Customer Satisfaction Survey Tips: How to Get Customers to Start and Finish Surveys  

A business can’t implement changes based on customer feedback if they can’t convince people a survey is worth their time from start to finish. A survey doesn’t do your business any good if no one takes it, or if no one finishes it.

Four ways we can improve our chances are 1) explain the survey and set expectations which state your case, 2) survey incentives, 3) a unique title/header and 4) a pre-test of the survey before you send it out.

Explain the Survey

It’s not very different from trying to reach a human resources professional who receives hundreds of resumes a week. There’s so much noise in everyone’s inboxes, voicemails, text messages and social media that it takes a thoughtful approach to break through.

By explaining to a customer how long it will take them to complete the survey, who your company is, why you’re doing it, how the company will use the customer feedback and how you will keep the respondents informed of changes resulting from their survey feedback. That explanation can come via email, text message, phone call, social media—or all of them.

Here’s where your business can ease potential respondents’ fears by explaining your privacy policies. People are more likely to share information—especially personal information—if they know exactly what you’re going to do with it.

A short explanation of the survey gives a brief opportunity to grab a prospective respondent’s attention. It should be short and straight to the point, so it doesn’t scare them off at first sight. In the message, you can also include your contact information for any questions they have and a due date for the survey (so it doesn’t sit forever).

An explanation also provides you with the opportunity to state the case for taking a post call IVR survey. It’s also your opportunity to clearly define an incentive for them.

Customer Survey Incentives

The goal is to reach the right audience with the right survey, so that everyone jumps at the chance to share their views. In those cases, simply publishing the results of the survey as they come in adds plenty of incentive for potential respondents. However, we can’t reach the right audience with the right survey every time.

Just because someone has opened a message from us, it doesn’t mean they’ll take the survey. We have to provide them reason to. It could mean direct improvements to customer service or a product—something that they’ll actually care about. Or another form of incentive like a gift certificate to Starbucks or any small token of gratitude that gets people to act.

Also, many people aren’t willing to take a survey the first time they hear about it or see it. And even many people willing to take the survey may forget and need reminding.

We can use follow-up emails or texts or calls to remind prospective respondents about our survey. We can explain up front that we’ll probably be in touch again (so they might as well take the survey now, essentially), and then follow through on that promise.

Unique Title

Bloggers put a lot of thought into titles for their posts, and survey designers should do the same (for surveys, emails or other messages they send). After all, they only have about three seconds to get a reader’s attention, according to conventional wisdom.

Three seconds is about enough time to see an email title and then decide to leave it, open it, delete it or mark it as spam. That’s not much time. If you only have a title with which to grab and keep someone’s attention this can be extremely difficult.

That doesn’t mean turning to tricks. If a survey is about cars, you can’t choose a title that makes it sound like the survey is about tents. And we can’t include offers in the title that we don’t follow up on.

Instead, we can title the survey something that holds interest for the reader and pertains directly to the survey. Better yet, we can focus the entire survey on things prospective respondents care most about and then title it accordingly.

Test Survey

From the smallest typo to the largest flaw in skip logic – mistakes turn people off. Given what a tenuous hold businesses have on people’s attention in the first place, we can’t lose them through careless mistakes.

By pretesting a survey and doing an A/B test with IVR survey software we can identify any errors or confusing wording. Ensuring that the survey addresses the issues it’s supposed to address.

As a writer, you can’t necessarily answer every questions for every respondent. We may think a question is crystal clear, but to the reader it’s gibberish. We’re too close, and it’s hard to step back and try to view things from an outsider’s perspective.

By testing a survey on a small group allows you to ask if every question is clear or confusing, what each question means in their minds, if there are any obvious errors, if the questions flow logically, if there are any questions that didn’t seem to fit or maybe need reworking for more relevancy.

Plum Voice Survey Templates

Many factors influence whether a person takes one of your surveys. With Plum Insight you have the ability to solve for these issues with an intuitive IVR survey tool to gather customer feedback, provide better customer support and other market research to help you continuously enhance the customer experience.

With complete customization, templates and industry leading support you can enhance the customer user experience with our automated omni-channel surveys.