Offline Survey App is the New Talk of the Town, and Rightly So!

10 min readSep 27, 2018

Let’s start simple and sweet. Imagine that you are a baker with a dream of turning it into a bakery-café chain with foodies standing in queue till the end of the road. Such a pretty dream!

How will you go about it now? You need growth and more growth.

Do you need more flavors? Which ones? Do you need more space? Or change your location? To where then? Do you need to slash down the prices? Or is it reasonable? Or can you tweak it a little higher?

To whom would you turn for advice?

Your best friend? Partner?

Who would know what your customers want other than your customers itself… Now for that obvious reasons, you decide to ask your customers. Surveys are your best friend there. You get deeper insights into different buying patterns and trends amidst your loyal as well as potential customers. Online surveys help you to get the job done with so much ease. Thanks to the customization options and attractive look of the online surveys, you get people’s attention. You get to contact thousands of your target audience in no time.

It’s all going well until your customer or you get into a bad network zone. What if your survey gets stuck or buffers for a long time? How long do you think your customer is going to stay dedicated and wait to finish off the survey that you gave? Not for long. The average response rate for email surveys stands at 24.8%. The customers are getting impatient every day. Everybody wants everything instantly. And if your survey, no matter how brilliantly and painstakingly you designed and deployed the survey, it is going to be a failure if it fails to load because of the internet connection. All the masterly crafted components work together only if the survey is able to maintain a strong internet connection.

Is that a scary prospect?

Let me tell you about the offline survey app that is going to save your day and make filling out surveys a hassle-free experience for your customer.

And for all those who say, offline surveys work only in Asian or African countries where the internet penetration is far less than in the US, you would be surprised to know that 15% of users have already started using offline apps. It definitely doesn’t imply that online survey apps are going out of the field, It merely points out a spectrum of potential customers that you are losing out because of the bad internet. It could be because of the location because they are transiting or it could be any reason that makes surveys a bit more complicated than it usually needs to be. Offline Survey Apps are much more convenient and can be presented creatively.

Are you convinced to accept that it’s high time for you to jump into the wagon and start chasing the race? And do you think that having an offline survey app would guarantee to minimalize the rate of customers that get marginalized??

If you do…Good! If not, I have some more reasons left in the bag for you. Let’s begin.

How Does Offline Survey Apps Work?

That’s gotta be the first question that came to your mind when you initially heard of offline survey apps. Usually, it is perceived that everything looks and performs better when it is online, but here you find survey apps competing for each other with bringing out more offline apps. Confusing, isn’t it?

Offline survey apps allow you to collect data from users anytime and anywhere completely depending on your convenience rather than the Internet.

The data gets stored in the application and is synced automatically to the database once the internet connection is established. This gifts your customer with a fuss-free experience while you can relax reassured that no data is going to be lost because of bad connectivity.

If you already have an online survey app, up and running, under which circumstances do you think offline surveys aids your feedback process more efficiently than your online survey app?

Let me introduce you some scenarios where offline surveys apps make your life a little easier and surveys manageable.

1. Remote Surveys — This is when you need to collect the data from your customers in remote places or famous “dead zones”. You are conducting an event like a medical camp or fair and need to know the feedback. Replacing online survey apps with offline survey apps in such times could save yourself a lot of buffering time and annoyed customers.

2. Event Surveys -Here you are going to thank your offline survey app a lot. At events, people are usually more willing to share their thoughts and opinions with you. What you did right, wrong or could have done better… the moment is so fresh in their minds, they wouldn’t have vague opinions. It is the accurate responses you need rather than indifferent ones if you need to produce quality insights. Event surveys are a good fit for offline surveys apps.

3. Walk-in Surveys — This is where you directly walk up to your customers and collect feedback immediately and moves on to the next customer. Slow internet is a buzzkill since nobody would actually wait to complete the survey when they are going from places to places or when they have other things to do.

Advantages of Offline Survey Apps

Offline surveys are going to be a savior when you are targeting the point-of-contact feedback. When you don’t have a very strong internet connection, it would help you to get the feedback seamlessly. You could also rely on offline survey apps where you need the questions to be swift or when you actually want to observe the reaction of the customers like market research or lead generation.

Other than its undeniable advantage of working without hinging on the Internet, it has other superpowers too.

1. Accurate Responses

An event such as a bike ride event is happening, and, you have got about 75000 people coming in. They are going to be excited and would love to give their views on the event. As discussed earlier, the experience is new leading to unbiased and very accurate responses. When asked directly face to face, the people sometimes feel obliged to answer in the best possible manner. It is something that these offline survey apps bring to the table. The surveyor is given the chance to read the customer and his responses semantically too, enabling you to develop highly informative results that would assist you to cater to the customers’ expectations.

