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Don't be a Survey Resolutionary

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Every January my gym is filled with fresh faces that I haven’t seen before, but I know who they are. They’re called “Resolutionaries” because they made New Year’s resolutions to get back in shape.

They show up regularly – for a little while at least.

Resolutionaries flood the gym right after the holidays but their good intentions quickly fade. By Groundhog Day, virtually all of the resolutionaries have stopped coming to the gym, having never solidified good intentions into good habits.

Similarly, at the beginning of the year all of us need to look at our feedback practices and resolve to make changes necessary to the way we gather feedback.  But unlike the resolutionaries at my gym, you must turn your good intentions into good habits. These good habits will pay dividends throughout the year by helping you increase response rates, reduce survey fatigue and generate actionable information. Here are the six actions you can take to turn good intentions into solid habits:

1. Review every ongoing survey more than 6 months old – If you have surveys that have been running for more than 6 months, meet with your stakeholders and find out if the data is being used or if it’s just “nice to have.”  If the surveys aren’t driving decisions, then stop them or risk fatiguing your respondents. If the surveys are being used, review them carefully and shorten them or update them to ensure that the content is relevant to today’s needs.
2. Consolidate disparate feedback efforts as part of a formal Customer Experience program – As Jeffrey Henning and I found in our Customer Experience IQ study, organizations with the highest degrees of customer loyalty consolidate their feedback efforts under a comprehensive customer experience program. You too must eliminate uncoordinated efforts and get the organization working together to obtain feedback in an intelligent fashion.
3. Create a common metric that can be used throughout the organization – If your organization doesn’t have a common metric that is used throughout the organization to measure loyalty or customer experience, you’re missing out.  A common metric focuses the organization, provides a well-accepted yardstick to measure results, and allows you to take maximum advantage of feedback efforts.
4. Create your own panel – Who would you rather get feedback from:  a group of people who don’t know your organization and your products, or a panel of customers who actively use your product and interact with you on a frequent basis? Feedback panels provide a ready and consistent source of input from the people who know you best. Despite their ability to maintain high response rates and lower feedback costs, house panels are used by only 10% of organizations.  Build a house panel. You’ll be amazed at the results you get.
5. Share survey data with respondents to improve response rates – Most people stop participating in surveys because survey owners rarely share back with them key items from studies. Many respondents participate in surveys because they want to provide you with their feedback to improve your operations.  But if they never see results or understand what you’re doing with the information, they’ll quickly stop responding.  Maintaining high response rates means that you must share information back to respondents on a timely basis.  This year, make the commitment to share at least some high level information back.
6. Include online communities as part of your feedback efforts – The qualitative feedback you receive from your own online community can round out the quantitative data from surveys.  I frequently refer to qualitative and quantitative data as the yin and the yang of a high quality feedback program. When integrated with surveys, online communities let you get the story behind the story and interact in a fundamentally more valuable way with your stakeholders.

By taking action on these six points, you can solidify your well-intentioned resolutions into good feedback habits that will pay dividends in the future.

So here’s my question: what will your feedback program look like when Punxsutawney Phil pops his head out of Gobbler’s Knob?