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How Conversational Forms Can Increase Survey Response Rates

Kate Williams

26 October 2023

11 min read

Increase survey response rates by implementing effective strategies and leveraging the power of conversational forms. Surveys play a pivotal role in gathering valuable insights.

However, getting a high response rate has always been a challenge. If you’ve struggled with this issue, you’re not alone. But fear not; there are actionable ways to boost your survey response rates significantly.

Let’s consider a scenario.

Company A excels with its product, offering round-the-clock customer support and promptly addressing every customer query.

In contrast, despite its outstanding product, Company B falls short in customer support. Their team takes 1-2 days to respond to customer queries, hindering seamless service.

If we ask you which company you’d prefer to do business with, chances are you’d pick the former one. A successful business depends on its customers. You must prioritize them and listen attentively to their queries, orders, and complaints.

That’s why a growing number of businesses are rethinking the use of traditional forms and adopting conversational forms to gather customer queries. The reason?

Traditional forms are too formal!

While the conversational form will provide a chat-like experience through images, videos, gifs, emojis, and much more.

With conversational forms when you survey every customer using a conversational survey, your customers will save a lot of time from filing a dull form that takes days to get a reply.

More and more businesses are embracing conversational forms, as they bring very high survey response rates and survey completion rates. And that’s precisely what we’re going to cover here. We’ll discuss conversational forms, how they can increase survey response rates, and more. So, with no further ado, grab your coffee, and let’s jump right in.

What Is Conversational Form?

Conversational forms, the future of interactive forms– can transform your traditional web forms into a delightful conversation. You’ve heard of rule-oriented chatbots.

Well, conversational forms are similar to that. But it’s a lot different from an AI chatbot. It doesn’t use Machine Learning or NLP to interact with respondents. However, that doesn’t make them less intelligent than the AI chatbots.

They learn from user responses and collect valuable data through interactive conversations.

Simply put, a conversational form is a tool that transforms boring information into an engaging one. Be it a customer complaints form, order form, or registration form, conversational forms interact with their users in a natural human-like approach, making them so special.

Unlike static web forms or traditional surveys, conversational forms take one question at a time and present the next question based on the previous answer.

For this reason, conversational forms can create a better connection with the user. In short, it helps businesses provide a chat-like experience and get more natural with the customers.

Let’s say your customer wants to order something or is trying to contact your customer support team online. And they have to fill out a long, tedious form to submit their order or request. Can you imagine how irritating it is?

With a conversational form, you can save your customers from this irritation. As per a study, 86% of customers would instead use a chatbot than fill out a form on a website. It is much easier to get customers to take the survey and get enough responses when it is in the chatbot format.

People prefer to interact with businesses through chats and messages because it’s much easier to access them. So,  if you’re using conversational forms it will help you build a personalized relationship with your customers in real-time. That’s massive.

How Do Conversational Forms Work?

The chat-like experience of conversational forms can increase your survey response rates massively. A conversational form works just like a traditional survey. You will come up with some questions to ask or a set of metrics to measure your customers. Once you’re all set with the questions and metrics, you can use a conversational form builder to add questions. Now, based on your customers’ responses, these forms will respond and ask further questions to the users.

Conversational forms

To create intuitive conversational forms using SurveySparrow, you can sign up here for free.

How Can Conversational Forms Can Increase Survey Response Rates?

Now that you know the basics about conversational form, here are a few ways it can help build better relationships with customers and increase response rates:

Build Trust With Your Customers

Rachel was nervous about meeting Steve. First dates are always nerve-wracking! You don’t know what to expect, what to ask, and how your date will be!

“Hey! How are you?” Rachel walks up to Steve and says hello.

“Hey, Rachel! I’m good. Where do you work, and how much do you earn?”

Rachel was shocked to hear this question. She’s now thinking, “How can a person, who I’ve just met, ask about her earnings?! Doesn’t he know how to talk!?

You might be thinking, why are we sharing this out of the blue?

Well, that’s because it has a deep connection with surveys. While conversing with others, you can’t ask too many personal questions right at the beginning. You have to wait before asking personal questions.

Similarly, in a survey, you can’t start asking sensitive or personal questions to your customers right at the beginning.

You must build a sense of trust with them first and keep these personal questions for the last. Without breaking the ice, you’ll have a tough time completing a survey.

The purpose of any form is to collect information from the users. If the form is boring and doesn’t care to initiate a conversation with the respondent, there’s a big chance they’ll leave it halfway.

An engaging conversation can assure your customer that their information is in safe hands and will not be misused. So, while asking questions, you must remember surveys are not an interrogation; it’s a conversation!

Unlike a traditional form, conversational forms provide a human touch to your brand.

Before asking for sensitive information, you can design the conversational form with background information and respond accordingly. Also, the friendly, informal tone gives a pleasant experience to the customer, and they can enjoy completing the survey without any issues.

