Improve survey response rate graph

INCREASE SURVEY RESPONSES

So, you’ve made the decision to listen and learn from your customers by gathering feedback, and implemented one or multiple survey kiosks. Now you’d like to increase the number of survey responses you’re receiving.

Although it’s not quite as easy as just deploying survey kiosks, there are some simple steps you can take to get more responses.

PLACEMENT OF YOUR KIOSKS

The location of your survey kiosks will have a huge impact on the number of responses you receive. Your kiosks should be located in high-footfall areas and at the right point in your customers’ experience. Such as, at the exit, in reception, in the waiting room, by the checkouts or outside toilets/restrooms.

Also think about high dwell areas, you wouldn’t get many responses from a kiosk in a narrow corridor but results for one in a seating or waiting area would be much higher.

CALL TO ACTION

As well as placement of the kiosk, make sure customers know what it is and what you’d like them to do.

Some good signage with a simple Call to Action asking, ‘How did we do today?’ or similar, will increase survey response.

survey kiosk in a pub

SURVEY DESIGN

The design and length of your survey will impact the number of survey completions.

Your survey should be easy to use and be nicely designed. It should include relevant and interesting questions, and most importantly enable your customers to say what they want to tell you.

You need to balance the length of your survey, long enough to gather useful data but short enough that respondents complete the survey.

STAFF ENGAGEMENT

One of the most important factors is to engage your employees and get them excited. They will then encourage customers to leave feedback, which will increase responses.

To encourage engagement, you could start competitions and offer rewards. One client offers a good parking spot to ‘Employee of the Week’. You could boost competition between teams or locations to so they’re all inspired to be the best.

INCENTIVES

Whilst it maybe tempting to offer money off vouchers or prizes as an incentive to complete your survey, it can skew your results. For example, if you offer a free meal as an incentive you’re unlikely to give it to someone who left bad feedback. Which encourages the respondent to leave more positive feedback, this will result in better scores. However, this isn’t honest feedback and doesn’t reflect their true feelings, so we advise against using incentives.

COMMUNICATE THE POSITIVE CHANGES

When you act on feedback or make improvements, make customers and employees aware. Whether it was one or a hundred of customers providing the feedback that resulted in the change, tell them what you’ve done and that you’re acting on their comments. You could communicate changes on social media, by emails, on your website, in newsletters or even on a noticeboard.

This shows you’re not asking for feedback as a box ticking exercise, but you do actually care.

By Caroline Hawksworth