Free Survey Tool ... Google Forms

Many businesses fail to employ their most valuable consultants ... their customers. Other businesses thrive because they strive for continual improvement by asking their customers how the products or services might be improved.

And there are some good tools out there to help facilitate that kind of feedback.

Enter Google Forms.

The Form option used to be buried in the Sharing menu in Google Spreadsheets, but recently, Google made it a lot easier to get started. Now Form is it's own object alongside Documents, Presentations, and Spreadsheets.Building the form is very intuitive. You can choose from Text, Paragraph text, Multiple choice, Checkboxes, Choose from a list, and Scale (1-n). See example:

You can create a link to the form, embed the form on a webpage, or even embed it in an email. (only works with certain email clients)

After you finish building the form and you have some submissions, you can see the responses in the spreadsheet-like view or in the graphical view:

Unlike Zoomerang and other non-free options, you cannot make the form change based on the customers previous answers, but most people don't need that option anyway.

Google Forms is free and easy to use (like the rest of the Google Office Suite), and can be used for a myriad of research applications as well as for customer feedback. All you need to get started is a Google account, which can be set up with or without a GMail account.

Now you know,

Garrett Woodroof