Provide Decision Support with Conversational Forms

Imagine this. You start filling a web form field by field. Each field is a box with some text below to guide you. After putting all the required information, your contact number, mail id, you hit the submit button. But, it takes you nowhere.

So, you scroll back to find out that you’ve made a few errors. You have to correct these errors first and try submitting the form again. This process is so long and painful!

With conversational forms, you get decision support at each stage of the online survey journey. The responses given by your customers are validated at each stage. This way, they can avoid the irritation of not submitting a survey without correcting the error.

Conversational forms let your customers answer one question at a time, with media descriptions and options. It’s a much more smooth and engaging option for the customer. As a result, they never leave the survey or the form without reaching the end of it.

Smarter Design+ Sleek Interface = Better Customer Experience

Do you know why businesses are turning to chatbots, online survey tools, and conversational forms? Because they provide smart design and sleek interface that you won’t see on web forms.

Humans get attracted to beautiful things, and surveys are no different.

41% of people stated that they like simple website design, while 59% prefer something stunning. So, if you want to increase your survey responses, you have to provide them with a top-notch user experience.

This is where conversational forms can help you. Conversational forms provide tailored and more engaging experiences than traditional forms. Its user-friendly interface chat format makes the survey experience smooth.

From the background button to survey question types, you can customize almost anything with it. Also, conversational forms ask users to fill the form, stage by stage, which helps grab their engagement until the very end.

The interface of these forms is similar to different messenger apps like WhatsApp and Facebook. In 2019, SMS open rates were 98% higher, compared to 20% of emails.

The trend of chats, messenger, and SMS never stopped growing after that. Even in recent days, people spend more time reading chats on social media than checking their emails. So, we can say a smart UI makes conversational forms a powerful way to increase survey response rates rapidly.

Personalized Conversation

From Spotify to Amazon, brand personalization has become one of the most crucial parts of every famous brand. Just like these giants, people expect personalized services from even small to medium businesses. According to Forbes magazine:

  • 74% of customers feel dissatisfied when website content is not personalized.
  • 80% of customers will purchase from a company that provides a personalized experience.
  • 72% of customers agreed they only like to engage with personalized messaging.
  • 63% of consumers said they’ll stop purchasing from brands with poor personalized techniques.

These statistics prove that personalization is crucial to maintaining your brand voice. Your customers care for your brand authority. When you personalize their expectations, it creates a bond of trust.

Conversational forms allow you to maintain and expand this brand authority. You can customize every form per your brand’s image, including logo, fonts, and color.

More importantly, you can even give a personalized avatar to your conversational form to give it a breath of fresh air.

No Need For CAPTCHA

Also, one of the most annoying parts of filling a web form is probably CAPTCHA! We are sure you have come across this CAPTCHA probably thousands of times.

And no matter how much time you waste to understand whether the warped figure was B, x, or D, it always remains annoying!

Here are some more reasons why CAPTCHAs are so annoying:

  • CAPTCHA offers a poor user experience to people with difficulties in image identification.
  • They are time-consuming and challenging. Sometimes, users leave websites without filling out a CAPTCHA.
  • In terms of security, CAPTCHAs are not entirely safe. With the advancement of technology, there are some CAPTCHA-solving software and tools available to hackers today. Attackers can solve CAPTCHA challenges through APIs, browser plugins, and extensions.

We understand how painfully difficult it is to read a CAPTCHA in web forms. But, with conversational forms, you just don’t have to worry about it anymore. Happy?

What’s The Future Of Conversational Form?

Conversational AI, forms, and chatbots are rapidly growing as mainstream for businesses. The year 2020 was filled with challenges; because of the devastating pandemic events and rise in remote work.

Companies leveraged different technologies to adapt to this situation. And as companies are expanding their businesses with the help of conversational AI, forms, and chatbots, it looks like AI will thrive in the upcoming years.

As per a report, AI will boost 95% of customer interaction by 2025.

So, here are some of the conversational form trends you can expect in the upcoming years and even beyond:

No-code Platforms

It’s challenging to develop changes in software products with coding. Coding for product development can be time-consuming and challenging. As the use of conversational forms and chatbots are rising, organizations are seeking no-code platforms.

With such platforms customizing engaging forms, bots are just one click away.

Gartner predicted that by 2024, 75% of large organizations would use at least four no-code or low-code tools for citizen development and IT development initiatives.

With no-code platforms, enterprises don’t need any programming knowledge, so there’s no doubt it will help organizations be more agile and effective in the future.

Personalization

Conversational forms will be more personalized and contextual in the upcoming years than ever. People will seek a human touch from businesses, and personalized bots, forms are the way to give that human connection.

The conversation AI bots will have the power to ‘wow’ their users by remembering past dialogues, user preferences, and context. By 2025, the emerging market of conversational AI is expected to reach USD 1.3 billion.

