8 Best Practice Tips for Beating Survey Fatigue with Video (Sponsored Post)

Data makes the world go round – so it’s no wonder that survey fatigue is a phenomenon plaguing customer experience teams across the globe. Surveys in their various forms help brands and businesses find out what they can do to improve customer experiences. But lengthy surveys full of inadvertently unhelpful questions mean that, before you know it, all of your respondents have dropped off at question 26 and you’re left with incomplete, inaccurate data. Thankfully, there is something that organizations can do to beat survey fatigue.

There’s no better way to truly understand your customers’ feelings and experiences than through incorporating video feedback into your customer experience survey. In capturing rich, video-based responses from their customers, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of what really makes or breaks an experience, bring issues to life, and drive action to make improvements. By building strong, targeted surveys, and incorporating video response to enhance your insights, you’ll keep customers engaged and get the most accurate and useful data possible.

Using video intelligence platforms to capture customer experience insights is, however, a new frontier. But using video feedback to beat survey fatigue is far easier than you might think. Here are eight best practice tips for incorporating video questions in your customer experience feedback surveys to help you beat survey fatigue.

1. Be upfront

Imagine you’re eating at a restaurant and suddenly the manager comes over with a camera, points it at you, and asks how the meal is. Would you feel happy to respond? How about if they asked you at the start of the meal if you would be willing to share your thoughts on camera? Chances are, you’d be more open to the idea. The same principle applies to putting video questions in customer surveys. Let respondents know at the earliest opportunity that you’ll ask them to record a video, and explain how the video will be used. This lets your respondent prepare for the video question, increasing the chances that they will take part.

2. Give options

Maybe the respondent is filling out the survey on the bus, or maybe they just woke up and don’t feel presentable enough to be on camera. It’s a good idea to provide people with the option to opt out of a video question at the point of collection, as making it mandatory could mean that some respondents abandon the survey completely, and you risk losing the rest of the survey data.

3. Start with video

It’s quite simple – putting your video question at the front of your survey means that you’re more likely to gather the richest insights way before survey fatigue kicks in.

4. What’s the data story?

The point of using video questions in your customer experience survey is to bring customer insight to life. Think carefully about the data that you’re trying to collect, the story you’re trying to tell, and make your questions relevant and easy to respond to. If you think you already know the answer to the question, video responses will likely be ineffective at giving you any new insights.

5. Be specific, but not too specific

Ask open questions about specific elements of the customer experience and avoid closed questions that will produce ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. Instead, encourage customers to discuss their feelings. For example, ask what could be improved about a particular experience, or what they most enjoyed about it. This will produce a video result which can be analyzed fully for the most valuable and actionable insights.

6. Rule out repetition

Think carefully about your survey logic, and direct specific video questions to respondents based on earlier responses. This will help to give more detail while making sure your respondents don’t feel like they’re repeating themselves. For example, a positive response to a question presents a great opportunity to direct to a video question to find out more about why they felt that way.

7. Incentives still work

You wouldn’t ask customers to come to a focus group without providing an incentive, so think of video response in a survey in a similar way. Qualitative responses like video responses require added time from your respondents, so an incentive goes a long way to make sure they spend a few minutes giving you valuable insights. Monetary incentives such as gift certificates, products, or sweepstake entries are a surefire way to get video responses, but you could also consider incentivization in other ways. For example, you could send a personalized thank you, promise to share the survey results, or report back on actions taken as a result of the survey. As an added bonus, including video from a senior representative thanking respondents in advance for their time will significantly increase your video response rate.

8. Close the loop

In addition to providing an incredibly rich data source, video responses are excellent for helping customer experience teams close the loop and respond directly to customer concerns. Utilizing a video intelligence platform means that your customer experience teams can analyze not only speech, but emotion, objects, and context, meaning you can extract deep insights quickly and flexibly in a way that written text simply doesn’t allow.

According to Cisco, in 2020 there will be close to 1 million minutes of video crossing the internet per second. Long gone are the days where video was only for creators and brands. With social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram normalizing consumers creating and sharing video, it’s widely accepted that user-generated video is set to redefine the way we communicate not just with each other, but with businesses too. Harnessing the power of user-generated video is the obvious next step for customer experience surveys. For organizations leveraging video in this way, there’s huge untapped potential to engage with customers in a more personal way, generate more meaningful survey responses, increase completion rates, and ultimately humanize feedback to make a real impact and inspire action.

Want to learn more about how video questions can help bring your customer experience program to life? Book a demo with the LivingLens team today.

About the Author: Brett Henderson leads the cross-territory Customer Success team at LivingLens. With over 20 years of experience in the market research, software development and CX industries, he’s developed a deep understanding of client objectives and priorities, ensuring LivingLens’ customers and respondents have a great experience using the LivingLens platform.