Traditional surveys can be time-consuming and often have a low response rate. Enter WhatsApp surveys – a new tool for businesses that provides real-time feedback, greater convenience, and personalization. In this blog post, we’ll explore the benefits of using WhatsApp surveys over traditional methods, including higher response rates and the ability to gather real-time feedback. So let’s dive in and discover how you can use this new age tool to improve your relationship with your customers!
What are WhatsApp surveys?
Introducing WhatsApp surveys, a modern and innovative way to collect customer feedback. There are billions of interactions happening on a daily basis- video calls, group chat, voice calls, sharing gifs and images etc. WhatsApp surveys offer a more direct approach, delivering the survey directly to customers’ phones without the need for paper or phone-based questionnaires. This convenience increases response rates and provides real-time feedback, allowing businesses to respond quickly and efficiently.
8 Benefits of WhatsApp surveys over traditional surveys
Customization and personalization are also key benefits of WhatsApp surveys. By targeting specific customer segments, businesses can increase the likelihood of receiving a response and gather more relevant data. Using Merren, the modern day marketer can now create a WhatsApp survey using our tools and best practices.
Here are the benefits of using WhatsApp Surveys for capturing customer feedback:
Reach where your customers are:
Customers expect a seamless and convenient experience in all aspects of their lives. WhatsApp surveys offer just that. Customers can complete a survey at their own pace, from anywhere, without having to visit a physical location or fill out a lengthy paper form. This convenience translates to higher response rates and more accurate data collection for businesses.
Use real-time feedback to respond instantly:
WhatsApp surveys offer businesses the advantage of real-time feedback from customers. With traditional surveys, businesses may have to wait days or even weeks to receive responses and analyze customer data. However, WhatsApp surveys allow for immediate and direct communication between businesses and their customers. This enables businesses to quickly identify issues and respond to them in a timely manner.
High response rate across demographics:
Using WhatsApp, businesses can 10X their response rate using this one robust tool. With billions of users across globally, it is easy to see why brands need to opt for a messenger based survey (including Meta messenger). This will bring in a serious data goldmine for improving touchpoints across customer journeys.
Personalization and friendly conversations:
Personalization is a key benefit that WhatsApp surveys provide over traditional surveys. With WhatsApp, businesses can tailor their questions based on the customer’s previous interactions with their brand, making customers feel valued and heard. A personal touch of WhatsApp surveys allows for real-time feedback, providing businesses with an opportunity to quickly respond to customer feedback and address any issues promptly.
Automate surveys and collect seamless feedback:
One of the biggest advantages of WhatsApp surveys is their ability to automate the data collection process. This allows businesses to collect feedback from customers at any time, without any manual input or data entry. With automation, businesses can easily track and analyze customer feedback in real-time, allowing them to make data-driven improvements.
Compatibility across mobile devices and tablets:
Instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook messenger and Instagram direct messages are robust in nature. They offer new features of voice messages, stickers, audio and video format and other media rich facilities. Collecting user data in this format is more suitable in this era.
Messenger apps facilitate multilingual feedback collection:
This is particularly useful for global brands that cater to customers from diverse regions and cultures. Messenger apps like WhatsApp even have built-in language translation features. Now it is easy for businesses to understand and respond to customer feedback in different languages. In a world where language diversity is becoming increasingly important, messenger-based surveys offer a valuable solution for businesses looking to connect with their customers on a global scale.
WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption:
WhatsApp users across iPhone and android can be rest assured of their privacy policy. This private messaging platform ensures that all conversations and data shared on the platform are secure. This level of security is a crucial factor for businesses, as it allows them to collect sensitive data from customers without compromising their privacy. With WhatsApp messenger, businesses can obtain valuable insights from customers while ensuring that their personal information is protected.
What are Traditional Surveys?
Traditional surveys involve collecting data through paper or phone-based questionnaires. While this method has been around for decades and additionally used for longitudinal studies. It can be time-consuming and expensive. It often requires a team of people to manually collect and collate responses, which can take weeks or even months. Furthermore, response rates can be low, as customers may find it cumbersome to fill out lengthy forms.
In the digital world, a traditional survey could come with an external survey link or a lengthy 19-question survey that becomes cumbersome to fill out. This can lead to abandoned customer feedback forms.
What are the types of traditional surveys?
There are several types of traditional surveys, each with its own unique characteristics and methods of administration. Here are some of the most common types:
Browser based online survey:
This is a web-based platform which administers survey questions via a link. These are redirected into an external browser where customers have to offer survey responses. Additionally, slow connections over web browsers can discourage respondents.
Mail surveys:
Mail surveys are sent by mail to a sample of individuals. They are asked to complete the survey and return it by mail. Mail surveys are often used in academic research or for gathering feedback from customers or clients. They may have lower response rates than other survey methods, as respondents are less likely to complete and return the survey. This method is equally time consuming.
Intercept surveys:
Intercept surveys involve approaching people in public places, such as malls or events, and asking them to complete a survey. Intercept surveys are often used in market research, and may provide a more diverse sample than other survey methods. However, respondents may be more reluctant to participate in an intercept survey, as they are often viewed as an interruption.
Face-to-face surveys:
These surveys have a trained interviewer visiting respondents in person to gather answers for specific questions. Face-to-face interviews are often used in market research, social science research and often while collecting information for census data. This involves detailed and personalized questioning. They are generally more expensive than other survey methods due to the cost of hiring and training interviewers. This method is also immensely time consuming.
Telephone surveys:
Telephone surveys involve calling respondents over the phone and asking them a series of questions. This method is less expensive than face-to-face probing, but may be limited since none of the callers can get any visual aid or comprehend the body language. Telephonic surveys would also include computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) type of probing. In this method, the interviewer will call up respondents to seek feedback. They will read a pre-made questionnaire on the computer during the call.
4 disadvantages of using traditional surveys
While traditional surveys have long been a staple in the world of market research, they are not without their drawbacks.
Lengthy and time consuming:
One of the most significant disadvantages is that traditional surveys can be lengthy and tiresome, leading to low response rates and incomplete customer data. Respondents may find themselves losing interest or becoming bored with the length of the survey. This can mostly happen during longitudinal study that spans over months or decades.
Respondents can get intimidated by a mechanical approach:
Since the questions are very predefined and lengthy in nature, respondents may not be encouraged to respond. The tone of the surveys are very formal in nature which can deter active participants as well.
Low response rates and high feedback churn:
Most time consuming survey methods do not bring a reasonable response rate. While sending email surveys, consumers may not be motivated to reply with their feedback. The intimidating format of questions is also to blame. Low response rates can hamper your business.
This format cannot be distributed among a broad audience:
Opting for traditional surveys can get expensive. Hence organisations may leave out a lot of target respondents off the record. This can create a biased result and incomplete data.
Traditional surveys suffer from providing added nuance or context to the feedback surveys. Hence it may not be too wise to opt for this method in the recent era.
Conclusion
WhatsApp messages are more than just a platform to share personal messages. It should be noted that every consumer has smartphones and there are billions of real time text messages being exchanged on the daily. WhatsApp is one robust messenger application that is compatible across desktop (WhatsApp web), iOS and android. This is all the more reason to opt for collecting customer feedback using a WhatsApp business profile.
To find out how Merren can 10X your response rate, opt for our 14 day free trial here.You can also create instant survey questionnaires using AI survey builder. Use our generative AI to create feedback surveys with a few clicks.
