How to Get More Customers to Take Your Surveys

Every company essentially looks out for insights from customers using surveys. Feedback survey or customer satisfaction survey is a metric that helps the companies/ employees gauge the satisfaction level of their customers. It is a short questionnaire sent out to the customer as emails, phone calls (immediately following a service experience), pop-ups on mobile apps and websites, post-chat windows, focus groups and customer interviews. The customers can share their opinions by providing ratings, filling out boxes, answering MCQs, or by vocal feedbacks.

But it is very difficult to get customers to take your surveys most of the times. Here are a few tips to create attractive surveys for your customers:

1. Keep it brief: According to research, survey length is the major factor that determines customer participation in feedback surveys. Depending in the nature of your business, keep the number of questions limited to less than 7, sometimes even 1-3 questions should suffice. Unless and until you are looking to evaluate a specific aspect of your business, the following 3 questions should suffice:

• Please rate your experience.
• Would you recommend us to a family member or a friend?
• Would you like to share or suggest anything else?

These questions should help you get all the data that you need. Don’t waste much of their time. Tell them how much time it might take for them to complete your survey in your email.

1. Watch your timing: Survey the customers while their experience is still fresh. You may try asking them for a feedback in-person, when they are at your store. They may complete email surveys sometime later, when they would have forgotten the details and consequently might give you an inaccurate feedback.

1. Use multiple choice, checkbox and rating survey questions: According to research, it shows that customers prefer quantitative questions over open-ended qualitative ones. The popularity is led by multiple choice questions, followed by checkbox and rating questions. These questions limit the time and thought it takes for the customer to respond to the survey.

1. Create an attractive survey: The aesthetic design of your survey can significantly impact the likelihood that customers complete it. Brand your tablet surveys with a company logo like that of helpscout. Choose a survey app which has a clean, simple design and easy-to use interface. This attracts your customers to participate in your surveys and complete it.

1. Ask relevant questions only: You should ask questions related to your customer’s immediate experience with your product or service only. Ask relevant questions only by using skip logic questions. For example, you cannot ask a customer who just got a haircut done at your salon about their pedicure experience. Irrelevant questions make the customers ignore and further not respond to the surveys.

1. Avoid vague questions: Be clear while you ask questions. Vague questions get vague responses. If you are not clear about what you are asking, the answers that you get will not be enough to improve your business. In fact, you will confuse your customers as well. Use simple and plain language and structure your sentences clearly. Avoid questions that make you sound like a salesperson or a data scientist.

1. Sequentially arrange your questions: You should know what questions to ask first. If you ask your customer demographic questions like where they live, before giving them an opportunity to share their positive customer experience, it will only result in higher survey incompletion rate. So be very careful to arrange your questions sequentially.

1. Limit open-ended questions: Usually customers avoid filling feedback surveys as they think it would take a lot of their time. Especially if they have to type sentence answers, it slows down customers and limits response rates. So, use open-ended questions sparingly, and always keep in mind that surveys should never take longer than five minutes for the customer to complete it.

1. Be vocal about feedback incentives: Lure your customers with feedback incentives in return for their valuable time completing your feedback survey. Include a free gift or contest entry as an incentive on completing the feedback survey. Consider showing the image of a free gift on the first screen, ask 2-3 questions, and then get customers to fill in their email address for a chance to collect their feedback incentive.  

1. Act on the customer survey feedback: After having collected the feedback from your customer, thank them and make the customers feel emotionally invested. They should feel that their feedback helps you to improve your product or services. Add an introductory message telling them how exactly you plan to use their feedback.  

How does Customer Satisfaction survey help?

Customer satisfaction survey is an important metric for everyone in the company.

• It helps the customer service representatives see how they can improve their service. It can also help them improve their customer service skills.
• Supervisors can check is proper training and resources are being made available to agents.
• It helps corporate see if there is any problem with their management, product, policy, customer service, or system. They can take actionable steps to improve customer experience based on their feedback.
• Asking for additional comments or suggestions can actually increase customer loyalty and brand engagement in the future.

Use the above tips to create surveys attractive enough for your survey response rate to be statistically significant and add value to your business.