When you’re creating any kind of data-gathering tool to help you improve your business, you want to ensure that everyone who interacts with it views it well. This will mean that the data it gathers is complex, comprehensive and, most importantly, useful. There are many great ways to ensure that your survey is interacted with in the precise way that you’re hoping for, so let’s talk about those methods here.
Offer an incentive
Perhaps the most effective way to ensure that customers are engaging well with your survey is to offer a reward. This can be something simple like a discount to your business, or something a little more complex and desirable, like a free Amazon gift card. Either option can work well for you, consider what your customers might value most out of the things you can give them for free.
Providing any of your customers with this incentive is more than just a way to get their eyes on your survey. As well as that, it’s a way that you can ensure their answers are honest and deliberate.
A good way for you to achieve this goal is to be totally clear from the outset of the survey, and let your clients know that there is a chance that will lose their incentive, should their answers prove to be unusable. Pairing this with an early-on call to action, asking the customer to ‘imagine what you could get with a $X gift card’ puts the interaction in much more clear and certain terms. They are aware of what they want and, therefore, what they could essentially lose.
To ensure that your customers are paying attention throughout the survey and delivering their honest, thought-out opinions, you might consider a ‘trick’ question. Often, these questions will be something like ‘Please type the name of a fruit into the box below so that we can be sure you’re reading the instructions’.
Then, following that question, you have one answer that you can use to identify any participants not engaging in good faith. In turn, these participants would not get their incentive, of course.
Keep the questions short
Maintaining the attention of anyone can be tricky when you’re asking long questions or delivering long speeches. Ideally, it’s best to ensure that all of the communication that your survey contains is as concise as possible. This will allow the customer, who may consider their time to be a favour they’re giving you, to answer efficiently.
For a great example, consider how you might survey people if you were in charge of a beverage company. First, look at this question: “On a sunny summer day, spending time outside with your friends and family and eating hot food, what types of beverages or other refreshments might you consume to stay hydrated or cool down?” This question is far too verbose! While it does conjure the correct image in the customer’s mind, it feels like a slog to drag your eyes across it. As such, the customer is much more likely to move their attention elsewhere and stop engaging with your survey.
For a version of that question that reads a little better, consider the important factors you need to consider: hot weather, drinking to hydrate and cool, and the group setting. Once you isolate these factors, you can construct a much more efficient question. For instance, you might ask: “What drink do you hydrate with at big social events on hot days?” That question covers all the themes that you need to research, as well as being concise and easy to comprehend. An increase in speed and comprehension will certainly lead to an increase in customer engagement within a survey.
Engage the audience’s attention
By creatively using language, you can ensure that your audience is focused on the content of your sentences rather than the words themselves. The way to make this happen is to ensure you use fairly common words but use them in a refreshing combination.
For instance, a bad example of this would be “As a valued customer, do you feel satisfied with your grocery shopping experience today?” This sentence is very bland and will lead to a very basic answer.
A good example of creative language use could be “Want to tell us how awesome we are? Click this link!” That use of language reflects a more flexible approach to company image, as well as engaging the audience with humour.
As this is a set of common words, and a fairly common joke, arranged in a more interesting way, you can be sure that the customer will understand what they’re agreeing to do: a customer satisfaction survey. You can also be confident that the customer will enter the feedback survey in a good mood: the words act as a natural filter to engage people who are happy with your service.
Creating an engaging survey that will give you the data you need can be complex, especially when consumers are often being asked to complete more and more surveys every day. However, using a few key methods, you can be sure to massively increase the rate of desired responses, and gather much more useful data.
