Is In-app Survey the right way to go?

A common practise across all organisations is the in-app survey to capture user sentiment and brand value. The intention behind this is simple — Quality change based on customer feedback

While this sounds pretty straightforward, I am afraid it isn’t.

Let’s start with why I have a problem with this trend. First of all, working closely with survey tools, I have realised that using the right survey at the right time and in the right place can do wonders for your website or App. On the contrary, following industry standards without proper plan and management only leads to umpteen number of surveys at random places hampering user experience and giving your organisation more reason to worry about. So why is In-App Survey debatable? Well, surveying customers in the App after a transaction may be a good idea but personally it offers a lot of drawbacks too.

1. Brand Loyalty or Transaction Loyalty — what are you really after?

Let’s say a user lands on the App, uses a service / makes a transaction and is asked to fill a survey that randomly pops out of nowhere — how your customers feel about you in the moment they are using your service is one way to measure. But it’s a skewed measure. Whatever they rate your service is based on this one interaction that they had — good or bad. How the customers feel about you a few days or weeks later, in the perceived privacy of their own email inbox might be a lot different. And a lot more honest.

An email NPS survey can measure how they feel about your brand in overall…not just a single interaction with it. Measuring brand loyalty is much more important and a far stronger predictive measurement than transaction loyalty

2. In-App Surveys are too intrusive

How would you feel if a survey interrupts your normal workflow? Wouldn’t that be frustrating? Imagine going through the process of making payment online and being interrupted just because an organisation is interested in knowing how your experience of payment was, even before you have finished it! That’s certainly a bad experience and probably no.1 way of losing customers.

When a user is in the app, they are trying to either address a problem or do something specific.Why would you want to get in the way of that? It only adds to higher rates of dismissal. Moreover, frustrated users will just rate anything just to ensure that the survey window closes. How is that going to benefit our scores or our goal in fact?

3. In-App Surveys or Email NPS?

I know that Email NPS has much lower rates of response but the idea here is : If I go to my inbox and make the effort to actually rate your product or service — it’s more personal and I am definitely a loyal promoter of your brand and isn’t this what we strive to achieve by this exercise? Email NPS may not be a very popular opinion but it certainly is a true representation of interest in any brand. Quality over Quantity

In conclusion, the idea behind a survey shouldn’t be to get that perfect NPS Score, but it should be to grow business, improve customer relationship and make changes for the better. However, all this seems to be lost in the mad race to achieve greater NPS score without focusing much on customer experience. Times have to change and so does the way we are setting the so called “industry standards”.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +414,678 people.

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