Many companies aim to be customer-centered, but it’s hard to meet that commitment without mapping out practical ways to make that mentality a reality. Some organizations keep a steady cadence of customer calls or on-site visits. Others run focus groups to get to know their customer—and their customers’ customer. Some hire their customers and integrate their DNA into the company.
At Stripe, we stay user-focused by empowering any employee to reach out to users. That was true when we had over 1,000 developers sign up before our launch, and it’s true today as we support more than 100,000 businesses worldwide. It’s less of a policy and more of an operating philosophy. Online surveys are one of the ways we enable—and encourage—all Stripes to connect with users.
Surveys have long been a channel to get useful customer feedback fast—unlocking user needs, pain points, and motivations in order to build better products and target the right markets. But great surveys are deceptively simple—it’s easy to accidentally create a survey that frustrates users while totally confusing your team and you.
The goal of this guide is to share the main principles Stripe uses to build clear, intuitive, and engaging surveys. This approach has helped us more than triple both our survey response and completion rates. It’s also surfaced insights that have refined product development, improved internal operations, and, most critically, fostered closer ties with our users.
Think of a memorable survey you’ve taken.
If one comes to mind, odds are it’s not because it was praiseworthy! Great surveys, like other first-rate user experiences, reduce friction and fade into the background. It’s the painful surveys—such as one asking about “English proficiency” in English—that people remember. (True story.)
A particularly painful survey question
Great surveys—ones that forge better products and stronger relationships with users—distinguish themselves from the rest in five important ways. They:
The Research team, and all Stripes, refer to a few main principles to build great surveys—ones users love to take, teams love to analyze, companies love to act on, and, just maybe, make the world a better place.
It’s safe to say that close to 0% of your customers proactively visit your website in search of a survey. They’ve got something else in mind: they want to make a purchase, update their subscription, review a dashboard, or learn more about your brand.
If you’re going to put surveys in between people and the tasks they want to accomplish, make their survey experience as painless as possible. They shouldn’t have to think too hard to answer your questions, and they should be able to quickly get back to their tasks at hand. Make their survey experience smooth and increase survey engagement by following a few easy guidelines:
Make surveys about them, not about you. Remind people what’s in it for them when you introduce your survey. Don’t make general requests for feedback and ask, “Help us by taking this survey.” Tell them how their responses will benefit them, whether that’s making a page more useful, getting rid of a bug, or providing better service.
To illustrate this point, let’s say you work at interstellar travel company Rocket Rides. Your goal is to build better experiences for your users, and to do that you need to understand what your users are thinking. But to get them through your entire survey without quitting and checking Twitter, it must be clear and compelling for people (and space aliens alike):