Is your customer survey too long?
In my opinion, if your transactional survey is longer than five minutes (for a phone interview) or one screen (for an online survey), then yes it is too long.
But even if you’re not as ruthless about survey length as I am, there’s a lot of surveys out there which everybody agrees are too long. I’m talking about the five-page 25-question online surveys we all know and loathe, or the 10-minute phone surveys which just seem to go on forever.
These surveys are amazingly common, yet I have never found anyone, not a single person, who disagrees with the notion that such a long survey is much too long. And I’ve spoken with a lot of people who currently field long surveys, and even people who designed them in the first place. Some are even our clients. And every single person I’ve spoken to thinks the long survey should be shorter.
So if everyone can agree that a survey is too long, why doesn’t it get changed? I’ve heard a lot of excuses reasons, and I’m here to tell you why these don’t hold water:
- Reason #1: It takes time to build consensus to change the survey. Guess what? Everybody agrees the survey is too long. You have consensus. Go change the survey.
- Reason #2: We’ve identified 57 different business drivers we need to ask about. You can’t focus on 57 different things. If you’re trying to focus on that many things, you’re not actually focusing on anything. Chances are there are only 3-5 of the questions that anyone ever pays any attention to, and you already know what they are. Get rid of everything else. Or if you truly cannot get away from all those secondary drivers, ask each customer about a random set of three or five. This will at least let you track the overall trends and your customers will thank you.
- Reason #3: We need to maintain continuity with our historical data set. There’s really no point maintaining a worthless data set. And anything beyond the handful of questions you’re really using is not serving any function and has no value.
- Reason #4: We have a lot of process built up around the existing survey. Change is hard, we all get it. But maintaining all that process costs time and money. There’s no point wasting the resources to keep delivering reports about things nobody cares about.
- Reason #5: We are legally required to ask all these questions, in exactly this way. Okay, this is probably the one real reason not to fix a survey which is too long. Those working in the healthcare sector probably know I’m thinking of the HCAHPS survey, a legally-mandated monstrosity comprising 32 questions (which some vendors absurdly supplement with a set of their own proprietary questions). So if this is you, sorry, you’re stuck. Go write a letter to your senator.
Well-designed short surveys almost always have a higher response rate, yield more useful data, allow more focus on business goals, leave a more positive impression on customers, and are easier to manage. They’re usually cheaper, too.
So what’s your excuse?
