Customer Survey Statistics: Everything You Need to Know

All types of businesses leverage customer surveys, and they’re as important for small, growing businesses as they are for established corporations. When you’re creating a customer survey, whether it’s for the first time, or something you do each year, it’s helpful to understand what to expect. What is a good survey response rate? What are best practices for customer surveys? What is the competition encountering?
Customer Survey Statistics

As businesses continue to evolve their customer listening channels as a part of their Integrated CX strategy, one source of feedback will always be around – customer surveys.

All types of businesses leverage customer surveys, and they’re as important for small, growing businesses as they are for established corporations. When you’re creating a customer survey, whether it’s for the first time, or something you do each year, it’s helpful to understand what to expect. What is a good survey response rate? What are best practices for customer surveys? What is the competition encountering?

We’ve collected customer survey statistics to help you understand the customer survey landscape. Whether you send out a standard survey via email or leverage the Net Promoter Score question in-app, knowing some statistics and trends can help you ensure that you get adequate feedback that helps build your business.

Customer Survey Statistics You Need to Know About…

Hearing from Customers

  • The average business hears from 4% of its dissatisfied customers. (Source: “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner via Help Scout)
  • For every customer who complains to a business, 26 other customers don’t voice their feelings. (Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs via Help Scout)
  • 95% of customers share bad experiences with others. (Source: Zendesk)

Asking for Feedback via Customer Surveys Statistics

  • Monday is the best day to get the highest amount of complete email surveys for B2B businesses. (Source: CheckMarket).
  • For B2C companies, there is not a best day to send surveys: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays all lead to a relative high response rates and Thursdays and Sundays can better be avoided. (Source: CheckMarket and SurveyMonkey)
  • The average response rate for email surveys is roughly 24.8%, according to a calculation by FluidSurveys.
  • The average response rate for telephone surveys are in the 8-12% range  (Source: FluidSurveys)
  • Response rates can soar past 85% when the respondent population is motivated and the survey is well-executed. (Source: People Pulse)
  • Response rates can also fall below 2% when the respondent population is less-targeted, when contact information is unreliable, or where there is less incentive or little motivation to respond. (Source: People Pulse)
  • Best practice is to keep your survey as short as possible. Data suggests that if a respondent begins answering a survey, there is a sharp increase in drop-off rate that occurs with each additional question up to 15 questions. (Source: SurveyMonkey)

Responding to Feedback Statistics

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey Statistics & Benchmarks

  • Entelo saw 2x response rate using in-app NPS surveys versus email. For example, when Entelo, a recruiting software, first began to use in-app NPS survey, their response rate quickly jumped from around 24 percent to around 60 percent, before leveling off at about 50 percent. (Source: InMoment)
  • The average American company scores less than +10 NPS, while the highest performing organizations are situated between +50 and +80. (Source: Reichheld via CheckMarket)

Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Learn how to modernize your NPS program for growth and higher loyalty.

  • The top 10 NPS leaders (those with the highest NPS scores) are USAA Insurance (80%), USAA Banking (78%), Costco (78%), Apple – Laptop (76%), Dillards (75%), and Nordstrom (75%). (Source: Customer Guru)
  • Fortune 500 companies such as Delta Air Lines, General Motors, Zappos, Lego, and Procter & Gamble all use NPS to help gauge customer happiness. (Source: Net Promoter System)

Thinking Beyond Customer Surveys

While surveys remain a great way to learn about the experiences you are providing your customers, you are more than likely only hearing from 10% of them.  To understand the other 90% companies are moving to a more integrated feedback signal approach to their customer listening.  With InMoment’s Integrated CX, companies are now able to easily combine, analyze and act on multiple signals (i.e. surveys, phone/chat transcriptions, social, CRM notes, etc..) to improve CX.

WHITE PAPER

The Art and Science of Email Survey Invitations

The problem with your survey response rate may not be the survey itself. In fact, most non-responses are due to people not participating in the survey at all. Hence the question: what is in an invitation?

If you are looking for technical and non-technical solutions to create the ultimate e-mail survey invitation, look no further. Take a step towards higher response rates by downloading the document below!

Download the White Paper

Start measuring Net Promoter Score with InMoment.

Email Targeted Survey Invitation

What do you want a customer experience (CX) survey invitation to do? Besides literally inviting someone, you want your invitation to tell the recipient that they’re valued and will also receive something of value if they accept it. Obviously, not every invitation accomplishes that.

Email survey invitations especially have a hard time convincing the customer to even open the invitation. In fact, it’s common to think that shortening the survey will increase survey response rates, but most non-response is actually due to people never entering the survey at all. 

So how do you send the perfect email survey invitation? Making an invitation as compelling as possible is not so simple. It takes a well-thought out process—and we have one to share with you in today’s post!

How to Send the Perfect Email Survey Invitation:

  1. Get the Survey Invitation to the Customer
  2. Get the Customer to Notice and Open the Email Invitation
  3. Get the Customer to Open the Survey

Tip #1: Get the Survey Invitation to the Customer

The biggest obstacle in getting your survey invitation to the customer is avoiding spam or phishing filters. If your invitation ends up in there, there’s little to no chance for a response. Here are a couple best practices to avoid this issue: 

  • Make sure to send from a reputable IP address
  • Remove any words in the subject line that may trigger those filters
  • Whitelist your domain if possible. 

Of course, with email surveying, there are highly technical strategies that can be done to help. At that top level, hiring a professional would be the most effective route.

Tip #2: Get the Customer to Notice and Open the Email Invitation

This is the step where most non-response occurs in CX measurement programs. Email invitations can get buried in other emails, respondents can mistake them for spam and just delete them, or customers can simply ignore them. 

One way to increase the likelihood of a customer noticing and opening an email invitation is to send it at the right time. But the right time always depends on who you’re trying to reach so it’s important to think about when your customer would most likely check their email.

Tip #3: Get the Customer to Open the Survey

Getting the customer to open the survey is often most influenced by the ease and simplicity of accessing and understanding the survey invitation. Your surveys must be optimized to various devices, especially smartphones, because no one will want to open a survey if the invitation is already difficult to read or display. 

Another useful tactic is to be straightforward in the invitation, telling customers exactly how their feedback will help them improve the company. This way, the customer knows that they are playing an active role in improving their own experience (and also that you’re listening and have a plan in place for how to make change happen).

We hope this introduction to the art and science of email survey invitations was helpful to you, but keep in mind that crafting the perfect invitation is both a nontechnical and technical challenge that goes beyond these three tips.

To learn more, read this white paper that takes a deep dive into the strategies and methods you can utilize to perfect your email survey invitations. 

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