At some point in business or life, all of us need the help of surveys to make few vital decisions. But what should be considered as the best methods of carrying out an offline survey? And how effective will the approach be in collecting the right data?

In order to assess the right method, we first need to understand what could be the potential challenges that could take our survey off-track. We’ll have to consider a number of factors before finding the best method that suits our requirement.

Here are a few challenges of offline surveys:

• Speed: Firstly, access to the right kind of people is the biggest challenge. Finding people from different geographies, groups, communities etc. is difficult and time consuming. Even if you find the right people, getting them to take-up our survey is going to be an uphill task. These challenges have major implications on the time-frame set for a particular survey.

• Cost: Conducting off-line survey are labour-intensive. This invariably means that the costs of carrying out such surveys are going to be expensive as compared to online surveys. However, since the feedback from offline surveys are direct & instinctive, it is definitely worth the cost and efforts.

• Old Techniques: The current survey approaches are mostly outdated and lacks innovative methods to connect with the respondent. Offline surveying is done in several ways like, you can opt to send the paper questionnaires to people at home, or question people directly or approach people by phone. Whatever technique you may follow unless the outcomes of offline surveys are limited to the extent of respondent’s awareness and willingness to participate. So, in this era when people are short of time, online surveys are best recommended.

• Anonymity: When you prefer to conduct offline surveys, it is inevitable that the data collected could be biased and subjective. The objective of any type of offline survey should be to get impartial feedback so that the objective of the survey is well defined and effective. But offline surveys lack this credibility and thereby is not a very natural method of surveying people.

Conducting surveys are important and imperative to any business. But choosing the best method which is abreast with the rapid changes of people’s expectations, attitude, technology and social changes etc. is the need of the hour.