Customer Survey

There are some individuals who are very hesitant to participate in web-based customer surveys. In fact, there are some individuals who would never even consider taking part in such surveys. Then we have others who would only consider taking part in web-based customer surveys after a lot of persuasion. Surely, there has to be a reason, or a number of reasons, as to why such individuals are not keen to take part in web-based customer surveys. And those reasons, as to why we have quite a good number of individuals who are hesitant to participate in web-based customers surveys, are what we are trying to find out in this article. Stop waiting, join the game now with lucky pharao spielen continuous luck and many victories await you! We will also go a step further, and give suggestions on how the various concerns can be addressed, so as to get the people in the various categories to take part in the surveys.

It emerges that there are at least five reasons as to why some individuals are not eager to participate in web-based customer surveys. Those include the facts that:

1. They fear that their feedback won’t be taken seriously: There are many people who are of the view that businesses only run web-based customer surveys as a ‘formality’. So, according to this school of thought, the opinions given in the web-based customer surveys are never taken into consideration – and as such, ‘there is no point in taking part in the surveys’. In actual fact, many of the companies that run web-based customer surveys do so with the genuine objective of collecting feedback from customers. There may be a few who run online customer surveys just to keep up with their competitors/just to show their customers that they care about their opinions. But for the most part, the surveys are sincerely aimed at getting customers feedback, which is then acted upon. It is important to remember that these surveys are costly exercises. And it is highly unlikely that a business would spend such colossal sums of money to collect feedback that it has no intention of acting upon! Nonetheless, if you are involved in designing web-based customer surveys, this is a concern you have to address. For instance, you have to include a statement to the effect that “you value your customers’ feedback” and a commitment to act on the feedback given by the customers in the survey. This way, some of the customers who would have been hesitant to take part in the survey will be motivated to do so.
2. They don’t want to waste their time: There are individuals who think that web-based customer surveys take too much time. So they are hesitant to take part in the surveys because they don’t want to spend/waste too much of their time. In actual fact, most of the web-based customer surveys take less than 5 minutes. But a person who has never taken part in such a survey would never know this. You come across individuals who think that the survey is like an examination – you know, the sort of exercise where you have to answer question after question for half an hour or even a whole hour! So you can’t blame such an individual when he hesitates to take part in a customer survey, unless he is being paid for the effort. To deal with this concern, it is important for you as a survey designer to include a statement (on the survey webpage) to the effect that the exercise won’t take much of the participant’s time. You can be even more specific, by stating that it is just a 3-minute or 5-minute affair. This way, individuals who would have hesitated to take part in the survey out of the fear of ‘wasting time’ are now likely to consider taking part.
3. They think that the web-based customer surveys are too complex: Human beings hate complexity. They love simplicity instead. And we have some individuals who think that the web-based customer surveys are ‘too complex’. And because they don’t want to ‘tire their minds’, they refrain from taking part in the surveys. In actual fact, the web-based customer surveys tend to be very simple, with the participants mostly being expected to answer by clicking on checkboxes or radio buttons. But an individual who has never taken part in one such survey wouldn’t know this. So it is upon you, as an individual who is designing a web-based customer survey, to make it clear that it is a simple affair. This way, individuals who would have hesitated from taking part in the survey out of fear of complexity would be more likely to participate.
4. They feel that they have nothing to gain by taking part in the surveys: There are individuals who are hesitant to take part in the customer surveys because they don’t see how it would benefit them. In other words, they don’t see what is in it for them. You have to understand that as human beings, there is a reward system that is hardwired in our brains – which sees us being eager to do things that are of benefit to us, while avoiding things that are of no benefit/things that are of little benefit. So if you are to get the individuals who are in this category to take part in the web-based customer surveys, you have to show them how exactly they stand to benefit from it. If you have nothing else to offer, you can just tell them that they stand to benefit from ‘better service’ if they complete the survey (and give feedback on how you can serve them better). But if you have better incentives – you know, things like sweepstakes drawings entries, discount coupon codes and so on, it would be even better. See, a person is more likely to complete your web-based customer survey if they know that they would get a discount coupon code or a sweepstakes draw entry upon completing.
5. They fear that the data they give out won’t be held securely: So these are data privacy concerns. There are individuals who think that in the course of web-based customer surveys, they would be asked to give very personal information — and they have concerns as to how securely that information would be held. In actual fact, the questions asked in web-based customer surveys tend to be of a very general nature, with no personal details – but a person who has never taken part in an online customer survey wouldn’t know this. Nonetheless, as an individual charged with the responsibility of designing a survey, you have to address this concern. You have to reassure the individuals who will be taking part in the survey that the information provided would be held in confidence, and that you have a privacy policy in place. This way, individuals who were afraid of completing the survey because of privacy fears would be reassured.

More and more businesses are showing a preference for web-based customer surveys over phone-based customer surveys. So, for instance, you find that almost every major company in the retail industry has an ongoing web-based customer survey. But very few have active phone-based customer survey campaigns. There has to be a reason, or several reasons, as to why companies are showing a preference for web-based customer surveys over phone-based customer surveys. In other words, the has to be a way (or indeed several ways) in which web-based customer surveys are better than phone-based customer surveys. Otherwise you wouldn’t be having businesses abandoning the phone-based customer surveys for web-based surveys. Those ways in which web-based customer surveys are better than phone-based customer surveys are what we will be focusing on, in this article.

As it turns out, there are 4 primary ways in which web-based customer surveys are better than phone-based customer surveys:

1. Web-based customer surveys are more cost-effective than phone-based surveys: If you are running a phone-based customer survey, you have to be ready to pay the huge phone bills that will be incurred in the process. Even if you are using the ‘free’ IP telephony technology, there will still be a cost somewhere. Then there is the even bigger expense of paying the individuals who would be making the phone calls to the customers, and soliciting feedback from them. Even if you are to use software for this purpose, the software would still have to be paid for. And this sort of ‘artificial intelligence’ software tends to be costly. Sometimes, you just can’t find a ready-made solution that is capable of doing exactly what you want. So this means that you have to pay a developer to create and configure such a solution for you. Sometimes you find that you want to use ‘calling software’ to run a phone-based customer survey, but you just can’t find an appropriate solution: forcing you to go back to employing human callers. So you can’t avoid costs. Now it is not that the web-based customer surveys are entirely free either. But you find that the costs are much lower. For one, with a web-based customer survey, you don’t have to pay someone to make phone calls to customers, soliciting feedback. Neither do you have to have to incur astronomical phone bills. If you compare the phone bill you stand to incur in the process of a phone-based customer survey with what it would cost to keep an online survey webpage running, it becomes clear that the latter is much cheaper. It is actually possible to keep a web-based customer survey running at all times – so that you are always getting feedback from your customers at all times. But businesses that opt for phone-based customer surveys find that they can only keep them running intermittently (at best). That is because the costs associated with phone-based surveys are simply unsustainable for most businesses.
2. Customers tend to respond better to the web-based surveys: People who are confronted with phone calls seeking feedback tend to feel as if they have been ambushed. Actually people respond to such phone calls in much the same way that they respond to those ‘cold calls’ from marketers. Some simply decline to give the feedback, on account of having been ‘ambushed’. Others will agree to go ahead with the survey, but you can’t help sensing hostility on their part, for having been ‘ambushed’. You also notice that the people who are confronted with phone calls soliciting feedback tend to exhibit a certain level of impatience, as they want to get done with it and go back to doing whatever they were doing before the phone call. But with web-based customer surveys, it is the individuals who (on their own initiative) go to the webpages where the surveys are being run. And they do so at their convenience – which is different from phone-based surveys, where individuals often receive the phone calls soliciting feedback at the most convenient of times. When all is said and done, you find that the response to the web-based surveys is better, in most cases, than the response to phone-based surveys.
3. Web-based customer surveys tend to be more objective: It can be very hard for most people to give candid answers to questions that are being asked on the phone. So if you opt for a phone-based customer survey, you will tend to find the customers mostly giving positive feedback, because they don’t want to ‘disappoint’ the person at the other end of the line. Even if they weren’t satisfied with the manner in which they were served, they will lie that they were (satisfied) just for the sake of not disappointing the caller. It is something that is ingrained in us, to avoid disappointing people. But with a web-based survey, there is greater freedom, and people are better positioned to be candid. They are not dealing on a one-to-one basis with people on the other end, and this has an impact on the responses given/feedback obtained. The people taking part in a web-based survey are not under pressure to impress, and this translates into more candid, more honest feedback – which is what you need, if you are to improve your business. It also helps that the framing of questions in web-based surveys, and the manner in which the question are answered (typically by clicking on checkboxes or radio buttons) yields much more objective feedback.
4. It is easier to collate data from web-based customer surveys: With phone based surveys, the people making the phone calls (the surveyors) often have to write down the responses received from customers, for future analysis. Alternatively, the phone calls soliciting feedback have to be recorded. This is very different from web-based customer surveys where the answers given to the customers survey questions automatically go to databases. So those are databases from where the answers can be very easily analyzed. With phone-based customer surveys, you find that you sometimes have to replay the recordings of the phone calls made to customers, to know what the customers said. It can be maddening having to listen to hundreds or thousands of such recordings, and analyzing what is being said, to get a clear picture of what the customers are saying. With web-based customer surveys, things are obviously much easier.

