In today’s digitized world, printing things, whether at home or in the office, has become less common. But it does still happen. And so, occasionally, I need to purchase paper.
Such was the case last week when I drove to my local Staples to buy a ream (500 sheets) of printer paper. It was, as you might expect, not a particularly interesting or notable event. And yet, by the time I arrived home, Staples had already emailed asking for “feedback on my experience.”
This is not the exception — we are being surveyed to death. Whether buying airlines tickets, visiting the doctor, donating to a charity, or picking up some printer paper, organizations are constantly asking for our feedback.
At some level, of course, this is a smart practice. Understanding the perspective of our current or prospective customers is essential for developing a solid strategy. But in an environment where survey fatigue has taken hold and response rates have dropped significantly, it has become increasingly difficult to obtain useful information.
Given these challenges, what steps can we take to get the “voice of the customer” into our strategy and thinking? Some suggestions…
Survey Sparingly
There was a time when surveying customers and prospects was both time-consuming and expensive. No more. It has become so easy and cheap (essentially free) to survey a house email list that it can be tempting to do so frequently.
The problem, however, is the more surveys you send, the worse your response rate will likely be for any one survey going forward. You need to resist the urge to survey at every turn.
Related to this, when you do send a survey to your list, you want to make sure it is for the purpose of making an important decision and the topic is something your customer base is likely to care about. Further, you should make it clear that (a) their responses will impact your decisions in a significant way, and (b) the survey will only take 3-4 minutes to complete.
A past client of mine built a great business providing very brief surveys to medical professionals — surveys that were decidedly different than the long, detailed “tracking” surveys this audience was used to seeing. By designing surveys limited to just a handful of quick-response questions, she was able to quickly obtain meaningful responses for her clients.
Go Beyond “Net Promoter”
The “Net Promoter Score” (NPS) is a metric created by a partner at Bain & Company in 2003. It’s pitched as the one question you need to ask: “How likely is it that you would recommend this company, product, or service to a friend or colleague?”
There is an elegance to the simplicity and logic behind this approach (not to mention the easy calculation of responses and simple score). And while there are certainly situations where this measure can be useful, I generally don’t recommend it.
That’s because at this point, NPS has been used to excess, often in situations where it makes little sense, my Staples paper-buying incident as just one example. There, the product and related buying experience were so trivial, it’s unlikely I would ever think to share them with others (except as this example, of course!). Asking the question was nonsensical.
Look for Balance
There is both an art and science to market research that is well beyond the scope of this newsletter. However, I do want to share one observation that applies in particular to open-ended survey responses: beware of focusing excessively on negative comments. Because while human nature causes us to pay far more attention to negative feedback than positive feedback, it’s important to assess the overall balance of responses.
One of my clients was reviewing the feedback they received regarding a controversial topic. The vast majority of the feedback was supportive; in fact, there was just a single negative comment. Still, much of the post-survey discussion centered on that one dissenter.
Of course, in some instances, the response truly is highly negative and that’s important information to obtain. Just don’t give negative (or, for that matter, positive) feedback greater weight than it deserves when reviewing results.
Don’t Stop with the Survey
In part because of the challenge of getting good input from surveys, it is also important to get out from behind your computer and speak to people.
For the entrepreneurship course I teach, I ask my students to find and speak with individuals — beyond their set of personal friends and family — who might encounter the problem they want to solve. And while these findings are, by definition, anecdotal, conversations can provide context and directional guidance, things that are not easily uncovered in email surveys.
Reflections
Online surveys are a simple and inexpensive way to seek feedback. That’s good news, certainly. At the same time, those characteristics have resulted in their significant overuse in the marketplace at large and, perhaps, within your own organization.
All of this makes it especially important that we use surveys sparingly, keep them brief, and reserve them for instances in which the survey responses will influence important decisions.
