Online Surveys - Too Many to Count

What’s with all the surveys? It seems like every time I surf the web, I am bombarded with requests to participate in surveys – most of them from companies I have never done any business with. It seems like the goal of these surveys is to simply acquire as many responses as possible, without any regard to who responds.

Sometimes I’m motivated by a great site, great service or great product to take the time to give input and complete a survey – when I do, I invariably find that the surveys are too long, and that the questions don’t give me the opportunity to tell the retailer what’s on my mind. Crafting quality surveys is tough.

Recently, I shopped several times at Harry and David to send Christmas presents. Once, when I went back to check shipment status, a survey request appeared, and I took it. Although it was extremely long and time consuming, I was in a patient mood and thought I’d invest the time. Most interesting to me was the long list of choices the company gave me to answer the question “what brought me to their site?”

Turns out, the questionnaire was missing the reason behind my online shopping – specifically, that I received their catalogue, had searched through it looking for food choices that met the varied dietary needs of the recipients, and then went online to purchase gifts. Note to those responsible for online sales: don’t ignore the other lines of your company’s business or you’ll run the risk of incorrect attribution. I entered this feedback manually in a free-text field, though.

For the length of the survey, a “thanks” follow-up with or without a repeat customer incentive would have been a nice gesture and would have brought me back to shop sooner.

Final note: The gifts were well received. I made choices based on “number of recipients in household receiving the gift,” “avoidance of chocolate due to recipient’s allergy,” and “fruit-only with platter for the serious dieter who didn’t need temptation of sweet treats.” It would be great to have some of these search options integrated on the site.