How to increase survey response rate? - Process Effectiveness metric

we are conducting a online survey through email, fax, calls etc., currently hugebilling is happening, for fax and calls survey, suggest me how can we streamline the survey process to reduce cost, what metric can put in place to measure the process effectiveness.

Re: How to increase survey response rate? - Effectiveness metric

Manju_taki said:

we are conducting a online survey through email, fax, calls etc., currently hugebilling is happening, for fax and calls survey, suggest me how can we streamline the survey process to reduce cost, what metric can put in place to measure the process effectiveness.

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You are stepping into murky waters (as is always the case with surveys). First, is response rate your only issue? How critical is this survey? Do you realize that responses from the different media can be different (what people will tell you over the phone can be vastly different from what they will respond by mail or email). Surveys are best for finding out what makes people angry - not what makes them happy. Angry people are willing to share their misery (to a point - then they want nothing to do with you). THey always make you look worse than you are. So, your analysis may not find the different streams of data to be apples to apples.

Some folks have tried bribery (If you answer our survey, you will be entered into a contest). Bottom line, you should not have high expectations for survey response rate.

Re: How to increase survey response rate? - Effectiveness metric

Welcome to the Cove!

Survey response rates are notoriously difficult to manage. I did a search using the function called "Search" (yellow font) in the toolbar above and key words "survey response rate" and got this list of threads, some of which discuss this problem in depth. Looking through existing discussions may be faster than getting insights with this new one.

Re: How to increase survey response rate? - Effectiveness metric

As my esteemed friends have noted, surveys are a tricky business. Our third-party auditor seemed pretty impressed with our response rate, so I will share what we do. We have a survey on our web site that has 5 or 6 statements and a 1-6 scale, disagree strongly to agree strongly, for the respondent to tell us where they stand in general areas of product, service, etc. Then there are 3 or 4 open ended questions that they can answer or not. They can give their name, or not.

The trick is that we have electronic billing over the internet, and there is a link to the survey on the bottom of our invoices. We also include a link whenever it is appropriate.

If we get 3 responses a month, it is a good month. We get an occasional gem that we can use to improve, but with most of the responses in the 5 to 6 level, frankly we don't get much usable info, other than our customers are generally pretty happy.

I hope this helps.

Re: How to increase survey response rate? - Effectiveness metric

You can consider offering small and inexpensive gifts in return for responding a survey. E.g. something that the surveyed person can pass along to a kid like a lamp, or toy, or for the respondent him/herself like a calendar, or agenda with your logo, etc. Everyone likes free toys, and when people is busy at work they will think twice about missing a chance to get something free for their son or daughter, and if it is for a 5 minute or so survey they will feel more willing to respond.

I don't know if this legal in different countries or appropriate for most companies' bussiness policies, but I have seen this works really well, with an increase in survey response rate of almost double.

Since nobody answered your initial question about how to reduce costs, let me give you a different perspective. When you get a response to the survey you need to look at how the respondent arrived there. You can then look at costs per response by the different methods.

For example, it costs

$10 for a fax campaign
$100 for a telephone campaign
$5 for an email campaign
$25 for a web campaign

If you get 20 responses from the fax, the metric would be $0.50 per response.
If you get 1000 responses from telephone campaign, the metric would be $0.10.

Even though the telephone campaign is 10x as much, the cost per response is 1/5th.

We can debate the merits of each method of recruitment, including bias, but without the sampling frame and intended population it is a moot discussion.