Customer surveys (CX) are an important component of any organization’s business strategy. They are essential for gaining competitive advantages, understanding strengths and weaknesses, forging positive relationships, driving business growth, and much more.
Customer surveys are crucial to the success of any business. However, there are many common mistakes that ruin the survey experience for customers, resulting in poor quality data and feedback.
In this blog post, our national customer survey company will focus on some of the dangers of DIY market research by discussing three different mistakes that are often made when conducting customer satisfaction surveys and offer simple solutions to resolve these common market research errors.
The three major mistakes most commonly made by businesses include:
- Customer surveys are too long
- Surveys are not customer-centric
- No incentive is included for customers to take the survey
Making one small mistake in your customer survey can impact results in a big way. Our customer satisfaction firm shares how to fix these 3 common mistakes when conducting DIY market research.
1. Surveys are too long
A survey that is too long can result in many different problems, especially for CX surveys. A common symptom of a survey that is too long survey is frustration, which is a feeling you definitely don’t want respondents to associate with your organization.
A survey that is too long is also going to have a higher drop-off rate and may yield poor-quality data. When conducting any type of market research, it's important to keep your target participant or respondent in mind. While you want to make sure you are asking the right questions to answer key business objectives, asking too many questions will deter from meeting this goal.
Particularly with customer surveys conducted online such as a landing page or email, our customer satisfaction survey company recommends keeping the average time to complete the survey to 3 to 5 minutes. Most respondents don't have the time to sit and complete a 10 minute survey, offering quality feedback to each question.
If you are looking for a longer survey in length, consider conducting in-depth or phone interviews with customers. Set the expectation of how long the survey will take and hire a trained interviewer who is qualified in probing participants for more detail and insight into their answers.
It’s best to keep surveys short and to focus on one objective. You can always send out another survey later on!
Drive Research answers, "How many questions should I ask in my survey?"
2. Questions are company-centric, not customer-centric
Market research surveys should be about the customer, not the company. When a company listens to its customers, positive relationships are formed. In return, customer-centric businesses thrive.
Customers want to feel important and share their opinions, which is why making sure surveys are focused on collecting honest customer feedback can increase the response rate and yield higher quality data than company-centric surveys.
In order to craft the right customer-centric questions for your customer surveys, working with a CX survey company is essential. An experienced third-party customer survey company has the knowledge and background of survey writing.
It is more than simply asking, "Were you satisfied with your latest experience with our company?" Adding one word, or phrasing a question in the wrong way can impact the survey data in a big way. A customer satisfaction firm is best at asking questions in an objective, yet effective way.
Market research has the power to ask customers the questions they want to answer. In response, your business is able to better understand customer trends and preferences. These results in turn lead to important decisions made off of fact-based evidence - not guessing and assumptions.
3. Not providing a small incentive
Your customers’ time is valuable. Providing incentives is a way to show your customers that you respect their time and value their feedback. When incentives are offered, the completion rates and the quality of data will often be much higher. In return, your company gets more data and more high-quality responses to use in its strategy development.
Incentives can either be monetary or non-monetary. A common monetary incentive we use at Drive Research is an Amazon gift card raffle. Our market research firm has found that even just the chance of winning a gift card is enough to increase the response rates and quality of data.
Pay-per-response is another monetary incentive that is commonly used in market research. Although this method can get expensive, it definitely has its place and value when it comes to reaching more hard-to-reach audiences or when a project has a fast turn-around.
Contact Drive Research
Drive Research is a national customer satisfaction company located in Upstate, NY. We specialize in all types of customer satisfaction surveys including phone surveys, mail surveys, online surveys, and in-depth interviews (IDIs.)
Questions about an upcoming customer satisfaction survey or wondering how to get started?
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