Online survey tools are critical in collecting the valuable opinions of your customers. Not only do they help create a user friendly interface that’s easy on the eyes for participants, but they also deliver the results back to you in an organized manner that’ll help you make heads or tails of it all. Once you’ve got your online survey design down, you’re ready to launch – right? Wrong! Don’t forget the three most important words in the creation of online surveys: test, test, test.

You could test it out for yourself, but where would be the fun in that? Want an idea that’ll give you some real results, super-honest feedback, and will go a long way to ingratiating you with some of your most loyal customers? Here it is: invite a small selection of your frequent customers to participate in your “beta survey.” This can accomplish a couple of very important things:

- Big time engagement with some of your most valued customers. They’ll feel honored that you asked them, and as a result it makes that lucrative bond that much stronger.

- The opportunity to test your online survey tools on people who weren’t in on the creation process, ensuring that it’s viewed with a fresh set of eyes.

Remember to program a comments field into the test version of your online survey design so that test participants can give you suggestions for making it better. Be sure to offer some kind of compensation to the customers that took you up on your invitation to test out your survey, and regardless of what kind of compensation you give them, share the results of the survey with them so there’ll be some sense of completion for those involved.