Over-surveying dilutes the value of your surveys. Each “touch” – every time a customer is contacted with a request to submit their feedback – should be carefully thought through in light of current and future business needs. The objective of each survey should be clearly articulated and used to set proper customer expectations. Setting proper expectations on what you will do with survey findings and then following through communicates a positive message about your organization.
There are several things you can do to ensure your organization does not over-survey its customers:
- Think Organization-wide: It is important to start by identifying all the customer surveys conducted by your organization. You may save time and money by replacing fragmented and disparate survey initiatives with coordinated studies that ensure all stakeholders get the information in they need in a timely fashion. Such an exercise should eliminate duplication of effort and streamline your surveys. Equally importantly, your customers will appreciate getting fewer surveys at times that are more convenient to them while still being able to share all essential feedback with you. To facilitate such organization-wide thinking, Zarca Interactive provides a Survey Calendar feature which helps organizations plan and track their survey initiatives.
- Diversify Survey Invitees and Respondents: This is to help you uniformly distribute the number of surveys you send out. Make sure no single customer gets more than a number of surveys in a defined period of time. Also, reward survey respondents by not sending them another survey within a defined period. Zarca Interactive helps you do such “touch rules management” automatically. The computer keeps track of all invitations and responses and you simply instruct it to determine invitee list based on who has received how many invitations as well as who has responded to recent surveys.
