Customer surveys are broken. Here's why.

Every company is the world has to ask questions to its customers. It's necessary, at every step of the customer journey.

At the very beginning, talking to your customers to understand their needs and problems is at the heart of every market study. Once your product is conceived, asking questions to test your concept is nearly mandatory. Understanding how people found you, what they're looking for, why they chose you right after a purchase if full of invaluable insights. And asking how a customer service contact went is now basic.

Market Study, Concept Testing, NPS, Customer Effort Score, Product Feedback... no one will contest that every company has to do it, at least on some parts of the journey.

But they way they do it is broken.

We are interrupted

Most of the customer surveys experiences consist in interrupting your customers.

1️. By email, several days after our purchase or our customer service contact. But since email is now more cuttered than ever, getting yet another email from a brand asking for something I don't want to do right now is a really bad experience.

2️. During our navigation, by using popups that block us from browsing the website. Here, the goal for the company is to increase the response rate but it's a company-only point of view. In that strategy, we prefer to annoy the customer hoping for a good response rate, instead of focusing on the customer experience. At the end, we fail on both side since the average conversion rate for popups is only 3,09%.

Bad UX = low response rate

At Screeb, we've talked to dozens of brands to get a better idea of their response rate.

On average, they manage to get a 12% response rate on their survey (on all channels). The best performing brands reach 30% of responses.

That may seem good. But put it this way: at best, 70% of your customers don't answer you. In average, 88% of your customers refuse to take your survey.

It means that you miss precious insights from the people willing to give your money. That's 88% of missed opportunities to strengthen your relationship with them, whereas you spent a lot of money acquiring those customers.

Dangerous bias

If the UX is so bad, who are those people, those 12% in average, who answer anyway?

Those ready to make such an effort to answer are, most of the time, really happy people or really angry people. It means that you manage to get insights from extremes, but not from the mass.

That creates a huge bias in the answers you collect. And it means that decisions you may take from those insights may be the wrong ones.

Customers interruption, low response rate, dangerous bias in the insights... Customers surveys are completely broken.

This is why at Screeb we completely revamped the way companies can ask questions to their customers, by adopting codes from messaging apps and by inserting the conversational surveys in the customer journey without interrupting it.

You want to try it? Get your invitation to Screeb today 👇