Surveying your customers has immense potential for improving your products and services. When you get customer feedback, you obtain critical insight to provide more value to clients. However, the massive volume of surveys that clients receive and are asked to complete can be pretty exhausting.
Because of this experience, only nine percent of clients take the time to respond to long surveys with 70 percent abandoning them. Remember, there are other companies collecting reviews from customers too, which is why you should refine your survey approach and strategies.
Best practice indicates that customers should be surveyed only one to two times a year. Of course, you can push it to four times, but going beyond that is too much and can cause review request fatigue.
In this blog post, you’ll discover why this request rate is recommended, as well as:
- How to ask for reviews,
- The recommended format for customer feedback survey forms,
- How to generate reviews
- The best practices to improve your company’s survey request process.
The Impact of Review Request Fatigue
Review request fatigue, also known as survey fatigue, refers to the weariness experienced by customers caused by overexposure to review and survey requests. It is characterized by either an unwillingness to participate or low enthusiasm about answering questions for reviews.
This phenomenon can cause low quality feedback from your clients. It can also create a significant drop in response rates from customers. Studies show that 80 percent of respondents can abandon a survey halfway through, with the majority of customers citing interference with their online experience as the culprit for review abandonment. (Elevation Marketing, 2021)
The Common Causes of Survey Fatigue
There are various reasons why people don’t participate in surveys. Some customers prefer not to submit Yelp or Google customer reviews. Others may be busy and won’t bother to respond when you try to collect assessments. Aside from knowing how to ask for reviews, you can improve your response rate by taking the time to consider why people don’t respond to these requests.
Some of the most common causes of survey fatigue that online reputation management often point out include:
- Surveys that take too long to complete can cause people to abandon the survey.
- Irrelevant or inappropriate questions that make customers withhold their replies.
- Questions that pertain to events that happened too long ago. These questions leave a negative impression on customers and may cause a negative perception of your business.
- Getting too many requests for reviews via email discourages people from responding to your emails.
- There are no apparent benefits from answering surveys or review requests.
You get customer feedback more efficiently by avoiding these causes of survey fatigue. Improving your survey methods prevents review fatigue, boosts review generation results and increases response rates.
Fine-Tuning Your Process Based on Essential Benchmarks
Online reputation management companies can help you polish your process of requesting a review to prevent survey fatigue. You need to make adjustments based on your industry’s response rate, the type of survey you plan to use and your outreach method (phone, email, text and others).
The following are essential benchmarks regarding survey fatigue that marketers and business owners should pay attention to when reaching out to consumers:
- Industries that get the most feedback from survey requests include consumer electronics, satellite and cable providers, and retail and mobile communications.
- Only nine percent of customers will be willing to provide feedback if a survey takes too much time (the majority will just abandon the request for a review).
- Industries receiving the least feedback include drug stores, insurance carriers, household products and personal products.
- The customers’ propensity to provide feedback isn’t connected to the frequency of using a company’s products and services. For instance, they have 63 percent customer patronage in the hospitality sector but only get 11 percent feedback from clients.
- On the other hand, 46 percent of customers will be willing to answer questions if it doesn’t take too much time.
- Only 3 percent of customers will respond to automated phone calls.
- Around 45 percent of customers will just reject the request outright.
- Customers prefer low-effort surveys, and reputation management consultants can help you design them to get better response rates.
- Only 13 percent of customers prefer email feedback.
Strategies for Avoiding Survey Fatigue When Collecting Reviews From Customers
From the data provided earlier, we can gather some of the best practices to prevent survey fatigue when you collect reviews from customers. Aside from knowing how to request a review on Facebook or Yelp, you should adjust your customer feedback strategy by following industry best practices. These best practices are based on timing, frequency, questionnaire length and survey type.
- Questionnaire Length
The survey length plays an important role when you try to generate reviews. Your team should also know how to request a review on Facebook or Yelp effectively using the optimal number of questions.
When you collect reviews and feedback from customers, one of the keywords they look for is “quick.” It’s true for both responsive and not-so-responsive customers. Adding too many questions for online business reviews will turn off customers who may abandon your survey.
