Ciao, the European subsidiary of Greenfield Online, made its call at the Esomar Annual Congress in Cannes, France, in a paper jointly authored with marketing research agency Fat Planet.
The companies claim that researchers were still very inexperienced when it came to the internet as a research tool and that the industry should put a greater investment in skills training.
Richard Thornton, UK client development director at Ciao, said: "Researchers need to get out of the mindset that they can take a survey designed to be sent out as a postal mailing or for computer assisted telephone interviewing and just migrate it online."
He added: "The internet is a dynamic and interactive medium and researchers are not yet fully exploiting its potential to bring greater insight and top quality research results."
Industries are being urged to make surveys more appealing, or else respondents will tire of taking them.
Tony Hufflett, director of Fat Planet, said: "If respondents are presented with too many overly-long, static, laborious surveys, we believe that response rates for online overall will start to fall.
"Engaging people in a way that makes them want to give their opinion is the objective, not boring them senseless."
Ciao and Fat Planet advised marketers to put a compulsory respondent satisfaction rating at the end of each online survey, which would they said provide valuable feedback to help create an improved experience for respondents.
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