The phrase “survey fatigue” refers to a consumer sentiment associated with being tired of surveys. It’s not simply the act of surveying that causes survey fatigue, it’s the fact that surveys are often designed in a selfish way, and businesses don’t compensate customers for their time or even let customers know how their feedback is used.

These days, customers are more strapped for time than ever before, so if they offer up their time to complete a survey and the brand responds with a five-plus minute exercise, the customer is likely to feel burned. Organizations need to set proper expectations in the invitation, then deliver on the promise in the execution.

“When consumers receive a survey invite, the reaction is ‘oh hum, another long survey’, that will I get nothing for, and that will not even be read by anyone,” Erich Dietz, VP of Business Solutions at Mindshare, told TMCnet.

To help fix the problem of survey fatigue, most organizations can use a form of Voice of Customer (VOC) technology. It is more productive, according to Dietz, to rely on the actual voice of the customer, giving their opinion in their own words, and then use speech and text analytics distill insights.

The largest element of the survey fatigue solution is less about technology, and more about a fundamental/philosophical shift in how organizations view and manage feedback programs. Organizations can rework their survey mechanisms to deliver shorter surveys that are more reliant on customer free form comments, employ speech and text analytics to mine those comments, operationalize the process of sharing insights with every level of the organization and customers, as well as establishing rules as to how often a individual customer may be surveyed.

“They need to migrate away from the ‘tell me about me in the way I want to be told’ to ‘tell me about you and how we can improve your experience, in the way you want to tell us’… and then use feedback to engage with more customers and show them their feedback matters,” he said.

To relieve survey fatigue, Mindshare provides:

• A customer-friendly approach to surveying:  Guidance on incentives, survey design expertise, business rules for surveying, etc.
• Technology to help businesses distill deeper insights from shorter surveys (especially customer comments): Fully integrated Voice and Text Analytics, so we can rely more heavily on customers own words/voices --  a single, unstructured verbatim comment from a customer can deliver 10 times the number of actionable insights when compared to a single, quantitative rating question.   
• Extensive guidance on how to engage customers rather than just surveying them: innovative ways to communicate feedback-inspired changes, closed-loop processes for customer recovery, etc.

To administer a successful survey, a company must consistently demonstrate to their customers that they value the customers’ time, that they are listening to and using customer feedback, and ultimately establish themselves as brand the customer trusts. The action behind customer engagement is aligning all survey programs, compensating customers for their time, proactively sharing how feedback is used, responding to customers that had poor experiences, etc.

“A survey invite that starts off with ‘Please answer four brief questions about your experience’ is a lot more likely to attract respondents than ‘Please respond to our customer satisfaction survey,’” explained Dietz. “Company interests are often served via fairly rigid surveys that sound like ‘Rate our website,’ ‘Rate our product,’ ‘Select this,’ as opposed to a simple ‘Please tell us how we can improve your experience.’”

Companies should seek to create surveys that are designed more like a conversation focused on the customers interests and needs as opposed to a test on what the company wants to know about.