Most customer feedback surveys contain two types of questions: closed ended questions and open ended questions. During open-ended responses, people have the ability to provide their opinions. However most surveys always seek responses in plain text. This limits the ability of people to offer multimedia responses. In this blog,we will discuss the benefits of multimedia survey and why you need it.  

What is An Open Ended Survey Question?

An open-ended survey question welcomes a wide range of possible replies from their respondents. These surveys are qualitative in nature. Instead of providing a limited set of choices, open-ended responses encourage people to express their thoughts and opinions in their own words. This approach is often used in qualitative research to gain deeper insights into people’s attitudes, beliefs, and experiences

Importance of multimedia responses in open ended questions

• Solicit higher response rate from respondents. It takes lower cognitive effort than typing on most occasions. 
• You get detailed insight that cannot be obtained on a scale based question.
• You can capture the emotional metric of the respondent. This is useful for sentiment analysis. 
• Multimedia responses make the survey less intimidating and more interactive. This welcomes more engagement rate over traditional survey mediums.  

From 2024 onward, offering multimedia surveys for your audience should be mandatory. This will be a massive opportunity to help businesses build on customer retention strategies and polish their customer support team. All of this will determine the overall quality of customer experience (CX).

5 Benefits of Multimedia Type Survey Responses 

There is a lot more to express than mere text. Customers go through a plethora of experiences on different touchpoints. Understanding them thoroughly needs some involvement and upgrading of feedback tools. Here is an overview of the important benefits of keeping a multimedia format to seek respondent insights.

1. Change your passive customers to active respondents

Most customers who could shy away from writing a review will now be inclined to provide vivid feedback. All they need is options. Different options will suit the comfort level for various respondents. A busy customer may not be willing to sit and type a testimonial. They could be more inclined to providing an audio format of response since it can be done hands free. As long as we offer a minimal involvement for filling surveys, there will be a greater participation rate.

2. Obtain a high response rate in your surveys

People are more likely to finish a survey if it is visually appealing, interesting and interactive. Moreover, multimedia surveys can offer a range of options – from taking pictures to recording videos. This will help brands understand their customers from their point of view.  There will be an inevitable rise in the response rate with this upgrade.

3. Close the feedback loop on unhappy customers

Candid feedback can come to the CX dashboard via means of a plain text, a document, multiple images, audio or video format. This will give a human touch to data collection. This is important while catering to customers at different touchpoints. Receiving media rich responses from unhappy customers can help you attend to them sooner and close the customer feedback loop. This augments the entire marketing process and brands can build on this feedback to improve on their products and service offerings for the future.

4. Enhanced brand perception across touchpoints

Multimedia surveys are one of the best ways to increase brand perception across touchpoints. When team members focus on improving the experience, you can get greater engagement for future survey protocols. Brands that can capture the respondents with engaging surveys, attain more digital footfalls. People from the younger generation will be more inclined to answer interactive feedback forms.  

5. Conversational tone encourage participants 

People do not prefer to be intimidated when they are filling a questionnaire. Seeking instant feedback in a media rich format is friendly in nature. This approach reaps a higher response rate over traditional surveys. Customer feedback surveys are goal oriented- to understand pain points, collect customer reviews and understand their level of satisfaction. Conversational format is the new way to go.

Merren’s Multimedia Surveys vs Traditional Surveys:
Merren’s multimedia survey channel can obtain responses via photos, videos or speech-to-text facility.

• Merren’s interactive survey encourages more participation. It offers more personalization as it collects individual responses.Comparatively, browser based surveys have an external link. This is a friction point and depends on how often do people access emails. 
• Merren offers dynamic email surveys that are interactive within the email body. You do not have to go to an external browser. 
• People use their phones on the go. They can access interactive Merren surveys in a few clicks. Emails are a more formal way of communicating. Most busy professionals do not access their emails away from their work hours. 

Conclusion

A great way to empower a marketing team is to bring a high response rate to the table. A high response rate will come when there are robust tools at your disposal.  We all can agree that media rich survey results can help us comprehend the user feedback, and welcome new customers with enthusiasm. While customers may have the paucity of time to give elaborate feedback, multimedia is the right way to capture their responses. Multimedia surveys have proven to be a popular and effective choice for brands looking to upgrade their customer feedback strategy. Do you want to upgrade your customer service protocols? Supercharge your business with Merren CX. Try our 14 day free trial without any credit card commitments.