How to Increase the Number and Quality of Responses You Get Through Online Feedback

But everything that is precious is usually extremely hard to get. This article shows 6 ways how to persuade customers to give you feedback more often. Raise the rate of your survey responses.

Respect Respondent’s Time Schedule

People get dozens of emails every day. In most cases, every new email is just another problem to solve or question to answer. This could be quite stressful, especially during peak working hours. That’s when people are most sensitive to perceive them as useless distractions.

Try to get into your customer’s shoes and do not request feedback that solves your problems when everyone else is busy solving theirs. It will only create negative associations with your brand. Your emails will go straight to spam folder and beyond the point of return. Instead, ask for feedback at the end of productive hours. If you respect the customer’s time, they will be more willing to help. If you are an international player, keep the tricky time zones in mind.

Tip: You can find more information about the most suitable times and dates to send a survey in this study (https://www.surveymonkey.com/blog/en/blog/2011/08/16/day-of-the-week/)

Explain the Purpose of Your Survey

Nobody likes doing things without a purpose. When addressing customers, always avoid phrases such as “to improve our service”. That does not motivate anybody to think about a concrete problem. Vague questions lead to vague answers. Which won’t lead to any improvements. Offer your customer a clear vision about what are their insights needed for instead.

Try phrases such as “speed up the payment process”, “shorten delivery time” or “redesign our website to be more user friendly”, so they know immediately, if they have something to say about the subject.

Ask the Right Questions

One question can be asked in a million ways. The questions must be clear to provide answers that you need. If you ask “how would you improve our website?“ you will get constructive answers like “the site load time is too long, there are too many features I never use” or useless answers like “make it green”. Bad questions bring useless data and you have to spend more time filtering out answers that are useful. 

To get useful answers you have to ask in a right way. What seems to be the main obstacle in payment process? What would you consider the greatest improvement in usability of our website? This is the kind of questions which bring good information to work with. 

Find the Balance Between Open and Closed Questions

Creating a good survey can be a lot trickier than one might think. Ask too many open questions and your respondent will soon get bored or stuck. But the danger of closed questions is that they might produce answers that make things simpler than they really are. The best thing to do is to use open-ended questions to get into your respondent’s mind. Only after you have a clearer picture, use closed questions to extract more exact data that are easier to analyze.

Make it Work on all Devices

When using a mobile device, there is nothing more annoying than zooming in and out to answer a question in a survey that was made only for computer screen. Nobody will waste their time for you. Make sure your survey is optimized for all devices. 

Tip: For more inspiration, visit Capterra and choose from this enormous list of survey solutions optimized for mobile devices.

Brand it!

A survey without a brand is like a friend request from someone without a profile picture. It just doesn’t look trustworthy. Participants will not be interested in giving information to some unimportant no name company. Make surveys an equal part of your brand. Branded surveys show that you care about your reputation. You will have much more credit in the eyes of a respondent.

Tip: It doesn’t take a designer to create a beautiful survey. Try SurveyGizmo which offers plenty of customizable templates made by professionals.

Getting high quality customer feedback is mutually beneficial for both sides – businesses and their customers. Regular insights from customers are extremely valuable sources of competitive advantage.  It is a force that drives your business to deliver products or services that meet their customer’s needs and desires better.

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