Are you struggling to boost your customer survey response rates? Or perhaps you’re wondering what qualifies as a “good” response rate? You’re not alone!
Getting customers to participate in feedback requests through a website feedback widget is a challenge for businesses of all kinds. That’s why we’re breaking down the essentials, offering simple and actionable tips to guide you in the right direction.
To help you improve your response rates, we’ll dive into the best strategies, including the importance of timing and how to make it work in your favor.
But first, let’s address the big question: What is a good survey response rate? While this can vary based on your audience and industry, a common benchmark for online surveys is between 30-40%.
Remember, response rates are influenced by factors like survey length, timing, and the level of engagement with your audience. By following best practices in survey design, you can boost participation and collect more reliable insights.
Why Timing Matters For Your Survey Response Rate
Timing is one of the most important factors to consider when asking for customer feedback. It is one of the leading factors in whether or not the customer responds. And if they don’t respond, you have no feedback.
A lot of people are yet to understand what is considered a good survey response rate, and how to calculate response rate.
There are some customer feedback strategies that most can learn from their own experiences of being asked for feedback. For instance, you probably know if a business asks you for feedback two weeks after you were on its website, you probably won’t even remember them.
But there are more sophisticated ways to nail customer feedback timing, like knowing best time and day for customer feedback.
Below are seven tips that you can start using right away to dramatically increase your customer response rates.
7 Tips on How To Improve Your Survey Response Rate
1. Ask for feedback quickly
The simplest principle of customer feedback response is not being late with your feedback request. If you’re a delivery service and someone just received their package, ask them for their feedback!
Not only is this when they’re most likely to respond, but also when all of the details are fresh. Even if a customer responds to a slow feedback request, they may have forgotten valuable details that you’re now lacking.
2. Don’t ask for feedback too early
On the other end of being late is being too early. What we mean by this is asking for feedback before your customer has any feedback to give. Amazon waits a few days after a customer has had a product to ask for feedback to let opinions form.
You can also ask for feedback too early in a customer’s journey with your brand. For example, you don’t want to ask for feedback after someone has been on your website for 2 minutes. Since they don’t have any relationship with your business yet, this is likely to frustrate and push them away. Use a proper website feedback tool to do it the right way.
Aim to ask for feedback when a customer has feedback to offer and is most willing to share it.
3. Use your time to ask important questions
Another aspect of customer feedback timing is that you’re asking for feedback and time. Time is more valuable to them than to you. If you give any hint that you are going to waste that time, then you are going to have a hard time collecting feedback.
The best way to make someone feel like their time is valued is to ask for relevant feedback. Mention them by name if possible, ask about a specific product, service, or person they just interacted with. Or try incentivizing their responses and time.
If they’re a new customer, ask questions that pertain to that, and if they’re a long-term customer, ask questions that relate to that.
Your customer support and customer experience managers, as well as agents will have great suggestions of what questions to help you “get to the point”. Or read our recommendation of user feedback questions.
4. Choose the right time of day
Thanks to research by SurveyMonkey and others, you can pinpoint the optimum time of day to ask your customers for feedback. Specifically, the study found that 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. are the best times to ask customers for feedback every day of the week. On the other hand, the hours between midnight and 5 a.m. garnered the worst response rates.
5. Choose the right day of the week
The same study also found that weekdays all perform well when asking for feedback, while weekends are less predictable and effective. No particular weekday was substantially more effective than the rest. If you do intend on sending a feedback request on the weekend, send it at 10 am on Saturday and 10 pm on Sunday.
6. Keep the feedback process snappy
Another important aspect of customer feedback timing is keeping the feedback process short and sweet. No one wants to spend an hour working through survey questions for the shampoo they bought a week ago.
You can keep things fast by implementing multiple-choice answers. Skype does this really well – they ask for feedback as soon as your Skype call ends, and all they ask for is a rating from one to five. It takes half a second to answer and you can appreciate their effort in listening to the voice of customers.
Look for the most opportune time and speed things up wherever you can.
7. Use Customer Journey Mapping to time your feedback
Customer journey mapping is a great way to improve the timing of your feedback requests. It tells you how much of a connection your customer has to your brand, which will affect the type of feedback you ask for and when you ask for it.
If someone is early on in their feedback journey, everything should be about speed. You want to make feedback requests instantly and have quick responses already laid out. For those who are farther along in their customer journey, you can ask for richer feedback that builds on your relationship with the customer.
5 Extra Survey Response Rate Tips With Usersnap
Usersnap is a tool that makes gathering customer feedback simple and effective. One of the ways that Usersnap helps you increase feedback engagement is through display rules, which control when, where and how customers are asked for feedback.
1. Match feedback questions to your webpages
One of the most important aspects of timing your feedback request is making sure that the context is relevant to your customer’s current experience. For instance, you don’t want to ask them about a product they haven’t received or to rate their purchase experience while they are still filling out payment details.
Usersnap’s Display Rules allow you to control which pages on your website to show the feedback collector. Ensuring that the request is always in tune with what your customer is experiencing. You can even match the request to the user, checking if they’re a new or repeat user.
2. Instant feedback for the most authentic reactions
By setting Usersnap’s Display Rules to match specific URLs, you can show the feedback form immediately when a customer lands on a page or performs a certain action, such as a confirmation page, after ordering a product. This helps you capture the most honest feelings and instinctive opinions, and it prevents them from forgetting important details later on.
You can set up different feedback projects and metrics for specific processes, experiences, and features to measure NPS or customer satisfaction more precisely.
3. Send questions to those most likely to answer
Display Rules can target customers using their emails. Just put in an email list with your most engaged or high LTV (lifetime value) customers, and the feedback request will be targeted to them only. This helps you avoid spamming the entire customer base and allows you to ask repeat visitors more in-depth questions.
Microsoft’s study on customer service has shown 77% of customers favor brands that seek feedback.
Loyal users appreciate being asked for suggestions on specific aspects of your service, which is great for you and them. Google fans are proud to sign up for a beta version of a Google product and enthusiastically test and give feedback regularly. Asking deeper questions prompts customers to provide better answers.
4. Avoid asking for duplicated info
One of the quickest ways to hurt your response rate is to pester your visitors by asking the same question over and over again. This happens a lot with less sophisticated feedback management tools, which end up turning your customers away in frustration.
With Usersnap’s custom data API feature, you no longer need to get customers to fill in their emails every time they submit feedback.
You can fetch user data and attach it to the feedback items, giving you a full background of the customer without bothering them with a lengthy form. The shorter the feedback form is, the more likely customers are willing to complete it.
5. Customize your feedback tool for the best results
Integrating Usersnap into your website is simple and quick. You only have to install the code once for it to work across your website. Once installed, you can easily customize the feedback popup in ways that enhance its clarity, like matching the popup’s heading to the question or page being referenced.
This level of control makes it easier to catch your customers’ attention, which is essential when asking for instant feedback. It increases the chances that they’ll pause what they’re doing to provide you with a quick response.
Are you ready to amplify the customer survey response rate?
Timing your customer feedback is all about understanding where your customers are in their journey with your website and products.
Usersnap offers the flexibility to target your customer feedback at the right place and time. And with a seamless experience, your customers will be happy to respond more often to website feedback questions.
This article was brought to you by Usersnap – a customer feedback, screen recording, screenshot, and bug tracking tool for every SaaS company. Try it out for free with your team now, sign up for a time unlimited free trial without a credit card.
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