Treating Your Survey Takers like Royalty
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Sep 23, 2008
Yesterday I described the "Twists and Turns on 21st Century Internet Express" presentation (The Survey Taker is King) at the AMA 2008 Marketing Research Conference. Many of the problems that face traditional market-research surveys go away when a corporation is able to survey its customers, employees or resellers, rather than a third-party population. Enterprise-feedback management systems and feedback communities alleviate many of these concerns.
The audience was polled for their concerns with the question, "What should be done to increase online survey cooperation rates?"
- Make surveys more engaging (50%) - Actually, the most engaging surveys are those for relationships that the respondent has the greatest involvement in. The challenge for MR is getting people they have no relationship with to take a survey. Employee surveys typically have the highest participation rates, because employees invest a lot in their work; customer surveys have solid response rates, with greater response rates the more money is spent; surveys of prospects or general consumers have the lowest response rates. When you're surveying your community, you start with engaged survey takers; your job is to respect that engagement and not dilute it through bad surveys.
- Limit the number of questions/time to complete (26%) - Traditional market research surveys tend to be long: researchers know nothing about the respondent and need to ask them detailed demographic and firmographic questions; researchers will often ask a question multiple ways to develop a more reliable index that can be used for tracking; researchers will have many grid questions, gathering different aspects of attitude for a common list of topics. Many of these reasons for length go away for the community researcher: demographic and other profile information can be piped into the survey, rather than prompted for; individual key questions are asked rather than index-question groups; finally, researchers can survey often, rather than getting every answer from this single survey.
- Better target surveys to individuals (15%) - Using the profile data in a community or enterprise feedback management system, community researchers can invite the right respondents, where market researchers need to invite everyone, then ask questions to screen out the wrong respondents.
- Increase the use of incentives (7%) - Incentives are less necessary in a feedback community, where respondents are more motivated by their engagement than by extrinsic rewards.
The reverse of the question was also asked to session attendees: "What factors are contributing to lower online co-operation?"
After "Length of time required to complete surveys" at 51%, "Frequency of invitations issued to survey participants" (30%) and "Lack of online panel development and active management" (11%) and were the two most popular choices. EFM systems are all about touch management, making sure community members and panelists are not oversurveyed. Internet panels, used for generic market research, have forsaken the traditional limits on survey participation, and are further hobbled by the need to invite people to take a screener survey before qualifying for the full questionnaire.
Clearly, for researchers who need to survey their organization's key constituencies rather than the market at large, enterprise feedback management systems and feedback communities eliminate many of the pressing challenges faced by market researchers today.
Traditional researchers haven't needed to be responsible to the respondent, who was a replaceable commodity; for community researchers, respondents are valued customers, employees and partners, and therefore should be treated like royalty.