You generate reviews with higher response rates when you survey with fewer questions. If answering your survey takes more than 10 minutes, you risk response abandonment. Studies show that 87 percent of customers don’t like surveys that take more than 20 minutes to complete. (SurveyMonkey)
- Survey Format
Knowing how to request a review on Facebook or Yelp includes using the most effective survey formats. The questionnaire format has a powerful impact on survey response rates. Customers want simple surveys that can be answered quickly. In this regard, Rize Review’s senior reputation manager, Tim Clarke, recommends a net promoter score (NPS) survey over other survey formats because it is a one-question and one-click type of survey. This survey format tends to get higher response rates than other types of online business reviews.
Asking one question per survey is optimal since it’s easiest for customers. You may also ask one follow-up question, which is one of the critical features of an NPS survey. The goal is to make your customer feedback survey forms easy for the consumer. You can use yes or no questions, star ratings and mutually exclusive choices. Surveys with one tap or one-click answers get higher response rates. In addition, there are survey types you should avoid.
One survey format that you should avoid using is the grid question, which appears in tabular form. You should never use them to ask for Yelp or Google customer reviews because they can be confusing. You can use it to get multiple answers to different questions, but it risks survey fatigue. It’s complicated and may take too long for respondents to complete.
Finally, one last format that you should use sparingly is the open text question. This type of survey format provides a box where customers can type entire sentences. Remember that consumers usually respond to surveys on their phones. This type of review request could therefore lead to fatigue as most people don’t like typing long responses on their mobile phones.
- Survey Frequency
Asking customers for feedback too frequently can contribute to survey fatigue. Tim Clarke recommends sending out survey requests only two to four times a year. He also points out that three to four times is the benchmark for the Rize team and more than that is too much.
- Timing
It’s not enough to know how to request Yelp or Google customer reviews efficiently. To get a higher response rate, send your requests during optimal times. Timing is vital in review generation, which is why Tim Clarke and his team recommend sending questionnaires on business days and Saturdays.
“We often won’t send surveys on Sundays, but weekend survey response rates are pretty high. I think around 11 AM-6 PM is ideal from Monday to Saturday.”
Sending requests for reviews during holidays and weekends may contribute to survey request fatigue. You can improve your response rates by following the recommended timing.
- Adjusting Survey Strategies by Industry Type
Find out the response rate in your industry and adjust your strategy for collecting reviews from customers. Even if the response rate in your industry is low, customers will be happy to respond when there’s a compelling reason or event to do so. For this reason, sending surveys during optimal conditions is best for your team.
You can improve response rates by sending requests for reviews when you resolve a customer’s concern, after answering an important question, when a customer purchases something and when consumers have had an excellent experience with your brand.
In addition, you would also need to adjust your expectations for response rates according to your business sector. For instance, if the response rate in your industry is higher than others, you should reduce the frequency of your requests to avoid survey fatigue. However, if you know that people don’t usually respond to review requests in your industry, simplify your survey feedback process.
It would also help to work with a reputation management services provider, so you know the most opportune times to reach out to your clients based on your industry or business sector.
- Choose the Best Survey and Review Platforms
The best review platforms recommended by online reputation management companies include Google, Facebook and Yelp. You can leverage their apps when asking survey questions. Their apps auto-populate the form fields with customer information, so consumers don’t need to enter them. Instead, they can go straight to the question they need to answer. The entire process is simplified through these platforms.
Working With Top-Notch Reputation Management Services
After understanding the causes of fatigue associated with asking customers for reviews, you will be able to adjust your review generation strategy to get a higher response rate when asking for online business reviews. If you need help with your review management process, it would be best to seek the help of experienced reputation management consultants. They can equip your business with the best-suited reputation management tool to improve response rates. They can also teach you how to ask for reviews effectively to avoid survey fatigue and get customer feedback efficiently.
When you work with a leading reputation management agency like Rize Reviews, you’ll be equipped with the best-suited reputation management tool to help you monitor reviews and surveys. Our industry experts understand survey fatigue and use proven strategies, best practices and guidelines for better results. As mentioned earlier, Tim Clark explained:
“We will send only two requests per year for most clients, and we have unsubscribes built into every message. We won’t bother people that aren’t interested in receiving any communications.”
Your business needs reviews and survey responses to improve your outreach, boost lead generation and provide better products and services. However, you need to balance these efforts with the temperament and preferences of your consumers. Rize experts can help you find that balance by asking for reviews at the best times when customers are ready to provide feedback.
Contact us today so we can help you revamp your outreach strategy, prevent review request fatigue and gather critical insights into your customer base.
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