2. More Reach

When you don’t have an extensive contact list and need to increase the response rates, offline surveys could be your best bet. You must have seen representatives standing in the mall or roadsides conducting personal interviews, which by the way is also known as interceptive surveys. It allows the customers to give their feedback on their experiences. The added bonus to you is that you get to directly contact your customers and observe their behavior and preferences. There is a lot of information that you can collect which can’t be achieved with online survey apps. Especially political campaigners exploit the advantages of offline polls. They need to fire short and precise questions to analyze the public’s opinion. The versatility of offline survey apps allows the campaigners to reach out to a higher number of people.

3. Increased Response Rate

We all at one point or another wanted to be celebrities. We want to feel special and appreciated. This is something the companies including yours tries to prioritize. Treat your customers like a king or you lose them. Customer churn can be painful, sometimes even fatal.

When you are sending out email surveys to your target audience that includes your loyal as well as potential customers, you squeeze in customized elements such as addressing them by name or sending greetings for their special occasions. Offline survey apps are mostly in the form of a personal interview and will enhance your survey response rates. How much more personalization can you bring in?

Imagine you have a cafe and you are giving out free samples of dishes that you are planning to introduce. The customers get to taste and then respond to your questions. They would feel like they matter and their opinions matter while you get to read your customer’s reactions face to face. Not many are going to shy away from a survey that includes free food and as an added bonus they get to share their opinions directly.

4. Follow-up Instantly

Another unique characteristic of the offline survey app is that they tend to be on the qualitative side more than the quantitative side. As I said, they are typically in the form of personal interviews. How absurd would it be if someone asks you to tell them your answers in numbers or just with yes or no?

The whole idea of these kinds of surveys is a chance at the deeper exploration of the answers. If you have a question about a response or if you want them to give a detailed answer, you could go for it. You get to follow up immediately for further details. Researchers engaged in field data collection usually prefer this survey method.

The real beauty of the personal interview style that offline affords is that you can explore responses further to gather deeper information. If you have a question about a response, you can follow up immediately for detail. You get to know why they responded the way they did. It helps you to go beyond mere numbers and takes you to the underlying reasons which again results in you getting amazingly informative data.

Alas! Nothing Is Perfect

I am not saying offline survey app is the only good way or the perfect method to record responses. It does have some downsides. Let’s get to the not so attractive face of these offline survey apps.

First of all, they are time-consuming. You might have to spend time individually for each of your customers. Still, this method could be on the cheaper side than paper surveys where you have to take care of printing, postage and data entry costs.

Though offline survey apps claim to fetch accurate responses, there is a possibility that people might hide their true responses being polite. You can always counter this by asking very candid feedback letting them know that these responses would impact the future positively.

Not many differences come up while creating an offline app by creating an online survey. You should be clear about your survey objectives so that you would end up with productive results in the end. You should not confuse the respondents by straying away from your survey objectives.

If the survey is in an interview form, you should make sure that the surveyor is conditioned to have excellent intrapersonal skills as well as interviewing skills. He should know to engage random people and keep them motivated to participate. Consumer interviewers or field researchers need to be trained adequately to tackle all that is thrown their way. There would be people with a million other peculiarities and attitudes. Your surveyor should be able to handle them all without feeling pressurized.

Do not scare off your customers asking too many questions. It is best to keep intercept surveys under five minutes. You can add in quantifiable responses to keep the answers from not getting complicated. Use open-ended questions wisely and only when it is absolutely necessary.

Having too many images or other features in your survey suffocates the respondents and kills the design. If you are using images ensure that they are all formatted properly and is compatible to your offline device. The whole point of offline survey apps is the promise of seamless working and you do not want to mess it up by adding too many tables and images. Image heavy surveys are slow to load.

You might rely on checkboxes and radio buttons too much to avoid long qualitative responses. Offline survey apps are mobile and that means the device size would be mostly constrained. Selecting buttons can be problematic for many when there is too little space. Make sure that the survey doesn’t look like its choking.

Wrapping Up!

Oftentimes, companies miss out leads and feedback just because they failed to extend a smooth, seamless survey experience to their customers. You might think that convincing a customer to agree to participate in a survey is the biggest hurdle down the path. No, it is not. Imagine your customer sitting down to complete a survey and it is taking forever to load or the responses are not getting recorded as they chose. Problems with internet connectivity and syncing could be the poison for your survey. The offline survey apps could help you a long way with these, especially if you want to cater the surveys to any remote location.

Survey fatigue is a real thing and the customers would not hesitate to leave at the first sign of discomfort. Offline survey apps help you to win over those skeptical participants by offering them a hassle-free experience. With minimum inconvenience and no buffering time, survey completion rates have all the chance to rocket high.

If you want to collect feedback one to one, you need to create an offline survey app. Intercept surveys are conducted in public places, and you get to capture the feedback live. This procures a clearer idea and aids in developing a well-defined perspective about what is needed and what is not, for the betterment of your company.

I agree that it requires a bit more effort from your part but it pays off when you end up with an in-depth and information-rich data.