[Editors Note: The author consults for Perseus, whose survey software is discussed in this article.
At Dolphin Quest, customers have an experience they won't soon forget. They get to interact with dolphins in a pristine and enriched dolphin habitat at Dolphin Quest locations in Bermuda and Hawaii.
To make sure that the dolphin experience lives up to - and exceeds - customers expectations, Dolphin Quest has always made customer feedback an important part of its programs and its organization. Guests were routinely surveyed in person or by phone, mail or e-mail. Dolphin Quests web site also gives customers the opportunity to tell Dolphin Quest and other potential guests what they thought of their own dolphin experience.
However, the people at DQ realized that for organizations in the service and entertainment community - like Dolphin Quest - the timeliness of feedback is just as critical as the feedback itself. As time passes, guests and clients become less likely to be willing or able to offer precise and helpful comments. Recollections become hazy, moments blend together, and impressions are generalized into moderate enjoyments and mild annoyances.
As with most of the service and entertainment community, Dolphin Quest needs the results from customer surveys available immediately. If customers are unhappy about a particular aspect of a service or experience, DQ needs to be able to act immediately to remedy perceived problems. If months pass before survey data is analyzed and available, this just doesn't fit the bill.
Selecting and implementing a solution
We were looking for a solution that would give us access to the survey data quicker, but we also wanted to integrate handheld technology in order to gather data right after the guest had completed their dolphin experience, said Jason Price, Dolphin Quests Director of Sales and Marketing. In the past, we used paper surveys that were handed out after guests were finished with their dolphin experiences. These surveys were collected at each of our locations and mailed on a monthly basis to a company in California that put together a report. It would take several months for them to collect the data and analyze it for us.
Not only did DQ want to get the best possible survey/feedback system in place; they also wanted it to have a cool technology twist. They analyzed the software available for handheld devices, and selected Perseus MobileSurvey. Once we met the folks at Perseus, tested their product and talked to some of their customers, we knew this was the technology for us, said Price.
Being connected to customers is a key ingredient to success in any environment, especially for Dolphin Quest, whose product is an experience intended to evoke particular feelings for people, says Rich Nadler, co-founder and President of Perseus, creator of the MobileSurvey and SurveySolutions software.
MobileSurvey enables users to create questionnaires using Perseus Development Corporations SurveySolutions word-processing interface, and then deploy them on Pocket PC, Palm, or Symbian-based handheld devices. Once respondents complete the survey, the data is dynamically collected and stored on the handheld device, and transferred to SurveySolutions through wireless or wire-based connectivity to be displayed instantly in tables or graphs. Results from Web, e-mail, and handheld surveys can all be transferred to an MS Access or SQL server-side database.
MobileSurvey offers easy-to-navigate surveys on Pocket PCs and other mobile devices.
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