A survey invitation can have a significant impact on the impression you make with your clients when you start a feedback conversation with them. It is a well-kept secret that a good survey invitation will drive better opening and response rates compared to the actual content of the survey itself. It’s simple: Better intro, better results!
Remember not to overestimate your customer when it comes to providing feedback. They are not likely to be interested in what is going on in your company or in answering your surveys. Limited attention spans and impulsive decision-making mean that it’s difficult to win over someone’s time to answer your feedback requests – regardless of their merit or value. Do not lose the battle on how people use their time and win them over with great intros. Drive conciseness, clarity, personalization, and humanization – and see the difference yourself.
Next, you will find out how to create survey invitations for different customer service channels:
Email invitation survey introduction
Make your email survey invitation stand out. Most of us receive a large chunk of emails daily so you need to make sure you are seen. To make that happen, perfect your email subject line – that is seen first. Then follow up with the message body and embed the first survey question in the email. An additional way to drive attention and responses is to personalize the email invitation including the name of the person receiving it. And what about highlighting your agent in the email invitation? Humanize your message by using the name or picture of your frontline agent.
What is a good survey email invitation subject line?
The more effort you put into your email subject line the better results you will get. The easiest way to drive away potential survey respondents is to include any of these keywords or phrases: “Survey” and “Research”.
In our experience concise questions such as the following work our great:
- How did we do today?
- How did we succeed?
- How was your experience with our customer service?
The more engaging, individual, and relevant the subject line questions to the actual experience of the end customer, the better.
A/B testing showed us that adding the agent name will achieve even better results in terms of open and response rates:
- How was your interaction with Sebastian?
- How helpful was Louis today?
- How did Mary succeed?
What should you include in the body of the email survey invitation?
Expecting your customers to read your long reasonings of why they should give you feedback is doomed to fail. Short messages are powerful because people only spend only a few moments on your message to scan what they are seeing. If it is long, trite, and full of text it will go unnoticed.
Bad examples can be found below:
- Dear customer, we want to develop our operations and your feedback is important to us…
- It only takes 5 min to respond to the survey…
- The survey is open until December…
Sometimes there might be policy and other mandatory aspects that must be included in the message. In that case, distribute the content carefully. The very bottom – small print – is usually a good place for those who want to read it. Additionally, it is smart to include some of that content in the survey thank you page.
Here is an example of a great email survey introduction:
Compare the above with a more traditional and lengthier example of a survey email invitation below. We bet you notice the difference.
What SMS survey invitations work best?
Customer service via phone is very common. The most effective way to measure the experience is to send an SMS survey invitation right after hanging up. The SMS format has its restrictions on the number of characters which leads to shortened text communication. This works to your advantage. As discussed, shorter messages work out better and the case verdict is the same for SMS. Through A/B testing, we discovered that messages with less than 80 characters outperform the ones with 120 characters. See the example below:
You can try it out for yourself. Produce two different example messages for your SMS survey invitation. Test which one works better. You will quickly notice that shorter messages will get more clicks and feedback responses. Personalizing and humanizing the message is also powerful. This can be done easily by using background information (metadata) that is projected in the SMS message.
How do you introduce a chat survey?
When it comes to surveys after chat interactions, the best invitation is no invitation at all.
When either the customer or the service agent ends the chat, it is good to ask for feedback right away with a quick question. That is enough of an introduction:
Based on the service you received today, could you tell us how we did?
The perfect situation is that the feedback conversation takes place in the chat window or widget itself. You can also project the survey automatically as a pop-up. If the above is not possible, and a survey link is necessary – then we recommend doing a small survey introduction.
Social media survey introductions
Social media is a different world, or is it? With surveys, just continue the conversation. No intros and invitations are needed, just ask directly:
Would you recommend our service based on this interaction (on a scale 0 – 10)
Survey intros for your support pages
The self-support channel is also a great place to ask for customer feedback. As with chat and social media, skip the intro and invitation – and go ahead and ask directly:
