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ASP Forum
Survey Fatigue?
"We have feedback forms on many of our Web pages—the
knowledgebase, shopping cart, etc.—and each one asks about
satisfaction with the specific page's contents. Will this
approach create survey fatigue?"
—Melanie from Maplewood
A: Yes! Would you bother to answer multiple questions on a web
site you visit? Probably not. My clients report that the response
rate on knowledge base document surveys rarely exceed a few
percentage points, so you should not rely on the surveys alone to
determine whether a particular document is helpful. (Plus, if a
particular document is never read, you would never get survey
results on it, would you?) However, surveys are helpful to spot
problems: if even one user bothers to tell you that there is a
typo on a particular document, that’s one piece of feedback you
will want to act upon.
So my take would be:
Keep page-specific surveys very short (e.g. useful? Yes/no
and a place for comments in case the customer has specific
feedback.)
Take action immediately if you get specific comments (i.e.
make the correction; you don’t have to get back to the customer.)
Use other methods to measure customer satisfaction. For
instance: pop a survey on the site randomly for every 100 user.
You should get better response rates that way and therefore
more reliable ratings.
Happy Surveying!
—Françoise Tourniaire
FT Works
650 559 9826
FT@ftworks.com
Melanie,
Including a survey on every webpage will probably not create
survey fatigue because no one will bother to complete it. The
industry benchmark is approximately 1.5% of visitors will bother
to complete a survey, so don’t expect a large number of responses.
Do expect to hear mostly from those dissatisfied with the content,
which would be the only reason I would bother to do such a survey.
On the other hand, it seems like every company includes the option
to provide feedback on the page, so as long as you don’t expect
much, I’d continue to offer the opportunity to provide feedback on
many of your webpages.
What most companies are concerned with is the number of
satisfaction surveys that solicit feedback from customers via
email or delivered via telephone. What I find is that many support
centers send multiple surveys: event-driven surveys (meaning a
survey sent after the service delivery transaction), a web-usage
survey (sent after a customer has logged into the support website)
and a periodic or annual survey. These support centers may not be
aware of how many other departments in the company are also
peppering customers with requests for feedback. It can be useful
to coordinate survey generation with other departments to decrease
the number of feedback requests. For example, the periodic or
annual survey could be combined with marketing’s survey about
product satisfaction. You can also limit the number of event-driven
surveys sent to customers by sending them to only a sample of the
total closed cases and excluding those customers who have recently
responded to a survey. All of these measures help to decrease
survey fatigue.
—Kristin Robertson
KR Consulting, Inc.
817-577-7030
krisrob@krconsulting.com
You can find a special offer for Kristin's new book on this topic,
"Spectacular Support Centers", at www.spectacularsupportcenters.com!
[If you have any other advice on this question, please send an
email to membership director Jane Farber at jfarber@asponline.com, and
we'll post your feedback.]
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