Why Surveys Fail: The Case for In-Depth Customer Interviews

It’s tempting to lean heavily on surveys, they’re quick to deploy, cost-effective, and easy to scale. 

But when it comes to depth of insights, response rates, and high-stakes decisions, surveys often fall short of providing the nuance, breadth, and context required to make confident calls.

Put simply, surveys promise efficiency, but efficiency doesn’t always equal insight.

Beyond that, here are some other problems with surveys:

1. Response rate: have you noticed that many surveys fall into customers’ email void? You may be familiar with the most common pitfall of surveys - low response rates. What use is a survey that no one answers? 
2. Surface-level responses: Finally got some responses? Awesome, now do they get to the heart of what you need to know? Often surveys cover the “what” customers think, but miss the why. 
3. Response bias: Surveys often attract extremes: the very satisfied and the very dissatisfied. This leaves the middle majority, the silent core of a customer base, underrepresented.
4. Context blindness: A checkbox can’t reveal hesitation in a customer’s voice, a pause before answering, or the subtle frustration that comes through when discussing service challenges. Interviews can.
   
5. False sense of security: If you find yourself lucky enough to have a large dataset from surveys, good for you, just be careful: it’s common to create the illusion of precision purely from quantity, but without understanding the story behind the numbers, the insights risk being misleading.
   

The Case for Voice of the Customer Interviews

In-depth customer interviews (called Voice of the Customer Interviews) fill the gaps surveys leave behind:

• Rich qualitative insights:  A well-run interview uncovers the drivers of loyalty, frustration, and churn. Now you’ve got answers that you can take action on. 
• Early warning signals: Subtle cues and quips from conversations human to human often surface risks long before they show up in retention metrics. A good interviewer knows to listen for these signs and probe more when they can. 
• Strategic direction: – The breadth and depth of an interview allows you to gain actionable intelligence. Things like which customer segments are truly at risk, where upsell opportunities exist, and how to refine value propositions show themselves when you allow them the space. 
• Credibility with management teams: We’ve found time and time again that bringing “the customer’s voice” directly into boardroom discussions carries weight that survey percentages can’t.
  

When to Use Surveys vs. Customer Interviews

Surveys still have a place, especially when validating hypotheses at scale, but when deals, decisions, or large outcomes hinge on revenue durability and customer relationships, in-depth interviews deliver clarity that numbers alone can’t.

Ready to have this clarity? We’d be happy to get you started with interviewing your customers, just get in touch and we’ll get you on the road to making more informed decisions. 

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