DULLES, Va.—Vovici, the leading provider of survey management and enterprise feedback solutions, has completed a landmark study to estimate how many surveys American adults take each year, why they take them and what they would like to see done differently. American adults as a whole are invited to take surveys seven billion times each year and claim to complete 80% of the surveys they start, for a total of 2.6 billion survey responses a year.
Based on the following results, Vovici advises companies conducting survey research to strive for surveys that are as short as possible. Vovici outlines ten tips for shortening surveys on its blog, Voice of Vovici, http://blog.vovici.com/blog/bid/50909/How-To-Shorten-a-Questionnaire.
When questioned as to why they take surveys, 24% of respondents said it was simply because they were asked to. Among other reasons given, 14% said it was to be helpful, 14% said it was because surveys are interesting or fun, 9% said it was to share their opinion and 7% were curious about what a given survey would be about.
“The survey industry has rightfully been concerned about demonstrating respect for the respondent,” said Jeffrey Henning, founder and VP of strategy. “It’s easy for survey authors to forget what it is like to be reading or listening to a long sequence of questions. We wanted to give voice to the respondents’ point of view so that survey researchers would do a better job about meeting their needs.”
Regarding the topic of making surveys more engaging to them, 18% said simply that surveys should be short: “Keep them brief and to the point”; “Keeping it short and sweet, that’s about it!” Another 13% said that they should be offered incentives: “A promotional incentive”; “A discount coupon for the product they are endorsing”; “Reimburse the people you’re questioning with a coupon, token or cash.” Ten percent (10%) said that surveys should be interesting: “Make them relative to something I’m interested in or concerned about”; “It has got to be about something interesting to me.”
Respondents to the study did not see a big change in the number of surveys they were being invited to: 24% reported that they were being invited to take more surveys than a year ago, 22% reported fewer and 48% reported the same. Seven percent (7%) didn’t know.
The most common complaints about surveys were related to time management. Twenty-one percent (21%) of respondents said that surveys are too time consuming or that they are too busy to take surveys: “I don’t like them; they are ‘time invasive’”; “If I have time for one, I will do it. If I don’t have time, then I don’t.” Sixteen percent (16%) said that survey requests, especially by phone, came at inconvenient times: “They call when I’m fixing dinner”; “The calls come at a bad time.” Other complaints were that surveys ask too many personal questions (16%), are too long (12%) and can’t always be trusted (7%).
For customer satisfaction questionnaires, one of the key techniques to shorten survey length is to embed already collected personal information from CRM systems within the survey without asking the questions again; this also addresses respondents’ disquiet with requests for personal information. Such information should be used to branch respondents to the appropriate section of a questionnaire automatically, making the questionnaire more relevant – addressing another common complaint about surveys, which often make it clear that a company doesn’t really know its customers.
To extrapolate to the U.S. population, Vovici surveyed 400 American adults by telephone using a Random Digit Dialing sample of landline households. To keep this survey on surveys short, no single respondent had to answer all of the verbatim questions.
About Vovici
Vovici is the leading provider of intelligent online survey management and feedback solutions. Powerful, scalable and easy to use, Vovici’s solutions help companies engage customers, employees and partners to increase loyalty, facilitate innovation, and influence critical business decisions. More than a thousand organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 500, rely on Vovici to turn information into action. Visit www.vovici.com for more information.