Convenience Sampling Defined: Pros and Cons

Conducting a thorough survey relies on two things: willing participants and accurate data.

Tracking down relevant survey groups is expensive in both time and money. But asking the wrong questions to the wrong group of people can have an even greater negative impact.

Since feedback is a necessary component of first-class customer service and workforce optimization, savvy professionals include convenience sampling to get the data they need.

What Is Convenience Sampling?

Let’s break down the name convenience sampling. Unlike random sampling, which uses demographic data to create a representative sample for the population they’d like to study, convenience sampling relies on easily accessible sample groups.

That’s not to say that random sampling is always better. Convenience sampling, when done correctly, have significant benefits for your business. The first one is that conducting surveys this way will cost a business fewer resource, and respondents are usually ready and willing to participate, saving on both the money and time costs we mentioned earlier.

To be effective, there must be minimal criteria necessary for participation in a survey employing convenience samples. Everyone in the population you wish to survey should be eligible. Not only that, but you should focus on getting answers quickly so that it’s possible to iterate, capture insights in the moment. This means you need to make it as easy as possible for the survey audience to provide their feedback.

We’ll explore when to use random sampling a little bit later.

Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Employee satisfaction and performance surveys are great examples of convenience sampling. These surveys are conducted from a readily accessible pool of respondents (i.e., your employees).

One thing to consider here: accuracy requires transparency. Transparency requires trust. If employees feel their answers will have a negative impact on their careers, you risk introducing bias into the equation and fail to capture genuine areas that need attention.

Luckily, HR departments do have the option to use genuinely anonymous surveys, perhaps by using Verint Survey Management, which allows the creation of unique identifiers without collecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII).

Taking this extra step builds employee trust and helps ensure less biased, more honest feedback. This can help smooth mergers, ensure the team feels supported after a layoff large or small or even catch the pulse of how employees feel about management. No matter what, by protecting their anonymity, you can ensure more thoughtful, useful answers.

Why Use Convenience Sampling?

There are several reasons why organizations should opt for convenience sampling.

Conducting employee and customer feedback surveys becomes much less expensive in time, cost, complexity and even stress. By using the readily available sample of participants it’s easier to focus more on interpretation and insights generation. Don’t forget to rely on the convenience factor. Straightforward questions and survey rules can help your organization gather data quickly and effectively.

One great reason to use convenience sampling is to delight dissatisfied customers. Unlike a random sample where you definitionally cannot target the recipient, a convenience sample can be used to capture what a specific customer thinks in the moment. Consider the practice of offering links to a survey on customer receipts or after a purchase.

Since this costs very little to add to the receipt and there is no follow-up needed from your organization, you will almost certainly receive more answers from thoroughly dissatisfied or delighted customers. This may be considered biased if you’re attempting to understand your overall customer experience, but if your goal is to actually do something with that data to save the customer relationship, a convenience sample is actually ideal.

You can also use unstructured feedback from your customers to create product reviews or understand the personas you need to model for better CX.

The Pros of Convenience vs. Random Samples

The primary benefits of convenience sampling, specifically ease, low cost, and targetability can lead to significantly more effective surveys in the right circumstances.
Here’s why:

• Your bottom line will thank you. The reason is simple. Convenience sampling is cost-effective when done right, allowing you to achieve greater results and more usable information even with less budget. Leverage your existing audience, use simple delivery systems like email, physical mail, leave-behinds, or web surveys.
• The survey delivery method can be as simple as mailing a survey invite to your in-house list or posting a link to your website or social media. Even if you want to rent a list, it’s much more affordable than a probability sample. In one study, it cost $800 to rent a list or $4,400 to field the same survey to a random sampling of telephone participants — More than 81% savings!
• Convenience sampling also requires fewer participation rules and less research since the goal is to reach a specific audience rather than collect a wide sample for every demographic. As a result, collecting your respondent pool becomes quick and easy, and the overall survey processing experience doesn’t complicate your back-office operations.

