ needs, employee sentiment, or public opinion. But the accuracy of your survey data isn’t always a guarantee – especially if the responses are rushed, ambivalent, or come from the wrong audience.
That’s why it’s important to validate your survey responses and ensure you have actionable insights. Decisions based on unreliable data are a waste of time, expensive and damaging at worst.
Want to get the most out of your survey data? Here’s how.
What Is Survey Validation?
Survey validation is a quality control process that ensures the responses you receive from surveys reflect your target audience’s real thoughts and experiences. It helps filter out incomplete, irrelevant, or fraudulent responses so the insights you gather are trustworthy and actionable.
Creating a well-designed survey is the first step, but even the most logical and thoughtful questions can yield flawed data if you don’t take steps to validate the input. For example, some participants may speed through surveys without thinking about the questions, or you may be getting answers from a bot.
If you don’t get a handle on these issues, they can distort your findings and misguide your business strategy. Survey validation protects against these risks and enhances the quality of the insights you rely on for decisions related to marketing, pricing, product development, or customer service improvements.
Why Validation Is Important for Your Business
Surveys offer valuable data to plan major business decisions, such as implementing an employee reward program or launching a new product, but they’re useless if the information isn’t real. Validated survey data gives you the confidence to act on your insights. Whether you’re deciding on how to improve your customer service or align internal strategies with employee feedback, solid, reliable data ensures your decisions are based on reality – not guesswork.
Conversely, poor-quality data can mislead your team, waste resources, and damage trust with customers or employees if actions don’t align with their real needs.
How to Validate Survey Responses
Validation should be built into every stage of your survey process, from the initial design to your post-survey analysis. Here are some tips to do it effectively.
Pre-Survey Preparation
The groundwork for validation starts before you launch your survey. Your design choices will directly impact the quality of the responses you receive.
- Start with balanced questions: Include a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions. Open responses can help you identify real respondents versus rushed or automated submissions.
- Define your target audience: Make sure the survey clearly indicates who it’s intended for. Responses from outside your desired demographic, even if sincere, can skew your results.
- Set completion incentives: Small rewards like gift cards can encourage honest, considerate responses.
- Keep it concise and engaging: Long or complex surveys tend to lead to drop-offs or low-quality responses as participants get bored with the process.
During the Survey
Validation needs to continue while your participants are actively completing the survey. Build in mechanisms to detect and prevent invalid submissions. Some of these techniques include:
- CAPTCHA tools that can filter out bots and prevent spam responses.
- IP filters that restrict survey access to specific geographic areas and audiences.
- Attention-check questions that test whether the respondent is real and paying attention, such as “Please select ‘strongly disagree’ for this question”
- Survey time-trackers that flag surveys that are completed unusually quickly, indicating automation or disengagement
Post-Survey Analysis
Once your survey is complete, the validation process needs to continue with careful data analysis. Here are the steps for post-survey review:
- Look for outliers and patterns: if certain responses dramatically differ from the majority of the responses, or you see the same answer selected over and over, it may suggest low engagement or automation.
- Check for inconsistencies: Compare the responses to related questions. Contradictory answers may indicate the respondent wasn’t answering truthfully.
- Review open-ended responses: Blank, nonsensical answers can signal disinterest or automation and should be removed from your datasets.
- Monitor completion rates and dropout points: High abandonment rates may point to survey design flaws or fatigue, allowing for improvement in future versions.
Make Every Response Count
Surveys are one of your business’s greatest assets, but only if the data you collect is accurate and relevant. If you implement validation strategies across your survey process, you not only protect the integrity of your data but maximize its value to fuel better decisions, improve performance, and build stronger business relationships.
This was contributed by Cynthia Mielke, VP, Strategic Partnerships at Tango.
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