What is survey toxicity?

Intro

You want your customers to give you feedback. However, you want to ensure you are not over-surveying your customer. One of the main reasons why response rates fall is because, too many times, a company sends multiple surveys to the same person, which becomes noise after some time.

Survey toxicity is a term used in CX measurement that signifies sending too many surveys. When implementing a CX system, you must ensure you don't send too many surveys to the same person.

The rule of 3

1. 1. Do not ask a person to answer one survey more than three times (no more than two reminders)
2. 2.Do not ask one person to complete more than three surveys in three months.
3. 3.Do not send a person who has completed any survey another one for the next three months.

but like all rules, there are expectations of the rule

1. 1. This rule applies to companies that have thousands of customers. If you are a B2B business with fewer customers, you could break the rules 2 and 3 and survey more frequently.
2. 2. For specific customer segments (premium customers, high-net-worth individuals, etc.), reduce the frequency of invite send-out to 1 every three months.

Conclusion

The objective here is to balance getting sufficient responses while not burdening your customers with constant survey invitations that they start to delete habitually.

Start with the rules above, but adjust and experiment to find the balance that gives you the best response rates.

Related guides

For related reading, see How to Design a CX Survey That Customers Actually Complete, When to Ask the NPS Question, and When Not To, Building the Anatomy of a High-Converting Survey: Mixing Close-Ended and Open-Ended Questions, How to Avoid Survey Bias in CX Research, Response Rate vs Completion Rate: What’s the Difference, and What Is a Likert Scale? Types, Examples, and How to Analyze Likert Data.