Everyone wants higher response rates. Why? Because higher response rates mean
So how do we go about getting higher response rates?
There are two reasons why people would respond to your surveys.
The key phrases to note in point one above are:
Conversely, anyone who doesn't have an opinion (an indifferent customer) or thinks their opinion does not count/ will not be heard would not respond to the survey.
To solve this problem, you will have to encourage people to respond when they seem indifferent. But, unfortunately, this is a complicated thing to do.
There are multiple approaches one can try.
For customers directly interacting with an employee, that interaction can be leveraged to generate a higher response rate. I am sure you are familiar with a support agent telling you, "You will receive a survey post this call; please answer it." This small act will help, but even more, can be done.
One of the best ways to ensure a response rate increase is by sharing success stories with employees. When customer opinions and stories are shared in a public forum, along with some public acknowledgment of higher response rates, employees will go out of their way to convince their customers to reply to surveys.
We are all storytellers. When something nice happens to us, we tend to tell the world. We tell these positive stories more often than we tell stories of misfortune. When we have a poor experience with a company, and that company hears us and does something to solve our problems, that is a positive story we can tell at the water cooler. People hear these stories and realize that their issues get listened to via a survey, and the company will follow up with them. They are then a lot more inclined to answer future surveys.
The social media phenomenon has taught us that humans have this intrinsic fear of missing out. Therefore, one of the more uncomplicated tactics has been to share the result of the feedback with every customer who was asked to participate in the feedback loop. Share critical messages in story/comment form and how you have acted on them. People who haven't responded would feel that their voices have not been heard and would want to participate more in future surveys.
This is usually a more straightforward thing to fix. But realize that this fix only works on those inclined to give feedback in the first place.
Over 70%-80%. of the surveys today are answered on mobile devices. This means surveys need to look good on those devices with one-hand operations. This is now a hygiene factor.
With the attention span of customers now at 8 seconds on social media and under 3 minutes for blogs, we need to ensure that one does not spend more than one or two minutes on surveys with us. You will see statistics that show that response rates do not fall with more questions, and people tend to finish the surveys they started, but the quality of responses will go down as the attention span is so low.
Send surveys out when you think they will answer. This will depend on what kind of response you are asking for. For example, if you send out a survey post a flight, sending it within 30 minutes of the flight landing is ideal as that is the time the person is most likely on the back seat of an Uber with nothing else to do. If, on the other hand, you are asking for a relationship survey, see when people are answering your surveys, and try to send it out during that time (e.g., emails that land Tuesdays/Thursday lunchtime work best; Fridays afternoon are the worst)
Getting customer responses is getting more and more difficult. Response rates have been falling over the last few years. However, this is because the system has been abused too much, and people are getting survey fatigue with no immediate benefit.
Using the approaches outlined above will positively impact your response rates. We have seen response rates increase by 3 - 5 X when implementing some of these measures. There is no magic bullet, but by combining these techniques, most companies will be able to overcome poor response rates.