Given the extreme ease of participation, lower cost, and high response rate with convenience sampling, it’s possible to do far more surveys on different subjects and to measure change over time more economically. Rather than providing the most possible control over variables, what you gain instead is the ability to rapidly produce a snapshot of the survey group. Because it’s so much cheaper, you can do this much more often as your team’s understanding of the issues evolves.

The Cons of Convenience vs. Random Samples

As useful as convenience sampling is, there are some drawbacks that you need to consider to get the best results. In fact, here are few issues to watch out for that just aren’t an issue with random sampling:

• Convenience samples produce biased data by their very nature. Because the survey is designed with convenience in mind, your results will usually not be extensible to the entire population. To avoid this issue, go in forewarned with the knowledge that these samples won’t be representative and could be biased. What a convenience sample can tell you is what the most likely respondents are most likely to think. This can be very powerful if that audience is your most diehard customers, frustrated customers, or your own employees. Just be careful to understand the limitations.
• It’s extremely difficult to replicate the results of convenience samples. This is a bit nitty gritty, but it absolutely matters for understanding your results. For example, if you give the same survey to different audiences, they will often differ dramatically in ways that defy easy explanation.

Neither of these drawbacks are deal breakers for convenience sampling, but it’s important to keep these limitations in mind. We also recommend that you clarify when a convenience vs random sample was used to collect data whenever you present to stakeholders. This prevents false impressions or dangerous generalizations.

Real-World Scenarios to Consider When Building Samples

Here are two scenarios where the drawbacks of convenience sampling played out in the real world.

• One of the most famous in recent memory was a 2008 AOL poll with 272,939 votes in which 61% of respondents voted for John McCain for U.S. President and 39% for Obama. Here we see that even enormous convenience samples are not necessarily more accurate at predicting wider trends, as we know Obama went on to win the election that year.
• At the 2009 CASRO Data Collection Conference, Jon Krosnick compared the results of a telephone probability sample to that of seven convenience samples conducted via the Internet. Where 54% of respondents said they had recently seen a movie in the probability sample, the convenience samples varied widely, with answers ranging from 65% to 93%, well outside the population norm. Even when corrected for the audience,

Why Does Sample Type Matter?

Speed vs margin of error. Cost vs bias. These are the main axis to consider when choosing between a random and convenience sample. Where convenience sampling offers lower cost and much greater speed it comes at the cost of a higher margin of error (especially when extrapolating) and an increased risk of bias based on who is being sampled.

Random sampling is the inverse. For a higher cost and longer time period, random sampling historically and theoretically produces less biased data with controlled margins for error.

That being said, the cost of convenience sampling and the errors that occur when using it can be addressed in three relatively simple ways:

• Use multiple samples
• Repeating the survey
• Cross-validating your data

Each of these techniques lowers the risk that you will make an incorrect assumption or decision based on the bias within the data collected. Another potential approach, which is used in medical testing, is to focus on homogeneity of the sample. Rather than looking for random people or simply the most readily available, find ways to target specific demographics in the convenient group. For example, if you want to understand how 18-24 year old women who use your product regularly feel about an issue, targeting that narrow band with convenience samples multiple times can help to tell you what that particular demographic thinks and feels.

Channeling the Power of Survey Management

Convenience sampling, when used effectively, can provide organizations with all the insight they need to improve their customer and employee experience. As long as the drawbacks are kept in mind, convenience samples can provide the necessary results at lower costs and with greater ease of implementation.

If you’re looking to take your employee engagement, customer experience, or feedback collection to the next level, Verint is here to help. Verint Survey Management leverages the power of real time AI to help you understand individual and strategic customer context allowing you to weave together the story from convenience and random samples with attitudinal and behavioral data like never before.

Whether you need to close the loop on a particular issue or understand how  your customers are truly feeling, Verint Survey Management makes it easy to get started and fast to get results.