The average response rate to paper surveys is around 8%. For web-based surveys, it’s a bit under 20% and declining as do-it-yourself remedies continue to flood the cyber highways. For phone surveys the going rate is a bit under 50%, but that’s only if it’s a very short survey. Response rates fall off dramatically if the time requirement is more than five minutes, or maybe 8-10 questions.
While logic would stipulate that putting a customer satisfaction survey in front of someone should be viewed as a positive thing, why is it then that so many people view them as irritants; held in roughly the same esteem as a trip to the dentist; something to be avoided if at all possible? With paper surveys commonly associated with junk mail, web surveys with Spam and phone surveys with telemarketing, the motives behind each may be pure, but they are received with the same enthusiasm as a politician’s promises a week before election day.
Part of the problem is the general sense of boredom most people attach to the conventional and decidedly tired methodologies of the day, but I think there’s a far bigger issue that most companies and market research firms far too often overlook. Namely, when trying to recruit someone’s participation in a survey, the age-old human need of “what’s in it for me?” typically does not have an answer.
Think about it. Your time is limited, and hence valuable. A third party wants you to give them some of that time, but implicit in the request for something of value is the presumption of getting something in return. Yet history says that IF you take the time to respond to most surveys, your efforts will flow off into some informational black hole, never to be seen or heard from again.
There are some who think that a small bribe will turn the tide. We’ve all received surveys with a dollar bill or two inside, or maybe a pen, key chain, small gift certificate, or some other type of token of nominal value. Whatever the “inducement” may be, the hope is that, if nothing else, by pocketing the gift a sense of guilt will propel you to respond to the survey. For most people I’ve talked to, the prevailing view is that if someone is dumb enough to send me a dollar bill I didn’t ask for, then shame on them if they think I’m not going to pocket it. Maybe I’ll respond to the survey, maybe not. Probably not.
Alas, unless you’re offering measurable odds on winning a Maserati, the impact on response rates of offering inducements are pretty close to nil. An act of desperation more than a productive strategy.
We have a different approach. Today we live in an informational age, and while trinkets and gadgets and token sums of money aren’t enough to float anyone’s boat, information is. We learned years ago, somewhat by accident, that constructing a survey around closed-loop communication is, all by itself, enough to stimulate interest in the process.
The approach is pretty simple. We advise all of our clients to make an up-front commitment to all prospective participants to the effect that, “when the survey is complete we intend to share with you the relevant results of the survey, along with our plans for addressing issues identified by the survey”. That’s all there is to it.
Best of all, when the survey is completed, our clients find themselves with a de facto standing invitation to come back later and meet with each client. Because they will be armed with a detailed view of what each customer thinks, closing the communication loop in this manner sets the table for not only the delivery of solutions, but it doubles as a great relationship-building exercise as well. And it’s worth a good 10-15 points of additional response rate. Everybody wins.
Now don’t get me wrong. The reader needs to understand that we already had the highest average response rate in the world when we stumbled onto this approach, so while the increase pulled us even further away from the pack, for everyone else, it’s just one small thing that will help get your customer’s attention. Just bear in mind, at the end of the day, a paper survey is still a paper survey and a web survey is still a web survey, and no matter what you do, the world at large is still going to hate phone surveys.
Still, even if you can’t spin a silk purse from a sow’s ear, even coming up with a polyester purse is probably more than you have now.
