, played by Kevin Costner, in the film Field of Dreams. I can promise you that Ray Kinsella never built a survey, or he would have never uttered those words.

I don’t think there is any disagreement on the fact that customer feedback forms the basis of several important decisions with repercussions ranging from sales to marketing to product development.

However, just launching a survey does not guarantee that it will come back with responses. At least, Wally knows that.

While it is always difficult to convince customers to take the effort of replying to your market research initiatives, there are certain segments of customer that are particularly difficult to get responses from.

Here are the four major categories these customers fall into and strategies to get more responses from them:

1. Customers who cannot be reached easily

Some customers are hard to reach. Due to geographic or technological distance between the brands and them. Typically, such customers would reside in smaller towns and villages, would not be the most technologically savvy and would have limited know-how of a digital world. Technology scares them. How do you reach such people?

One easy way is to piggy ride on the popular messaging mediums that have already done the hard yards of reaching these customer segments. Take, for example, WhatsApp. It is the most popular messaging app in Africa and accounts for 44% of all country’s mobile internet use.
In India, 65% of the population is from rural areas but WhatsApp currently has 487 million users in the country.  Targeting the users with simple WhatsApp message surveys will be a wiser approach. WhatsApp is a convenient survey platform for business.

2. Customers who lack the wherewithal to respond

This category of customers is unfamiliar with the customer survey or feedback process. They have might have know-how and accessibility issues. Language itself can be a challenge including reading and following instructions. In most cases, they will limit themselves to the mediums familiar to them. Online mediums of data collection are unfamiliar and have a learning curve.

So how can we approach them?

Localizing your data collection process is the best recourse. This includes creating questions in their local languages and extensively using audio format (which also helps if they are unable to read or write). Besides, using visual elements placed vividly (such as a brightly coloured button can direct users where to click.) Requesting audio or video responses for open-ended questions instead of typing would encourage customers to answer. This, of course, assumes they know how to share responses in these forms. This is where messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger come to the brand’s rescue again. The familiarity with the interface of these messaging apps overcomes a lot of learning curve issues that accompany data collection.

Making online customer survey process accessible to the end user will solicit more responses.

3. Customers who don’t have the time to respond

This category of customers lacks the time and enthusiasm to respond to long surveys. They include busy professionals such as senior executives, and service industry professionals including stylist, beauticians, mechanics, cab drivers etc.
For this segment, the brand has to reduce the effort and time involved in the feedback process and offer value for their time.

Creating short surveys and following up regularly can be a great method to encourage response. Additionally, offering meaningful incentives is a good move.

Another strategy is to use the sync mediums of communication instead of the async ones.
Sync medium uses ‘always-on’ and ‘real time’ platforms such as instant messaging apps. Async medium will be emails that users will respond to at their convenience. For this segment of customers, the async communication and reminders would sit in their inboxes and would never see the daylight. Short series of questions on a messaging app will generate a better and faster response.

4. Customers who lack the willingness to respond

Customers in this category feel that filling out an online survey is not worth the effort. They abhor surveys and feel that there is no upside to providing feedback.

Even with the best strategies, getting them to respond would be an uphill task. Some of the strategies that work are personalization, orientation, and closing the loop.
For this segment, personalize everything- starting from the message seeking feedback to follow-ups, appropriate incentives and a thank you message after the survey conclusion.

Explain the importance of their feedback upfront. Mention how the information would be used. Make sure that the invitation for feedback goes from someone with (or can claim to have) authority to act on the feedback.

If feasible, inform your respondent of what actions were taken after their responses. This will encourage them for future survey participation as well.

Go for conversational surveys by keeping the questions simple and avoid long forms or questionnaires.

Before creating an online survey, map out the audience you will target. Identify who you are going to and if they belong to one of the above categories. Like any communication, your feedback system needs to be tailored to the audience it seeks. This is prudent in terms of time and resource consumption.

If you are looking to create a short online survey for your business, feel free to check our 14 day free trial here. Simple to create, test, deploy and analyze!