Many businesses do polls with their customers to learn more about them. But if your clients finish your surveys infrequently, they may be tired of filling them out. Survey fatigue is common in organizations, but you can and should do something to fix it.
This post discusses why customers get tired of surveys and how to stop or lessen their effects.
Types of Survey Fatigue
Even though many customers like giving their views, some people may want to avoid answering questions because they are tired of surveys. Olivia Tsang, who is in charge of growth marketing at the mortgage lending platform Fraction, says that survey fatigue leads to fewer and less accurate answers.
At two points in the poll process, people can get tired of them:
- Before starting the survey: The client gets too many requests to fill out surveys and feels too busy. What counts is that there are too many requests, not whether they are coming from one group or several groups simultaneously. The customer thinks they want to wait to answer the survey before opening it.
- When the poll was being done: The consumer opened it and is now reading it. But in the end, they lose the drive to finish it. This could be because of many things about the survey’s content and style, like the questions, length, visual elements, ease of use, etc.
The client must give the business an utterly filled-out report in both cases. So, the group needs to get the valuable information from its target audience that it had hoped.
Find out what causes tiredness
It’s important to know why your clients might not answer your questions because there are many reasons why they might not want to. If you know where the problem comes from, it will be much easier to solve.
Here are a few common reasons why people get tired of surveys.
- The wrong people are being asked to fill out the poll. Imagine getting a report from a store you’ve never been to and being asked to rate their customer service. You need to would something out if you still need to ha the subject. The process will seem pointless if a customer doesn’t think the poll is for them.
- The number of poll requests sent to the client needs to be lowered. If you or other businesses repeatedly ask customers to fill out surveys, they may stop caring or even get angry. If you ask too many times, you may hurt your chances of getting an answer.
- The consumer needs more time or energy to fill out the whole poll. It’s essential to get the length of the vote just right. A survey should be long enough to get the information you need but short enough to keep the customer’s attention and keep them filling it out.
- The poll is hard to use and needs to be fixed. A customer isn’t likely to finish a vote with technical problems, needs to be easier to understand, is hard to read, or looks terrible. Customers will only want to take the time to complete surveys if they like the process.
- The questions on the poll could be more precise, easier to understand, or more enjoyable. Questions must be easy to understand and interesting enough to get an answer.
Find ways to avoid getting tired of Surveys
You can do several things to get people to fill out and send in your surveys, whether you already have survey fatigue or want to avoid it in the future.
Plan out the Survey
Plan out your survey plan over a few months or a year so you only survey customers a little. This way, you can choose what information to gather and when.
How often should you ask your clients how they feel? This will depend on your business and the kind of customers you have. For example, companies that sell to other companies should only poll their clients once every three months.
Business-to-customer firms follow different rules depending on how often they talk to their customers. If a company speaks to a customer once a week instead of once a year, it can send out surveys more frequently.
Divide up your Clients
Try sending focused surveys to specific customers instead of sending every study to your clients to get more people to fill them out. For example, a question about customer service is more relevant to people who have bought something in the last three months than to people who haven’t bought anything in over a year.
Use a good tool for making Surveys
How you send out your poll is as important as what it says. Even if the customer wants to tell the business what they think, they might only be unable to finish the survey if it is easy to use or fill out. To make your survey look friendly and easy to fill out, the tool you use should let you customize the poll’s look and feel, add a progress bar, use split logic, and do other things.
Tsang says to make your polls fun and exciting. “Visuals and interesting questions can get people involved.”
Use A/B Testing
Since it can be hard to tell immediately if a survey will interest customers, many businesses try their surveys on a small group of customers first to see what they can change to get more people to finish. You could see if a poll with five questions does better than one with ten or if asking questions in a certain way gets more people to answer.
Tsang says that polls should be short and straight to the point. “People don’t like it when you take a long time to answer a question. Do not ask your friends to write essays.
Customize the information
Ensure that the information in the report is always helpful to those who take it. Use branching reasoning to make sure that they only see questions that are relevant to them based on the information they have already given. This makes the poll better and feels more exciting and personal, making people more likely to finish it.
Without branching logic, the poll could show questions or answers that don’t make sense, making people give up in the middle.
