Online surveys are one of the most commonly-used feedback mechanisms for businesses. And it’s no wonder: they are cheap to create, deploy, tabulate, report and share. They provide a degree of insight into how customers think and feel about your company, products and/or services. While getting valuable and insightful results is much more likely when the survey is being administered and interpreted by a trained professional, it is an unfortunate reality that most companies let untrained marketing or communications professionals attempt to create surveys. I’m writing today to try and help those intrepid souls.
While there are a variety of simple tips to help amateurs create better online surveys, the single most important by far is: keep it short. Most people will respond to a short, quick survey. Those same people will not respond to a long and arduous survey. Despite that, most customer satisfaction surveys are looooooong. For example, a hotel chain I stayed at recently sent me a 21 (!) page survey. Here’s how the transaction went:
- Get an email asking me to complete their survey
- Click on the link and intend to complete it
- Arrive at the page and see there are only five questions on it
- Heartened, fill the page out and click “Next”
- Get an alert that I’m now on page “2 of 21”
- Disgusted, immediately close the browser and return to my life