There are certain mistakes that you need to avoid, while running a web-based customer survey. Your web-based customer survey is highly likely to be successful if you avoid these mistakes. Conversely, chances of your web-based customer survey flopping are high, if you make one or more of these mistakes:

1. Running a customer survey with too many questions: Chances are that the customers will only be in a position to spare a few minutes, to take part in the survey. Now if you have a survey with too many questions, it is likely to take too long to complete (and on that account, some of your customers will be discouraged from taking part in it). Besides the time factor, you also have to understand that a survey with too many questions looks ‘daunting’. One may feel as if they are being subjected to an examination. This would lead to even more of your customers refraining from participating in the survey. And at yet another level, if you run a survey with too many questions, you will end up with too much data/feedback, which you may not know what to do with.
2. Running a survey with wrongly worded questions: If you run a survey with wrongly-worded questions, you will end up getting the wrong answers/answers that don’t tell you exactly what you wanted to know. So it is very important to first figure out what you want to establish from the survey. Then it is very important to frame questions in a manner that is likely to elicit exactly that type of feedback your customers.
3. Failing to publicize the web-based customer survey in the right manner: If you don’t publicize your web-based customer survey in the right manner, you will end up with too few customers knowing about it. Consequently, very few customers will participate in it. In the final analysis, you will not have gotten views from a big enough sample of your customers to make any meaningful inferences. So what you need to do here is to have strategies through which you can get as many of your customers as possible to know that you are running a web-based customer survey, and that you’d want them to consider taking part.
4. Launching a web-based customer survey without clear objectives: So this is where, for instance, you come to learn that many of the other businesses you are competing with are running web-based customer surveys. You therefore decide to launch yours, just to keep up with the businesses you are competing with. The problem here is in the fact that the customers who will be taking part in the survey will not be in a position to know why it was launched. They will be assuming that it is a genuine survey, designed to collect feedback from them. Yet, in actual fact, it is something you simply did to keep up with the competitors! But then again, someone may argue that the desire to keep up with competitors is a legitimate reason to launch a web-based customer survey. That if you don’t run a customer survey, yet your competitors are running such surveys, the customers may get the impression that you don’t value their feedback (whereas your competitors value their customers’ feedbacks). And that this could lead to a situation where your customers switch to those other businesses where their feedback is valued. Well, such reasoning is sound. But the most important thing is to be clear about the objectives behind your survey. If the objective is just to keep up with competitors (and to show your customers that you care about their opinions, just like your competitors), you should be clear about that, and have it at the back of your mind. So in this case, you wouldn’t really be running the survey with the objective of collecting feedback, but rather, with the objective of just showing your customers that you care about their opinions. Of course, you wouldn’t announce that, but you would have it at the back of your mind… Genuine customer surveys are aimed at actually getting feedback from the customers. They are, in some cases, aimed at knowing whether the customers are getting satisfaction with the way they are being served. In some other cases, the surveys are aimed at getting, from the customers, suggestions on how to improve customer service. We also have surveys that are aimed at knowing how deep the connections between the businesses running them (the surveys) and the customers are… The most important thing is to know what the objectives behind your web-based customer survey are. So, before launching the survey – at the survey design stage — you actually need to sit down with the people who will be responsible for running the survey, and have a brainstorming session on the survey objectives. Only then will you be able to design a customer survey that is aligned with the objectives. Take, for instance, a situation where your survey is aimed at getting suggestions, from the customers, on how they can be served better. In that case, you can have one of the questions in the survey asking the customers to suggest how your business can serve them better. Then you can leave a space, where the customers would key in their suggestions. If, on the other hand, your survey is aimed at knowing the extent to which the customers are being satisfied with the manner in which they are being served, you can have objective answer-oriented questions in line with that objective. So in this case, you can have a system where the customers would rate their satisfaction on a scale (of, say, 1 to 10). But if you don’t brainstorm on the survey objectives, you won’t know how to best design it, and chances are that you will end up bungling it.
5. Failing to act on the feedback given by customers in the survey: It is very easy for you to collect a great deal of feedback from your customers in a survey, only to end up not knowing what to do with it! Yet — just think about it — if you fail to act on the feedback given by customers in the survey, the survey would have been more or less a meaningless exercise. Admittedly, acting on the feedback given by customers in the survey often means having to move out of your comfort zone, as a business. Yet you have no option but to do it, if you are to ensure your business’ long-term success.