Customer Surveys for Agency Managers: What Managers Need to Know (Urban Institute Press)

This practical volume provides a wealth of nontechnical information and advice on planning and conducting customer surveys. It's a must for all agency managers, public or private, seeking to make their customer surveys more useful to their agencies and to make their agencies more responsive to customers. Topics include the types of information that should and should not be sought from surveys; categories of respondents; options for administering surveys and the advantages and disadvantages of each; conducting surveys in-house versus contracting; steps in the survey process; sampling strategy; sources of survey error and suggested remedies; and tradeoffs among timeliness, accuracy, and cost.