Harvard Business Review has a great post about making effective surveys. Rob Markey is a partner with Bain and Company, the consultancy, and huge proponent of the “Net Promoter Score.” He tells us that he himself ignores email invitations to surveys routinely, even though he’s in the business of surveys.
Response rates below 40% in consumer businesses or 60% in commercial environments indicate a problem. And if your response rates aren’t increasing, your customers are telling you that you don’t respect their time.
That sounds a bit familiar to us. Customer surveys (or employee surveys, or stakeholder surveys) all too often are exercises merely in “data collection” and not meaningful engagement with customer feedback. The challenge with quantitative surveys is that it’s relatively easy to treat customers as data points. In face-to-face interviews, it’s relatively impossible to ignore the real concerns of real people, particularly if you have a senior executive witnessing the interview first hand. But in surveys? Every customer becomes a data point.
If your response rates are falling, that is a finding. If you cannot get your surveys shorter than 10 minutes, that is also an indicator that you are placing your company’s needs for insight above your customers’ needs for free time.
Markey has a few great suggestions, including make sure you reach out to customers later and show them what you’ve done with their feedback. We also suggest a few more steps:
- Pilot test your survey with real customers. This needs to be built into the timeline, but it will be worth it. You need to know if your questions actually get to the heart of what customers believe. And you’ll know if you’re asking too much from them.
- Avoid using “off the shelf” charts from Survey Monkey or Excel. Senior executives see hundreds of these charts every week. Be inventive and create your own charts.
- Tell a story. Just like with qualitative research, you need a narrative arc embedded in your report. Make it evocative. Make it human.
- Integrate qualitative findings: mixed methods are hard to do well, but they are the gold standard in good insight. Weave direct quotes from interviews or focus groups into the charts.
- Share the story with customers. This will be difficult if your results are not as positive as you’d hoped. But authenticity is a value that consumers value in companies. Be brave and face your truth. Your customers will respect you for it.
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