feedback - How to convince a user to fill out a survey

I am working on a project that provides a service (landscaping) to members of the community. When the work for that client is finished we always encourage the client to go to our website to fill out a survey to review the work that we have done.

The problem that we have been having is simply that we are only getting around 20% of the customers to fill out a survey, and only about 10% of those have anything useful on them.

In the past we have tried to convince customers to give use feedback on these surveys by offering a sort of e-coupon sent to their email. This only generated about 20% more surveys with only 5% being useful and the rest being something like "Good service guys".

My question is, how do I convince customers to fill out our surveys, and fill them out with useful comments? Do we need to offer a coupon again, but only for "useful" surveys (how do you judge something like that)? Or should we offer a certain % off their final payment? Or are there others ways of convincing a customer to fill one out?

Answer

Are you asking users to fill in text boxes and write long narratives? If so, this is a high commitment task. Instead, make answering your survey a low commitment task by:

1. Shortening the length of the survey overall--could you limit it to one or two questions, varying questions by user? This would increase participation overall and you could still get all of your questions answered.


2. Making each question quick and easy to answer--instead of asking users to describe something, give them a description and ask them to agree/disagree on a Likert scale (e.g., 1 = totally disagree, 5 = totally agree).


3. Providing an optional open field at the end (e.g., Anything else we should know?) for freeform answers.