Tips on making Surveys customers will take

With Center EX surveys, you can present all sorts of questions to your clients and attendees.  Here are some tips for getting them to fill them out.

• Target your audience with filters (don't send your survey to everyone under the sun!)
  • If your questions correspond to particular customers, filter them and invite only the customers that make sense.
    • For example, if the survey is meant for in-business clients, only send it to those particular customers
  • The shotgun approach of sending a survey to everyone can backfire, causing customers to opt-out of future surveys, which may be even more important for them to take.
• Keep the number of questions to a minimum (shorter is better!)
  • The temptation is there to ask every conceivable question you can think of, but nothing makes someone give up on a survey more than seeing a mile long list of questions.  Try to keep the survey to one or two page lengths if possible.
• Pre-test the questions
  • Make sure the questions make sense by asking another staff member to take the survey and give you feedback. 
    • They can do this by adding an anonymous response.  You can delete their response afterwards so it doesn't mess up results.
  • Make sure questions are clear, and don't cause the taker to give up in frustration
• Use interesting questions first, to help retain the taker's attention
• Keep the open ended questions to a minimum.
  • Open ended questions, where the taker is asked to write a short sentence or two, can take quite a bit of time to fill out, which can be annoying. 
  • Muti-choice or single-choice questions are usually much easier on the taker. 

And always remember, being nice and thoughtful toward the survey taker will help you get more responses.  Don't make them work too hard.