I've worked for a few bosses who think they're Jedi masters. They don't need to study figures or hear from clients to know how to serve them best--they know all that stuff intuitively. Or so they think. But in most cases, their grip on The Force was so tenuous that they couldn't see the pink slip approaching their desk at light speed.

What these managers really needed (apart from a swift whack upside the head) was a thorough grasp of the customer survey.

A well designed survey can tell you what customers want, what they think of your products or services, and how you can figure out what you're doing right and where you're going wrong. But the crunch comes in designing a survey. It's not exactly an art or a science, but it's a skill that takes some practice--and requires a tool that doesn't demand too much attention to figure out.

That's where Perseus Development's SurveySolutions software comes into its own. The latest version, 3, comes in four different flavors, ranging from the free one-question SurveySolutions Express to an industrial-strength Enterprise version that supports SQL database environments including Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and SQLServer. I put the two versions in the middle, SurveySolutions for the Web 3 and SurveySolutions Professional 3, through their paces and found the program has a lot of handy features, a clean and easy to use interface, and a few loose threads. On the whole, it earns a strong recommendation in its handling of all three main phases of surveys: design, data collection, and result analysis.

how do I begin?

If, like most of us, you want feedback from your customers but don't know how to get it, Perseus's site provides a welter of examples and white papers on the survey process. Because its product creates HTML-based surveys, its view of the survey process leans heavily toward Web-based or e-mail surveying, but its products and advice can work equally well for phone surveys in which operators fill out Web-based forms. Perseus's online tips range from the fairly obvious (clearly state the purpose of your survey; identify who you want to participate) to some canny advice on how to get the best results (the best time to solicit via e-mail is Monday night; expect most of your responses within four days).

Armed with Perseus's strategy and a good idea of what you want from a survey, it's possible get a survey up and running within a day. If you're in a rush to get started, you can download SurveySolutions for the Web 3.0 from Perseus's site and give it a trial run for a month. You can buy a "license-plate" code to unlock the program, and optionally upgrade it to the Professional version (which adds a superset of features I'll discuss later).

I've used previous versions of SurveySolutions before, so it took me no more than an hour to pull together an eight-question survey from a cold start to a finished HTML page. Naturally, your mileage will vary, but SurveySolutions is easy to follow because it uses a familiar Office-style word processing interface with templates, easy-to-interpret toolbars, and a question wizard that helps you through the process of building a survey. In short order, you can blast through some sample surveys, including customer satisfaction, event evaluation, membership surveys, and demographic research. And if you don't find a good match, you can create a survey from scratch.

There's a large collection of sample questions with a neat preview feature for those who don't want to use the Question Wizard to build questions by hand. For real masters of the game, it's possible to import properly formatted Word documents and add standard elements-single-response questions, check-all-that-apply responses, comments boxes, and satisfaction ratings on scales of three or five-by clicking on toolbar items.

You can build complicated instructions into your survey, including the ability to skip irrelevant questions with the click of a mouse. With the $495 Professional version of the program, you can skip whole pages of a multipage survey, add branching to create dynamic multi-page surveys, and pipe responses from previous questions into questions further along in the survey. These are pretty fancy requirements, but if your needs are great, it's worth the extra $300 to upgrade to the Professional version.

You don't see the exact look of your survey while you're creating it, but you can preview it in any browser on your system at any point in the design process. And when it's done, you save it as a questionnaire (.QUE) file or as HTML. The resulting Web pages look pretty good in both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator and are compact enough to load pretty quickly (a trick that many HTML creation programs can't manage). The pages are pretty plain, though, so you may want to edit in your logo or design elements using an HTML editor; the SurveySolutions page is designed and commented properly, so it's hard to break the survey form as you gussy it up.

and the response is …

You have several choices for collecting responses from your survey, and most of them use e-mail. The easiest method uses a script on Perseus's servers to translate the survey responses into an e-mail message, which is sent to the e-mail box of your choice. Another method is to send the results using an HTML mailto command, which won't work on Internet Explorer 3.0, and which kicks up a security warning. If you buy SurveySolutions Professional, you're given the survey script to place on your own Web server.

SurveySolutions also provides several "thank-you" page options for your clients to see after they have completed the survey. The default one is pretty clunky--it recommends that you hit the browser's Back button twice to return to the page you came from (a request that would make most webmasters cringe). A simple dialog box enables you to rewrite this or divert your survey clients to other pages on your Web site or elsewhere. As surveys are completed, the responses come filtering back to your e-mail box--or, if you use the Professional version, they can also be saved as an ASCII tab-separated database file on your Web server. These responses can be imported into the Access database that SurveySolutions creates from the survey you've built. Once the results are in, you can begin analyzing and reporting on the data you've collected by using a solid set of reporting tools. If you're not accustomed to data analysis, you can use the AutoPresent and AutoReport wizards to prepare the data. You can chart information from the spreadsheet-like table of results. There are 15 chart types, including pie, bar, line, and column; 3D rotations are available too. And the reports come out as word-processing documents that you can easily edit. There's also some statistical strength to the data analysis tools: They can summarize counts; figure averages in mean, median, and mode formats; calculate standard and absolute deviations; and perform more obscure math. The Professional version can also crosstab and do regression analysis.

When you read a bald list of some of the product's features--especially those in the Professional version--SurveySolutions sounds daunting. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's easy to create decent-looking surveys and get them online. And they're easy for your clients to fill out. SurveySolutions gets a hearty recommendation.

Now, would you say this article was (a) useful, (b) really useful, (c) saved my business, or (d) all of the above?

Contributing Editor Matt Lake has racked up experience in three major corporations and one branch of the government. He currently operates RegSelect.com and helps nonprofit organizations develop a Web presence.