Survey Benefits & Response Bias

Many market researchers are told that they need to make sure the customer knows how and why the survey will benefit them if they complete it. First and foremost is the incentive, which gives the sample a reason to care about the survey at all.

But sometimes companies also explain why their answers will benefit the company itself, which in turn should benefit the customer. That should, cognitively, get customers to provide a higher response rate to your survey. Yet it’s possible that this may also introduce a problem with your data collection.

Although it may not affect all surveys, it’s possible that how you use language may affect your respondents. The following is an example of what may occur.

Imagine you run a survey about customer service at your retail store. Customer service has always been one of your strengths, and you want to make sure the customers are enjoying the actions you’ve put in place. As with most surveys, your goal is to improve your business, and you create your email with the intention of getting the best response rate possible, hoping to motivate your customers to answer the survey in order to improve their experience.

You send your sample the survey, and you prime it with “your answers will help us improve our customer service, so that we can ensure your needs are met” along with other information. Then you run your survey and you find that you get a weaker response rate than you expected, and lower overall scores than you had hoped. It’s possible, in this hypothetical scenario, that the reason your response rate was lower than expected and the reason the scores given to your satisfaction failed to live up to your expectations is because of the sentence about improving customer service.

It’s possible that customers that already experienced great customer service didn’t feel the need to provide their thoughts, because the survey was about improving customer service – something they didn’t feel needed to be improved.

Of course this is nothing more than a hypothetical and like most research it can be difficult to know exactly the role that language will play in response rate. But it’s yet another example of how delicate a survey can be, and serves as a reminder that even the smallest aspects of a survey can play a role in the outcome.