7 Ways to Improve Your Enterprise Survey Response Rates

Having established some of the reasons that may explain why you may be having difficulty getting people to respond to your customer surveys, course evaluations, employee performance appraisals and other requests for feedback, it’s now important to establish some guidelines on how to ensure that you can start to generate higher response rates. With that in mind, let’s establish 6 good practices that organizations and institutions should use when trying to generate not only more feedback responses but also get more actionable data.

1. Clearly communicate the benefits:

   In order for a survey or evaluation to be taken seriously and given its due respect, all key stakeholders need to be made aware of why their feedback is important. Students need to be made aware by their teachers as well as by their university/college that taking the time to fill out their course evaluation honestly & openly impacts not only their course but also the overall quality of education moving forward. This is the beginning of an effective feedback loop, which can open the door to a positive continuous listening strategy at Higher Education institutions. 

   Employees need to be made aware that filling out an employee climate surveys will help management know what areas of the organization need improving in order to produce a truly harmonious work environment. Moreover, its important to provide a couple of reminders, through a number of different avenues (email, social media, supervisor reminders, etc.) to stress the importance of these evaluations.

2. Stress that absolute confidentiality is ensured:

   Everyone always wonders what will happen to their responses. No matter what, respondents must remain confidential. This is absolutely imperative. Consider the consequences if a professor was to find out which student gave him a particularly negative review. Once confidentiality is ensured, you will see response rates increase noticeably. Guaranteed.

3. Use company/organizational portals:

   Being able to integrate your enterprise surveys/evaluation forms into your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) or Student Information System (SIS) allows you to reach your respondents in areas where they already interact with. This will allow you not only to further communicate the benefits of providing feedback, but also give you the ability to repeatedly and easily reach your respondent through automatic reminders that are programmed through the proprietary system that they deal with.

4. Act quickly to address any issues that can arise:

   Doing so will enable you to not only show that you are listening, but acting on some of the findings of a first evaluation/enterprise survey will only help to ensure incrementally higher response rates over time.

5. Keep forms short:

   Avoid at all costs surveys or feedback systems that insist on having the respondent fill out his or her demographic information repeatedly. Not only will this be annoying, but it keeps evaluations needlessly long.

6. Help them manage interruptions:

   If respondents have to step away from their survey or close their browser, a system should be able to save their completed response so they can resume answering where they left off.

7. Insist on a scalable enterprise survey software vendor:

   Consider the average university with over 10,000 class sections with an average of 25 student respondents. That’s 250,000 respondents that a system has to take into account. Now remember each student is taking 4 or 5 courses a semester. Or let’s look at a corporation with over 1,000 employees that’s looking to do a 360 degree evaluations. Consider all the permutations that one needs to consider when trying to keep track of different relationships in an organization and who would be evaluating whom. It can get very complicated.

The bottom line is that your survey evaluation system should be able to keep track of all these responses and tie them to the appropriate individuals. Moreover, it should be able to handle the potential for more responses and more complicated responses as an organization or institution grows.

 Learn how to unify all your survey and feedback information with Blue