SURVEY INTERVALS
How often should you send surveys? The answer can be quite complicated, but I’ll try to keep things simple here. The survey interval discussion has two main facets: how often you send surveys in general (daily, monthly, annual process) and how often you survey the same customer. How often you send surveys in general should really be based on the resources you have to manage the feedback and what they can handle. And also, it should be based on the type of experience, whether it is a survey about a recent interaction with a customer or a survey about the long-term relationship between you and your customer (depending on your type of business). How often you send a survey to the same customer should be based on the number of interactions they have with you in a period of time and the number of times you can reasonably expect them to respond before getting tired of seeing surveys. Here are some tips:
After a transaction. If you want to send surveys after a particular transaction, it helps to start by evaluating the number of transactions you have per day/month/year. If you triggered a survey after every transaction, would that (a) give you too many responses to manage? and/or (b) touch the same customer too many times in a short period? You want to keep the interval between transactional surveys long enough that you don’t aggravate your customers causing them to stop responding. The best thing to do is test out some scenarios with different rules on when to exclude someone from a survey invitation. For example, take your transactional data for a year. If you were to exclude a customer from a survey if they’ve received one in the last 90 days, how many would you end up sending out for the year (or month, or whatever period is applicable for your business)? Does that volume feel right to you and your customers?
During a lifecycle. Sending surveys during a customer lifecycle or relationship is a great way to reach out if you don’t have a high-touch relationship with your customers (it will remind you that you need to find more reasons to communicate with your customers if you haven’t been!). Typically these are done annually and that interval can provide great YOY performance data, especially if done at the same time every year.
REVIEWING AND ADAPTING YOUR SURVEYS
You’ve successfully implemented your survey program but the fun isn’t over yet. The next step is to carefully review your survey results to make sure you’re getting what you need.
- The right number of responses — Based on the business rules and survey intervals that you set, are you getting the volume you expected? Do you have enough responses to provide significant findings without irritating your customer base by over surveying?
- Abandonment rate — Are your customers leaving the survey before completing it? If so, you should investigate if it is happening because of a bad question or if the survey is just too long.
- Actionable response data — Are you getting the answers you expected from your questions? More specifically, are customers correctly interpreting what you’re asking? Check to make sure the data you’re getting back is valuable and actionable. Make sure it is measuring what you intended it to measure and make sure you’re capturing the most critical aspects of the experience (you’ll be able to tell from the comments what is most important).
- Survey complaints — If you have a large number of customers complaining about a particular aspect of your survey process, consider changing it. And be sure to check the opt-out rate as it may indicate a problem if you see an increase.
As we improve the customer experience in our organizations, we want to capture that through our survey results, so don’t be too quick to change everything up. However, we want to keep our customers engaged and keep things fresh in how we collect feedback. It is no doubt a balancing act.
Survey Design Part 1: What to Ask and How to Ask It
Survey Design Part 2: Standard Questions, Question Scale, and Survey Length