If you’re familiar with PATH, you know we always stress the importance of talking to your customers. If you’re new here, welcome! PATH stands for ‘People Are The How’ and we wholeheartedly believe you cannot improve relationships with your customers without talking to them. If every business followed our sage advice, customers would be burdened with surveys from everyone. How do you combat survey overload and still get the data you need? Be smart about what you ask, how you ask it, when you ask, and who you ask. 

Survey Fatigue 

Survey fatigue – or customers being bored and uninterested in your surveys - is driven by many factors, including:

• The number of surveys customers are asked to fill out 

• The length of the surveys 

• Poor survey design – too many open-endeds 

However, the top factor is the perception that your business isn’t going to act on the results. Many customers take surveys and don’t see how the insights are used. If a customer has this perception they ignore your survey requests, wasting the time and resources you invested.  

Do you have to make every change a customer asks for to be successful?  No!  You don’t even have to give people a full report of the results. The simple act of thanking happy customers for their feedback and following up with customers who gave low ratings can turn them into your most loyal customers.  

Best Practices to Beat Survey Fatigue 

How Often Should I Send a Survey? 

The simple B2B rule is quick follow-up for transactions, deeper follow-up for relationships.  Some best practices include: 

• Analyzing how often a customer interacts with your business and multiply that by 2 to understand how many surveys to send – working with an expert to customize your frequency is very important

• Segmenting customers by product or service lines and creating customized, focused questions

• Coordinating internally so your customers won’t be burdened with surveys - departments need to talk and leaders need to make decisions to limit the number of surveys a customer is receiving 

Asking the Right Questions 

Survey design is a key part of ensuring customers complete your surveys.  To design a great survey you need to: 

• Keep it short! 

• The K.I.S.S. acronym works here too (Keep It Simple, Stupid), but your survey should be so direct and so short that you only use K.I.S. (Keep It Short)

• Vary length based on how often someone is answering your survey - the more surveys they are asked to answer, the shorter the surveys should be

• Direct the survey to your right audience 

• Use language your customers understand - ex. no industry jargon or confusing words that only your company uses (we have PhDs that do this at PATH, but if you’re taking a shot at building your survey the best way to make sure it’s good is to test it with a few customers and get their feedback)

• Be careful what you ask 

• People are busy with a capital ‘B’ these days – don't waste their time asking them every single thing you’ve ever wanted to know. Know what decisions you’re trying to make and build questions to address that 

• Do not repeat questions or ask the same thing in different ways - people get really annoyed by this

Conclusion

Here at PATH we love a good survey! Speaking with customers is of vital importance for a business to thrive, but if you bother a customer too often they will go silent on you. That’s why you need to make sure you are 1.) asking the right questions, 2.) reaching the right customers, and 3.) not wasting their time.   

Above all else, show customers they have been heard and how you will act upon their concerns.  Do this and watch your customer relationships and bottom line grow. 

Reference 

https://qualaroo.com/blog/the-best-ways-big-companies-use-customer-feedback/