Voice-enabled Assistants

Voice technology started to emerge with the arrival of Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa. Years later, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the rapid growth of voice-based technologies. As per a study, 77% of customers expected increased dependence on voice-based technologies. Giant companies like Amazon and Google will continue to fuel this trend in the upcoming years as well. The high demand for voice-enabled services will impact conversational forms, chatbots, and the gaming industry, among all others.

Augmented Reality

In the years to come, you can expect the growth of augmented reality in customer-centric chatbots and conversational forms. Adding AR in states and bots will open a new opportunity to communicate with customers about their product purchases, queries, and complaints. In short, it will add a new level to increase customer shopping experience.

AR is still a new term for mobile and web users; getting accustomed to its usage will take time. But recently, organizations like L’Oréal, IKEA, and Amazon are experimenting with the potential of AR technology and its adaptability.

L’Oréal has launched a device called Magic Mirror using AR, which will help you look in a real mirror and try on different makeup. Brands can use AR in apps to guide a customer in their purchasing journey, and that’s simply incredible.

Smart Tips To Choose The Right Conversational Forms Software:

These trends in conversational AI, forms, and bots will rule the market in the future.

Because of the increased artificial intelligence, businesses must adopt a platform to communicate with their customers conversationally. But how to choose the right platform to meet all your business goals? Well, here are a few tips:

  • Knowing why you’re using a conversational form to communicate with your customers is important. Define your goals at the beginning. Address your customers’ preferences and expectations. Do they prefer to share by email?
  • Do they visit your site through mobile? You have to think like a customer to understand what they want.
  • Decide the type and level of customer experience you want to deliver…
  • Now that you know what your customers want, shortlist all the features you’re looking for in new conversational forms software. Ask yourself, “Can I personalize the software?” “Is it mobile-friendly?” “Can I integrate with other tools?” etc.
  • Lastly, test the software based on customer experience, customer service, sales, customer success, and marketing. You can ask your customers about the effectiveness of the new conversational form software. In short, don’t make decisions in haste, especially when it can greatly impact your overall business.

Creating Conversational Forms With SurveySparrow

SurveySparrow is an online survey builder that can help you create forms and surveys. With SurveySparrowsm’s conversational form, you can easily build engaging, personalized forms to engage with your customers and get higher responses.

In these conversational forms, you can add questions, quizzes, order forms, surveys, polls, NPS surveys- you name it, we have it! Let’s take a glance at all the powerful features of SurveySparrow’s conversational form:

Smart Design

Creating smart conversational survey forms is not a hassle. With its chat interface, you can add color to dull survey questions and grab audiences’ attention till the end. You can aim for perfection with CSS customization. SurveySparrow also provides myriads of beautiful themes to make the form-making process breezy.

Most importantly, the mobile-friendly survey feature lets you take surveys from the comfort of your home. Multi-device compatibility and conversational UI are both ideal for engaging respondents for more data collection.

Data Security

Security is a top priority when it comes to sharing crucial and personal information. SurveySparrow understands that. In 2020, nearly 22% of small businesses faced security breaches.

That’s why SurveySparrow designed their conversational forms with data encryption. You can use custom SSL to guard your custom domain URL over the internet, with domain white-labelling, to give the customers a sense of security. SurveySparrow lets you manage payment transactions securely with stripe integration and data encryption.

Logic Branching And Personalization

Earlier in this blog, we discussed how personalization can improve survey response rates. SurveySparrow’s conversational forms help you with that.

You can customize the conversational form with the brand’s logo, fonts, and color to get more responses. Using skip logic, your respondents can skip irrelevant questions and answer only the important ones.

Other features like display logic, custom params, question piping, and contact param save respondents from boredom.

Here’s a heads up: Never forget to include multiple thank-you pages in your conversational form. You can use it depending on an expression, score, or simply for completing the survey. Using a thank-you page will surely increase the response rates.

Insightful Data

With SurveySparrow’s online survey tool, you can get insightful reports sturdy filters in real-time. 95% of the business decisions are driven by rich data. With a conversational form, you can capture valuable customer data the moment they hit the submit button. With features like cross-tabulation advanced report filters, you can sort the responses to understand your customers better. Another great feature of conversational forms is the constant sum. You can get numeric value, quantifiable data through constant sum to know what your customer prefers and expects from your brand. Impressed yet?

That’s All, Folks!

We’ve compiled almost everything you need to know about how conversational forms can increase survey responses. A conversational form can provide a better experience for your customers. The experience will be more personal and tailored than traditional forms. With a sleeker interface and chat format, answering questions will be a walk in the park! Remember, you only need to keep the questions crisp and short.

So, go ahead and start creating your very own conversational form today, share it on your social media channels, embed it to your blog, and don’t forget to let us know about it.

Adiós!

Kate Williams

Content Marketer at SurveySparrow

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