Good Survey Response Rates Are Getting Harder to Come By — Here’s What to Do About It

As email survey participation declines, here’s what you can do to get comprehensive, actionable customer insights.

If you work in customer experience, you know average survey response rates are on the decline. In fact, they have been dropping over the last couple of decades as the prevalence of voice-of-customer programs have grown and consumers have become inundated with surveys. In recent years, we’ve seen typical survey response rates of about 5% to 30%. So what’s making it harder for brands to generate good survey response rates? 

For starters, there are several things your company could be doing, perhaps without anyone even realizing, that might be getting in the way of successful survey completion. Medallia research has found that participants are less likely to complete questionnaires when they do not believe the company will act on their feedback, the survey is too long, when it asks for overly sensitive information, isn’t tailored to the customer’s experiences, doesn’t have a clearly defined purpose, or isn’t mobile-friendly.

But poor survey design and execution aren’t the only threats to survey-based customer feedback programs.

Companies that rely on email as the sole — or primary — channel for distributing surveys are likely also seeing average survey response rates drop even further.

Why? Email providers like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and now Apple are using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically group emails into priority and secondary tabbed inboxes, which in turn can impact email open rates and engagement, which could ultimately cause already declining survey response rates to drop even further. 

AI-powered email sorting helps keep inboxes organized, but may pose challenges for survey-centric CX programs 

You’ve likely experienced these kinds of tabbed inboxes with your own email provider, unless you’ve disabled the feature. For example, Apple Mail sorts messages into either a primary tab or secondary transactions, updates, or promotions tabs.

Google has given us a peek behind the curtain at how their tabbed inbox’s algorithm works and they’ve said emails get categorized based on a variety of factors, such as who the specific email sender is, what the contents of the email are, and how customers have interacted with similar types of emails in the past. 

The idea behind these AI- and ML-powered sorting features is that they’re supposed to offer better user experience. Less clutter, more order — without the work. Instead of users having to manually organize their emails, it’s already been taken care of for them. Personal communications from friends and family and high-value content usually ends up in primary tabs, while marketing emails end up in promotional or other secondary tabs. 

The not-so-great news for customer-centric brands is that survey emails could be overlooked if email providers downgrade their importance in user inboxes.

Studies show that about 50% of Gmail users use the tabbed inbox feature and in turn only about 80% of these users say they check secondary tabs like the promotions tab at least once a week — and even less (51%) say they check the promotions tab every day. 

The reason inbox placement matters so much? When brand emails land on the primary tab instead of one of the secondary tabs, that can increase open rates by 30%. More opens and more chances for consumers to engage with the contents of these messages, and in the case of surveys, successfully complete brand questionnaires. 

Surveys only tell part of the customer story

If you’re only hearing from a small fraction of your customers, it’s inevitable that you’re not getting a clear picture of your company’s customer experience. More likely than not, you’re gaining insights from the most vocal consumers and not capturing the everyday experiences of customers across segments. You’ll miss out on figuring out what’s working (and what’s not) for customers who don’t even see your survey, can’t fill it out, don’t want to, or don’t have the time. You’ll also only learn about the topics you ask your customers about, which might not necessarily be the things they really care about. 

That’s why CX programs that rely too heavily on surveys could miss opportunities to uncover and address root-cause issues that are contributing to churn, discover steps that can be taken to improve the customer experience, find out what motivates brand advocates to keep coming back for more, and, ultimately, increase revenue, save money, and reduce risk. 

CX is evolving  — it’s time to capture signals from more than surveys 

While customer experience professionals say the #1 way to drive customer loyalty is by collecting customer feedback, it’s time for brands to think more broadly about how that information gets gathered, consolidated, and analyzed.

Just as consumer behavior has changed, so has the technology available to capture customer data. These converging realities are driving change with how companies manage customer experience.

If email is the only channel your company uses to deploy surveys, expanding to more channels can help get your questionnaire in front of more customers. Leveraging SMS marketing, in-app or in-browser messaging, push notifications, live chat, or in-person touchpoints, such as kiosks, QR codes, or signage, can help generate better survey response rates. 

You may also see average response rates improve if you give customers the option to share video feedback instead of directing them to fill out a traditional form. 

But surveys account for only a fraction of customer data available today and limit your understanding to a vocal minority, and to only the questions you’re asking.

Newer technology makes it easy for companies to understand customers across their entire journey that today spans in-person, digital, contact centers, and more — without having to ask for feedback in the first place. 

For example, digital experience analytics can track and interpret user behavior in real time as customers navigate an app or website.

Two other advanced CX capabilities helping modern customer listening programs go beyond surveys are AI-powered Text Analytics and Speech Analytics. These tools allow organizations to gather, analyze, and drive action on open-ended, unstructured feedback from sources like social media conversations, online reviews, contact center conversations, and more to achieve and learn from a broader voice of the customer. 

How to Capture Feedback in the AI Era

Are your surveys reaching as many customers as possible? Are your questionnaires optimized for maximum engagement? Is there anything you can do to adjust your feedback strategy to get a more complete picture of your customer experience? To help you answer these questions, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide, How to Strengthen Your CX Program When Survey Response Rates Are Declining, which includes a checklist you can use to evaluate your current customer feedback survey program. This will help you see if you’re doing everything you can to get your survey seen by more of your customers and improve your response rates. Plus, you’ll find even more insights into how leading brands are evolving beyond an email-based customer feedback program and how you can do the same.

Survey participation and email engagement rates aren’t what they used to be, but that doesn’t have to stop you from learning what it is your customers are going through as they interact with your brand, how they feel about these interactions, and what they’d like you to do more (or less) of or otherwise adapt to better meet their needs.