Driving Response Rates from Surveys

Everyone loves collecting customer feedback through surveys, whether it’s Net Promoter® (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or otherwise.  They’re an incredible way to spark energy and promote change within your organization.  The challenge is getting your customers to actually respond to survey requests without harassing them.

Driving the right medium for surveys

One big decision you face is choosing the right medium to deliver surveys.  This is part luck and part science.

Think about your own experiences as a consumer:

• When you call your bank, you’re asked to complete a survey over the phone.
• When you pay your mortgage, you’re asked to submit a survey online.
• When you buy yourself a McLunch, there’s a survey at the bottom of your receipt.
• When you subscribe to an online service, you’re emailed survey questions.
• Your gym has comment/survey cards with a submittal box on the wall.

And now we’re putting surveys inside software applications and web pages.  I think it’s safe to say that customers can be saturated with survey requests.

 

If your business is subscription-based, you’ve probably experimented the most with email surveys.  This involves building the target list, emailing the target list, dealing with email distribution, hoping that people will pay attention to your message, etc.

 

Go through all that just to get a 2-6% response rate? What a pain in the pa’toot.

 

So, what is the right medium to get surveys into the hands of our customers and what kind of response rates should you expect?

 

First, start with your business objectives.  Perhaps these questions will help define them:

• Is it important to achieve a very high response rate, or is a sampling of the customer base adequate?
• Does every user need to be surveyed?  Or just certain role players (in B2B) like “admin”?
• How many other types of communications are being sent to users?  Using which mediums?  What does “over-communication” look like?

Regarding expected response rates, there isn’t a de facto-standard but here’s some evidence:

• An email survey campaign can see response rates from 2-6+% (depending upon the number of follow up attempts).
• Bain has reported telephone surveys can see responses from 80-95+% of the people that answer the phone. Of course, those that don’t answer the phone are probably the majority.
• Online surveys can see responses from 11-20+%

A brief study performed by University of Texas at Austin has an easy to consume acceptable response rate list that should give you a good idea of baselines.

Test surveys that work best for your business

In the end, the best choices for your business come from experimentation and testing:

• Test survey modes for email, in-app, phone, etc. (whatever is appropriate for your company)
• Test number of follow up attempts
• You can even go so far as to test the day of the week you launch a survey

If you’re an A/B testing nerd like me, Optimizely has a great article about A/B testing surveys for better response rates.

Don’t limit yourself to just one mode of survey distribution.  Test everything!

Happy surveying!