People, as a rule, don’t like change. Our brains simply aren’t wired for it. Maybe that’s why so many of us cling to the old fashioned ways of doing market research. Ho Hum. Not only is it boring, but it doesn’t always work as well as it used to. Let’s change things up a bit.
The standard model of doing customer research is a one-way communication model; marketers determine the conversation and ask the question and the customer is supposed to answer. Then, like Gollum in The Lord of The Rings, we take our “Precious” data and retreat into our cave of an office.
Try These 5 Creative Customer Survey Ideas
1. Get Your Answers Questioned: Instead of asking your customer questions, make a list of what you think you know about your company, your brand, your products and service, and your customers. Then create fun surveys around those. For example, you can create a survey theme around “How well do we know you?” And then make a list of things you think you know about your customers and have them rate how well you know them.
2. Storyboard your surveys: Aren’t you tired of creating surveys that are so serious?! Why not give them some entertainment value — set the stage for your respondent and take them through a sort of create your own adventure. Here’s how:
- Create a flow chart of your survey – with the raw, basic questions.
- Then create a contextual story for your respondent “Imagine that you’re going on the vacation of a lifetime…”
- Create all of your questions inside the context of the adventure.
Sure — it will take longer – but think about how fun it would be — and of course, keep it short.
3. Use images — lots of them: QuestionPro gives you the ability to upload images – use it. You can create wonderful custom images using tools like Canva or PicMonkey.
4. Use video questions: You already know that video is hot hot hot! So why not use video questions? QuestionPro has a video question option. Just add a question and choose the tab that says “Video”. Again, this will take a little time, but have fun with it. Create super short video questions — think Jeopardy style — HOW FUN IS THAT?
5. Change up the rating scales: The average respondent spends 4 seconds reading a question and 1 second providing a rating on the standard Likert scale. On any given 5 point scale question, you’re going to get an average answer between 2.5 and 3.5 — meaningless. Your goal should be to have your respondents spend more quality time thinking about their answer and not just blowing through the questions. Change up the rating scales by using faces, or other images. QuestionPro gives you the ability to upload a variety of images as question answers – so you can do fun stuff like use emoji’s as part of your rating scale. Another fun thing to do is move away from the standard “agree – disagree” phrasing and use other words such as “Rocks – Sucks”. The key is to change it up so that it disrupts the respondents expectations and increases response.
There you go — stop being boring and try these creative survey ideas to increase engagement and actually bring a smile to your respondents’ faces.
