There’s no doubt about it – we’re seeing an epidemic of survey fatigue, and consumers and businesses are both suffering.
A third of people will walk away from a brand they love after one bad experience – and that includes any follow up research. There’s so much we want to know from our customers, but with requests for feedback constantly increasing, we risk turning off consumers with research that feels onerous and ‘old school’.
Brands need to stay focused. It’s not good enough to simply migrate old questionnaires onto newer platforms like mobile and hope for the best. Instead, brands should be thinking leaner and lighter. Here’s how:
Put yourself in the right shoes
Not yours – your customers’. Surveys shouldn’t overstretch your audience, bore them, or make them wonder what the point was. A survey is part of their overall Customer Experience. With that in mind, make it feel right for the moment. Don’t ask everything at once – make the questions relevant and sensible.
Get on with it
Don’t spread yourself too thin. Focus on a single aspect of their experience – one that is still fresh in their minds. By respecting the customer’s time and keeping things short and easy you’ll reduce drop-out rates, meaning you’ve got more insight to work with.
Look for the nuance
Shorter doesn’t mean multiple choice. Think about text analysis, and where written responses (and increasingly, feedback relayed via voice, video, photos, and even emoji) could help you identify key themes, pinch points, or barriers for your customers. If you’re worried about this making your survey more difficult to complete, especially if users are on mobile devices, even asking for descriptive words will help – you’re not looking for chapter and verse.
Some companies are even moving back to interactive voice response (IVR) technology, because they understand that it’s easier for the customer to talk than to type – and that this often generates a more honest response.
Technique matters
A series of questions measured against the same scale makes it easy for respondents to lose focus. That’s when they start simply answering ‘agree’ to everything or scoring all questions the same, because it saves thinking effort and gets them to the end of the survey faster. It’s a sure-fire way to get poor quality results. Shake things up to avoid it happening.
Make it personal
If someone’s a regular customer they don’t want to see the same old survey over and over again – survey fatigue is bad enough already. If you can, use transactional information to make your questions relevant to your customers’ experiences: dates, locations, money spent – anything that shows that you know them, and that you want to learn something specific from their feedback. Don’t show you know them too much though. Privacy is important, so don’t go against GDPR and the MRS Code of Conduct.
Give it energy
Ask a dull question and get a dull response. Instead, be creative and challenge consumers to be different. Try asking questions like: “What would you change if you were our CEO for the day?”, “If we were in a customer service competition, what medal would you give us?”, or “Would you employ one of our staff in your business?”.
Don’t do it for the sake of differentiation or frivolity though – remember your resulting responses still need to be valuable and actionable.
Stay on brand
Every survey is a golden opportunity to get people to engage with your brand. It’s a chance to strengthen relationships with customers and show you value them. Work closely with your marketing team to make sure that your surveys reflect your brand values and are true to its tone of voice. It might feel like you’re relinquishing control but these experts know what works, and when it comes to Customer Experience no organisation should be operating in silos.
Remember, the last impression you leave is often the most enduring, so the way you deliver your survey is going to be the way people will recall your brand.
Test it till it hurts
Test everything: your ideas, your subject lines, and your questions. Will they give you varied, insightful responses? Make every element of your survey work as hard as possible. Repeat to yourself: there’s huge benefit in marginal gains.
Appreciate the limitations
There’s no doubt that surveys can deliver value, but they’re not the only way to gather feedback. Even when designed well, you’ll only ever receive responses from a small proportion of the survey field, and those customers who do complete them may naturally share common characteristics and preferences – something frustrated CX teams would be quick to confirm.
Think about what surveys are not giving you – are you trying to validate existing data, or fill in gaps in information? Or are you trying to gauge the opinion of a hard-to-reach group, or tap into unsolicited feedback?
Consider harvesting social data, using text or voice analysis or predictive analytics. Remember: the average NPS score of a company which integrates feedback from four or more different channels is 14 points higher than the baseline. Not convinced? One airline we worked with saw a one percent increase in NPS translate to more than 100,000 extra bookings a year, so there’s a lot to gain from getting it right.
And if you’re still thinking “But…!”
Relax. As a first step, concentrate on in-the-moment feedback – there’s never a better moment than now. Capturing live responses means better quality answers, higher response rates, and the chance to fix any immediate problems your customers are flagging. Once you’ve got that down, you can start joining the dots and creating a bigger picture later.