Achieving high value feedback from short customer surveys

Web survey developers constantly strive to achieve a balance between survey length and data captured.  An optimum survey length ensures a low drop off rate while meeting the survey's data acquisition objectives.  In practice, most feedback projects sacrifice either data capture objectives or response / drop off rates. With customer surveys in particular, it's important to get both high response and to capture the required data.

 

So how can you achieve both high response and a large quantity of gathered data? 

 

I offer these three techniques. 

• The single best technique for keeping surveys both concise and high value is to "Pre-Load" data into your survey database.  In the customer survey context, lots of data is typically available about customers.  Their names, purchases, account managers, regions, etc. are all known.  Often this information has already been synthesized into reporting elements in the company's customer data warehouse.  Pre-loading some of this information to your survey database ahead of time means that it can be used to filter your survey responses into more useful information.  It can also be used to pre-answer some questions or to automatically "route" or "branch" the questionnaire.  Helping to shorten it.  But most of all, any data you can pre-load from your customer databases is data you don't have to ask questions to acquire. 
• Question Routing or Branching is another great way to shorten surveys.  Branching let's you only ask questions to those people who can or should answer them, thus shortening the questionnaire for all participants. 
• Data Piping is also a great technique for shortening questionnaires.  By inserting pre-loaded data into survey questions or answer alternatives, piping saves you from the need to ask for data in order to answer a question.  If your survey system can both pipe in data and automatically branch / route based on piped in data it makes the survey doubly efficient from a time utilization perspective.

By using data you already have, along with "branching / routing" and "piping" techniques you can design your questionnaires to be concise while gathering lots of actionable and useful data, and do it without annoying your customers to the point where they won't give you the feedback you need.