On 10th March 2022, GreenBook published an article written by FlexMR’s in-house copywriter, Emily James, entitled Making Surveys Human Matters More Than Ever; in this article, Emily discusses the need for insight teams to make their surveys more human, and how they can start to do so effectively.
Surveys play a pivotal part in helping brands understand consumers, but it has become incredibly hard to get consumers to participate in survey research. Humanising survey research is the key to gaining more survey results, and better survey data.
Humanising Surveys
Why should we humanise surveys? Well, this question has arisen due to the increasingly hard nature of getting general consumers to engage in market research. Through the advancement of technology, consumers have become increasingly used to faster service, faster delivery and almost instant gratification with no wait at all. Thus, the time and effort it takes to complete survey research aren’t worth it in the eyes of consumers unless followed with a handsome incentive.
Humanising surveys will help capture and keep the attention of consumers, making the experience engaging and time well spent. To humanise a survey, stakeholders must be aware of the shifted focus during survey creation; taking leave from ‘human experience’ research and customer-centric strategies, the focus when creating a survey must shift from the content and research topic to how the research participants will experience this survey. Emily notes three easy ways to start to humanise surveys:
- Use language to make the survey more accessible (easily understandable) as well as to create a safe space in which participants feel safe to share their more personal experiences.
- Keep surveys short and sweet; longer surveys with many topics will create what is known as ‘survey fatigue’ in participants, and they will more likely drop out rather than complete it all the way to the end.
- Vary the question types used in the survey to keep participants engaged. Using the same question types over again will lead to a repetitive survey that will also cause ‘survey fatigue’.
When implementing new tactics, how do stakeholders know if they’ve been successful? Measuring the success of humanising surveys can feel hard on the face of things, but actually, there are easy indications that can help stakeholders understand if they’ve been successful; for example, the number of completed survey responses should rise, as well as the depth and quality of the answers research participants provide.
To find out more about humanising surveys and to read the full article, visit the GreenBook website here.
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