How to Increase Survey Response Rates with Image Answer Options

Ever considered using answer image options to boost your survey response rates?

A successful customer feedback strategy is the backbone of the customer experience. If you’re looking to create a customer-centric organization, engage with your clients, and grow your business, asking for feedback across different touchpoints of the customer journey is a no-brainer.

When it comes to customer feedback, however, the challenging part is that on average only one in four respondents will describe their experience using more than two or three words. This doesn’t mean that your customers don’t want to share their opinions with you. It only means that providing open feedback is considered by many a hassle. To make sure that your efforts at capturing feedback produce reliable data, it’s worth considering simplifying the survey response experience to make it easy and fast for your respondents to answer your questions.

What is the survey experience and why is it so important?

The survey experience refers to all the steps taken to optimize the survey process so that your respondents find it appealing and you end up with useful data.

We’ve all heard it: “Surveys are boring!” They don’t have to be – the time of the dull questionnaire is over.

You can design your customer surveys in such a way that they deliver an engaging, effective and hassle-free experience from start to finish.

As a general rule, the better the survey experiences the higher the response rates. Increased response rates will help you get data that is:  

• Accurate
• Reliable
• Actionable   

How to design an elevated survey experience  

A great survey experience should instigate a conversation your customers are comfortable having. By this, we don’t mean that you should shy away from the questions that really matter to your business. We rather mean that you should allow your respondents to provide answers in an easy and straightforward manner. Let’s take a closer look at the elements that can help you take your surveys to the next level.

Survey introduction

It would be very awkward if you asked someone to give you feedback without providing them with some contextual information before they take a survey. A short and concise survey introduction will allow you to do just that, draw respondents attention, and make a great first impression.

Survey structure

To ensure that your survey structure resonates with your respondents and compliments their response experience, you should start by clearly defining the touchpoint for which you are requesting feedback. Once you have completed this step, figure out what you consider valuable feedback in relation to this touchpoint.

If for example, the touchpoint for which you want feedback is a customer interaction with your support, think of the aspects of that interaction that you would like to know more about. Depending on your business, these aspects might be:

• Resolution speed
• Agent knowledge
• Agent friendliness
• Overall satisfaction

It is important to do this because the information you are looking for will act as a guide to help you build survey questions and answer options that are clear, simple, and effortless. In that regard, the more effortless the survey experience, the more likely you are to get complete responses.

Add a visual touch to your surveys

Your main goal should be to deliver a pleasant survey experience and encourage your respondents to give you feedback. The easiest way to go about that is to replace texts with visual elements such as images, smileys, icons, etc.  The applications for this approach can practically be limitless. Additionally, your surveys will stand out and you will be providing your respondents with a fun, engaging way to give feedback.

In the following paragraphs, we will explore what is one of the best ways to boost the survey experience with visual elements, and pre-selected image answer options.

What are image answer options, anyway?

Ever heard of that old saying “An image is worth a thousand words”? That old saying is still valid, and it has a perfect application in the world of online experience surveys.

Creating image answer options will allow your respondents to provide feedback on the different aspects of their overall experience in a matter of seconds and with very little effort.

An additional benefit of using pre-defined image answer options in your cx surveys is the fact that they make data analysis and reporting much more illustrative and easy to understand. A simple glance at data resulting from answer options is enough to discern the reasons that drive customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

How to create a survey with pre-defined image answer options

Here’s an example of a survey with pre-defined answer options. Let’s imagine the objective is to measure the customer experience in a café. Here are the steps to follow.

Determine the quality of the overall experience

First of all, you need to gauge the visitor’s overall experience at the café. This will allow the respondent to express how they experienced their visit with just one click:  

Determine what affected the customer’s perception of the experience

To gain a better understanding of the respondents’ answers to the first question, break down the overall experience and approach it from two different perspectives. If the visitor indicated that they had a very positive experience, like in our example, what do you think might be the reasons that led them to perceive it as such? Based on this, your second question should look something like this:

If the respondent had indicated they had a bad experience, your second question should have been structured in such a way as to understand the reasons why the experience was negative.

Determine other factors that might have affected how the experience was perceived

Finally, give your respondent the opportunity to provide open feedback if they wish to do so. Open feedback is valuable and might give you critical insights about the customer experience that you failed to take under consideration, to begin with. The key takeaway here is that asking for open feedback should be a complementary step in your survey and not your go-to option. Based on this, the last question of your café experience survey can look something like this:

Here is another example of an experience survey gauging customer sentiment about their in-flight experience.  

Start by asking the customer to rate their overall experience:

Design the second question to help you understand which aspects of the service impacted the respondent’s rating on their overall experience: