TABLE OF CONTENTS Interest in the use of new technology for conducting research typically focuses on the web but there are also applications in telephone research.
Although both use the internet, we should initially distinguish web from e-mail surveys. An e-mail survey involves sending questionnaires to customers by e-mail, typically in the form of a file attachment. The customer opens the file attachment, completes the questionnaire and returns it to the sender. A web survey would be completed by logging onto a web site and is usually preferable to an e-mail survey since it avoids the software problems that can be experienced with file attachments. However, in business markets it should be borne in mind that some people may be authorised to use e-mail but not the internet. There is evidence that response to e-mail and web surveys is quicker than for other types of self-completion survey but no evidence that response rates are higher. Web surveys, typically in the form of exit surveys, are useful for e-commerce businesses, especially for measuring satisfaction with the web site itself. However, even for e-commerce businesses that should not be confused with a full measure of customer satisfaction since it would precede order fulfilment and ignore any requirement for after sales service. For a worthwhile measure of customer satisfaction, e-businesses should invite a random sample of customers to complete a web survey that covers all customer requirements. Even then, a web survey with a low response rate will suffer from...
