March 29, 2011
Sound Advice: Revamp Questionnaires to Improve Response Rates
By James Sallows, VP, Client Operations, EMEAI was out shopping recently and 
I passed the window display of an electronics store. A particular piece of audio equipment caught my eye, so I went inside to inquire about it. The store owner was friendly and helpful, clearly proud of that particular home cinema system and eager that I should appreciate its true value and the quality it produced.
That interaction got me thinking: We would do well as an industry to adopt a customer-oriented mindset, like that of the retailer. After all, the survey respondent is our customer. The questionnaire is where we come face-to-face with him to make a sale. However, instead of presenting him with our finest product, we drag out our old survey, scratch out “For Telephone” across the top, replace it with “Online” and email it to him. Then we complain when he doesn’t buy it.
It’s ironic that the overarching goal of most of our research is to make consumer products or services better and more appealing to customers, yet the product we put in front of them at the beginning of the process is often a hard sell. At Lightspeed Research, we recently looked deeply into the causes of survey incompletes among more than three million surveys across our panels. We found that things like large grids, long surveys and waiting for downloads caused about two-thirds of dropouts.
We used this information to work closely with some clients to re-vamp questionnaires to make them more engaging to respondents, while still providing the same quantity of data. For one client, in particular, we shortened the length by one-quarter, vastly reduced the number of clicks and mouse movements and were upfront about the survey’s length. The result was an increase in the completion rate of 30 percent across the clients’ more than 200 projects.
If our industry continues to drive survey respondents to boring, lengthy, or repetitive surveys, we can’t expect them to complete the surveys – let alone provide high quality data. Improving surveys to reduce dropouts is a win-win for everyone involved. We should be putting our best products in front of our respondents.
And it worked for the electronics store, as my new home cinema system will testify.
Category:Panel Quality, Research on Research, Survey Best Practices
Posted on March 29, 2011
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