Surveys are a critical part of every store visit. They help your field merchandisers gather valuable info about your customers and get useful feedback on your field interactions (including sales conversations, customer experience, and product displays to name a few).
But more often than not, surveys are a major source of friction for store managers and field merchandisers alike—requiring long lists of multiple-choice questions and a tedious submission process. Yes, even for those who rely on digital survey tools.
The question is: what exactly makes most survey tools a hassle to work with? In this post, we’ll look at three common issues that field merchandisers run into when using survey tools and give you a few tips for improving these questionnaires. Let’s dive in.
Slow, Cumbersome Processes
Surveys are hard to sell. But it should come as no surprise why. Besides demanding respondents’ undivided attention for several minutes, surveys are painfully tedious. They require customers to endlessly select their preferred answer and click through page after page after page of questions, before finally typing multiple fields of personal information into the tool.
So naturally, if you’re going to persuade store managers to take time out of their busy day to respond to a survey, you need to make the process faster, easier, and more enjoyable for them. Here’s how to do that:
- Trim the Fat. Rather than asking hundreds of mediocre questions, try asking one really good one. The fewer questions store managers have to answer, the happier they’ll be to help you out, and the more thoughtful their answers will be.
- Easy Access. You don’t want your field sales reps fumbling around with their tablets when it comes time to send the survey. It’s not a good look, and if there’s a big delay, store managers may need to move on. Instead, make sure your surveys are accessible and sharable with a few clicks.
In doing so, your sales reps will not only be able to save time (for themselves and your customers) during the actual survey, but they’ll also be able to snag valuable insights that can pay rich dividends for your company in the future.
Old-School Options for Survey Distribution
We’ve long since entered the digital age. The bulk of our communication happens online. We buy and sell on eCommerce sites and digital marketplaces. We share our documents in the cloud. We send money electronically. The list goes on and on.
But for many field survey tools, online sharing is either impossible or incredibly limited. As a result, the questionnaire can get bogged down between your merchandisers’ “do you have a few minutes to fill out a survey” question and the beginning of the actual survey.
Luckily, there are newer technologies out there that field merchandisers can take advantage of to get a survey into their customers’ hands quickly. Using QR codes, reps can share questionnaires with customers effortlessly, and store managers can fill out the survey directly from their mobile devices. Customer portals can also make the process easier, by allowing store managers to simply log in to their accounts to provide feedback.
But with the right field merchandising tool, you can send the survey without any extra steps or technology. All you have to do is tap or click a button to send survey links to customers via SMS or Whatsapp, and store managers can open and respond to it directly from their mobile devices.
Lack of Customization for Field Merchandisers
No matter what kind of field survey you’re sending out, you need to be able to customize it to the specific devices, questions, and customers easily. That means you can’t be locked into cookie-cutter survey templates that only your developers can modify.
Unfortunately, most field survey tools don’t come equipped with extensive customization options. As a result, field merchandisers are limited in the questions they can ask and the format they can use. In some cases, this lack of customization can impact the user experience within the survey too.
So how do brands resolve this? Simple. By finding field merchandising tools that are designed to work with any type of survey. That allow for complete drag-and-drop customization and are simple enough for anyone (including those who aren’t “good with technology”) to use.
By making a switch like this, field merchandisers will be able to create personalized surveys faster and start getting high-quality data sooner.
Survey tools are powerful solutions. But not all of them are designed optimally. From cumbersome processes to limited survey distribution options and lack of customization, there are quite a few issues that persist with the technology. And this poses a problem to field merchandisers who are working hard to maintain strong relationships with your customers.
Fortunately, with the right field merchandising tools you can make surveys a truly frictionless experience for your customers and simplify survey taking for your field reps too.
Interested in seeing how you can remove friction from your sales process? Chat with a Field Solutions Expert today.
