You know those surveys that you get from businesses that have WAY too many questions and end up taking an hour to complete even though they said it would take 5-10 minutes of your time? Don’t be that business. How many customers have the time to complete a survey like that? Any businesses sending these kinds of surveys should expect a low response rate.
If completing a customer feedback survey for a business feels like a bit of a chore, the customer will simply avoid giving feedback at all. Responding to a survey doesn’t have to be a cumbersome task, there are easy ways to get the nuggets of gold you need from a significant proportion of your customers.
The best surveys are achieving 45% response rates. That’s a lot of feedback to use to help improve. How are you doing?
Asking for feedback is a delicate art. Well-designed surveys are an opportunity to engage customers and enhance your brand. But poorly designed surveys are ignored, or worse, reflect badly on your organisation.
You can craft surveys that seize interest, get responded to, and garner quality feedback.
Make it super easy for customers to start a survey by embedding the first question within the email using buttons. Our analysis shows a 30-40% completion rate by including buttons to respond within the email, compared to a 1-5% completion rate by instead providing a link that directs customers to external website to complete the survey.
When you send people to a link that then requires them to log in or enter personal information then you are straight away turning off a large proportion of your survey participants.
Explain why you’re asking, what you’ll do with the feedback, and that you read all feedback received. Show the customer you care, and their voice is valued. If you don’t, some customers will assume it’s just for management dashboards, and will possibly never be read or acted upon, so won’t see the point in providing their thoughts.
Ask fewer, but stronger questions that will provide you with the information you need for better business decisions. It’s also important to be upfront with how long the survey will take customers to complete. If you deceive customers about the time and effort involved in a survey, most will either give up halfway through or stop caring about their responses.
Writing tip: Less is more! Emails between 75 and 100 words achieve the highest response rates.
Make sure your survey sounds like it was written by a human - because it was. Nobody wants to feel like they’re sharing their thoughts with a robot. Humanising your survey and showcasing your business personality will make it more engaging, and you’ll be more likely to receive personalized responses. Avoid jargon, speak in plain English. This will make you much more approachable and will lead to better quality responses.
Sincere personal invitations increase the likelihood of a reply. Social psychologists call this the reciprocity principle.
Writing tip: Tighten greetings and delete apologetic openers. (“I hope you don’t mind me emailing...” They do mind, now you’ve put the idea in their head!)
We know the best quality feedback is open text responses, but those take time for people to write, and time is precious. People are much more likely to respond to options presented to them, therefore you’ll get the best outcomes using a mixture of buttons (eg. single choice, multi-choice, ratings) as well as free-text responses. Make sure free-text responses are not ‘required’ to move to the next question. Respect the person providing feedback by allowing them to skip questions.
Connect your survey to your booking system or CRM and save your customers time by not asking them for information you already have. Remove the guesswork and know exactly which customer responded and all relevant details such as the booking, appointment, or event that it was related to.
