We are Listening—So Why Isn’t Anyone Answering Us?

Challenges in Getting People to Respond to Your Surveys

Having established how important it is to solicit the feedback of customers, the number one challenge from there of course is trying to get people to respond to your attempts to solicit information from them.  With that in mind it’s important to understand some of the challenges you might face in getting people to respond to you in order to give the data you are looking for and need.

All of the below challenges assume that the surveys are targeted towards individuals towards whom you have some sort of a relationship with & therefore have an innate reason to answer your surveys (ex; students doing course evaluations, customers filling out a survey about their experience with a customer service representative, office supervisors doing a performance evaluation on employees, among other things).

1. Survey invite is impersonal: 

   Very often in trying to get people to respond to the surveys that we send out, we often take great pains to write out a perfect series of questions that gets the data that we’re looking for. However, very often the survey email invitation itself is very drab, uninviting and generic. So it’s strongly that you take the time to personalize your invitations by adding the name of the individual in the email subject line, within the copy of the survey invitation and even in the survey itself if possible.

2. Survey length: 

   While it’s certainly understandable to want to take the opportunities to ask as many questions as you can of your stakeholders/constituents, realize that if a survey takes more than 5-10 minutes to complete you run the risk of either getting incomplete feedback, or an unwillingness to respond to future attempts at feedback. If you realize that you’ll get more through protracted, short attempts to get responses than with one long, never-ending survey, you’re already ahead of the curve.

3. Forgetting to send reminder E-mails: 

   Very often people will sincerely intend to fill out their surveys or evaluations but in the midst of everything they have to do they will get sidetracked.  Sending a reminder email to complete their survey a few days after the initial survey invitation was sent out will increase your chances of getting the feedback you really want.

4. Lack of incentives: 

   Very often they individuals are sent surveys that ask for their feedback, but often feel they have little reason to answer these questions. So what’s needed is either a small sweetener or a little kick in the pants—so to speak! Depending on your environment, there are a number of potential incentives that can be offered.

Educational institutions can use the ability to prevent students from viewing their grades as an incentive to get students to complete their course evaluations online.  If you’re looking to get feedback for the latest product/service you’ve put out on the market, either a coupon on your next purchase or a special bonus addition might help persuade people to give you the feedback you are looking for.

Now that we’ve established just some of the reasons why you may not be getting the feedback you were hoping for, we’ll now look into ways that you can improve your survey/evaluation response rate.