Consultation that people can answer on a phone in ninety seconds.
Public sector consultation has a participation problem, and most of it is friction. A form that needs an account, works badly on a phone, and takes twenty minutes gets answered by the same fifty people every time. Removing the account is the single biggest change you can make to who actually replies.
Councils and agencies are asking residents about services and decisions, and asking staff the same things any large employer asks. Both need to work on an old phone over a poor connection, and both need to be readable afterwards without a research team.
When a survey goes out here
- Consultation on a proposed change, where you need more than the usual respondents
- Service feedback after somebody has dealt with you, asked the same day
- Staff surveys across departments, anonymous and on a fixed rhythm
- A short poll on a single decision, where one question gets ten times the answers a form would
- Post-event or post-session feedback from a public meeting
The survey types this sector runs most
Each one comes with its questions already written, the scoring explained, and the mistakes named.
CES survey
Customer Effort Score asks how hard somebody had to work to get what they needed. It is the best single predictor of whether a customer sticks around after a support contact, and it is more actionable than satisfaction because effort has a cause you can go and remove.
See the questions CSATCSAT survey
Customer Satisfaction Score measures one specific interaction rather than the whole relationship. It is the right tool immediately after a purchase, a support ticket or a delivery, and the wrong tool for a quarterly health check.
See the questions EngagementEmployee engagement survey
An engagement survey is the long one, run once or twice a year. Its job is not to produce a number, because eNPS already does that in one question and does it more often. Its job is to tell you which specific parts of working here are holding the number down.
See the questions eNPSeNPS survey
Employee Net Promoter Score borrows the NPS® question and points it at the people who work for you. It is a good measure and an easy one to ruin, because the moment somebody suspects their answer is traceable, you stop measuring morale and start measuring caution.
See the questionsQuestions worth asking in government and public sector
What is different about asking here
- Removing the login requirement changes who answers more than any amount of promotion does.
- Ask the demographic questions you will actually break the results down by. Anything you will not use is data you then have to look after.
- Publish what you did with the answers. A consultation with no visible outcome trains people not to bother with the next one.
Responses are anonymous unless you add a question asking who somebody is, and nobody needs an account to reply. FreeSurvey is a general purpose survey tool and makes no public sector accreditation claim, so check it against your own procurement and data rules before using it for a statutory consultation.
Security and dataDo residents need an account to respond?
No. One link, no login, works on any phone. That is usually the difference between fifty responses and five hundred.
Can we run this as an open consultation?
Yes. A link that stays open and collects submissions whenever people get round to it is what feedback boxes are for. Surveys suit a consultation with a closing date.
Is it accredited for public sector use?
It is a general purpose survey tool with no public sector accreditation. Check it against your own procurement and data protection rules before using it for anything statutory.