What impacts your survey response rate?
Survey response rate varies dramatically from member to member, but at present we average a little over 70% for all of our surveying for all of our members.
Many of our members enjoy response rates above 90% response rate, very few have below 50%. Why such a big difference from member to member?
1) Good Customer Contact Information. The biggest contributor to a high response rate is the quality of your customer contact information. Wrong numbers and bad emails lead to no response. We lose nearly 10 percentage points on our response rate for lack of good contact information.
2) Customer Satisfaction. Builders and remodelers who have a high recommendation rate have customers who are more eager to talk about their experience. Building professionals that struggle tend to have more non-responsive customers. Many of these non-respondents are simply frustrated. They also recognize that the survey benefits the member more than themselves, so they just don’t respond. This is especially troublesome, because these are precisely the folks you need to hear from in order to improve.
3) Relationships. We have the highest response rates among smaller volume builders and remodelers, where the customer knows the company owner or operator.
One note about the first two points: Good performance in “Communication” correlates strongly with a high Recommendation Rate. If a building professional doesn’t have accurate contact information for their customers, chances are they have trouble communicating with them. Many members can make dramatic gains in enhancing the quality of customer experience they deliver by simply verifying contact information for they customers.