Top Tips for Increasing Your Survey Response Rates

Below are our top tips to improve the quantity and quality of your survey responses.

Prioritise ease

A customer shouldn’t have to work to find or fill out your survey, make it as easy and mobile friendly for them as possible. It should be easy to respond to, to view and understand.

Think mobile first, when designing any survey, many of your customers will be responding on their phones. Test out your survey’s operationalisation on a number of devices to make sure that it easy to complete for everyone.

The questions must also be easy to understand. Exclude any terms that someone outside of your industry or business might not know. If you offer multiple-choice options, keep them consistent in how the customer is meant to respond to each. If a question is from 1 to 5 make sure you clearly describe what each option means to so it’s intuitive for the customer to answer quickly and correctly.

Your responses should run the gamut of your customer base, so the easier it is to access and complete, the better.

Be contemporaneous

Don’t wait days before following up with a customer. To improve response rates, ensure that your survey follows a customer’s experience as closely as possible. The more immediate, the better – because as time passes, their emotional connection to the event wanes and the likelihood of responding diminishes quickly. If three days pass before a customer receives a survey invitation, chances that they will respond reduce drastically.

Be it via chat, IVR, text or email, the experience should be fresh on a customer’s mind for them to be most likely to respond. They are also more likely to give the most accurate and considerate responses while the interaction is still top of mind.

Shorten survey

A transactional survey shouldn’t take your customer more than three minutes to complete., ideally it should take no more than a minute. Lengthy surveys lead to drop-offs and unfinished surveys remove an element of clarity from results. People lead busy lives and most don’t have the time or patience to answer 30 questions about a single purchasing experience.

Remove any questions you already know the answer to or don’t really need to know. If you have certain customer information to hand, you shouldn’t ask them about it. Most businesses should have a treasure trove of information customer information that can be integrated from 3rd party sources.

Decrease frequency

When a customer receives emails asking them to complete a survey too frequently, they will start to see them as spam and not only will they begin to ignore the surveys, but they will unsubscribe and you won’t be able to ask them about their experiences again.

It also does your results no favours when the same people are responding over and over again. You should have a diversity of respondents if you really want to take the pulse of how your business is doing.

Test out different formulas for sending out surveys to see what works, but for quality and quantity, you’re better off sending surveys at a lower rate so not to irritate your customers.

If you’re still worried about your response rates or curious as to how yours can improve, contact info@cxindex.com for advice.