Customer satisfaction, product optimization, and sales all rely heavily on feedback. It’s difficult to figure out what to improve if you don’t collect customer feedback on your product and services.

Intercept surveys collect user feedback while the product/service is being used to improve the user’s experience. Collecting these responses from users while they are still on the website or app keeps their perception of your product fresh, and they can tell you about it objectively.

What Are Intercept Surveys?

An intercept survey allows you to collect customer feedback as they use your product. This allows you to learn more about your platform visitors’ experiences and opinions about your product, as well as how you can use their feedback to improve their experience.

To avoid distracting users, intercept surveys are typically brief and simple. It can be multi-choice or open-ended questions to understand user experience and gauge satisfaction with your products and services.

Another reason companies conduct intercept surveys is to learn more about their customers by collecting demographic information. Knowing who your target market is will help you determine how to optimize your product to meet their needs and increase revenue.

Types of Intercept Surveys

There are two popular methods for conducting intercept surveys:

1. Pop-ups (Modal Boxes)

A pop-up survey is usually triggered when users perform a specific task, such as adding items to their wishlist or making a purchase. The survey appears on the screen, and users can choose to dismiss it or participate.

2. On-Page Surveys

On-page surveys are widgets that show up on the user’s screen but don’t fill the screen. Users can still access the web page and the survey at the same time.

How Do Intercept Surveys Work?

Here’s a breakdown of how intercept surveys work behind the scenes:

1. Solid Proposal

Before you begin the journey of designing and implementing an intercept survey, you must first prepare a proposal outlining the goals you want to achieve with the survey.

Your  intercept survey proposal should include the following:

• Survey objectives
• Intercept survey method
• Kickoff meeting
• Timeline
• Cost

2. Kickoff Meeting

You have to hold a project kickoff meeting before setting up the survey. This helps you discuss the feasibility of your proposal and develop an action plan to achieve all of your goals.

The kickoff meeting involves all teams involved in designing the intercept survey, such as engineering, design, customer satisfaction, and marketing. 

During the meeting, each team can explain what is missing from the survey and how to fix it. Sharing their timetable for completing their tasks will also help you figure out whether the timetable in your proposal is feasible.

3. Survey Design

After you’ve completed the project kickoff, you’ll need to design the survey. Designing the survey entails creating a list of questions to ask the respondents and scrutinizing them until you are confident that they will achieve the survey’s objectives.

After creating the survey, conduct a soft launch to ensure that users have no problems providing feedback.

Intercept surveys should be more than 3 minutes long; anything longer than that will discourage users from using the product and possibly increase drop-offs.

4. Survey Launch

After designing and testing the survey, the next step is to launch it and begin collecting responses. Using a survey platform like Formplus allows you to see both the completion and drop-off rates.

If your drop-off rates are high, you redesign the survey to better capture the attention of your users.

5. Analytics and Reports

Once you’ve received the needed number of submissions, the next step is to analyze the data.

If your intercept survey contains open-ended questions, it will take you longer to complete than a multi-choice survey. So, for open-ended questions, try reviewing the responses as soon as you get them to keep them.

Your survey reports should include:

• Key takeaways from the feedback
• Infographics, charts, and other visual data reports
• Personas of Respondents
• The results of each question are displayed in a spreadsheet format.

 

Why Use Intercept Surveys?

Intercept survey feedback can help you understand why users visit your website and what they want from your product. While most user experience tools provide data on what customers do on your website and their journey, they rarely explain why.

Intercept surveys enable you to gain a better understanding of your user persona and how to build and improve your products and services to achieve high customer satisfaction levels.

For example, if Hotjar shows that after visitors and on your homepage, they try to sign up next but then leave. Intercept surveys can help you understand why potential customers are leaving the signup page and fix the problem.

Intercept surveys help point you in the right direction regarding what to improve about your product and service while customers are still experiencing it for the first time.

Intercept surveys can also be more effective than traditional surveys because they collect feedback in real-time which helps you respond quickly. They also have a higher response rate than email surveys because customers are more inclined to respond when they are actively using the platform.

Common Uses for Intercept Survey

1. Website and Purchase Satisfaction

Asking your customers to rate their experience after making a purchase is a good time to ask them how they navigated your website and what they would like you to improve.

Customers are more likely to explain the difficulties they encountered accurately when their experience is still fresh. You can then use their submissions to resolve issues, decrease cart abandonment, and increase sales.

2. UX Research 

You can learn how easy your product features are to use if your website content is simple to understand, and how their overall website experience is with intercept surveys.

3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Intercept surveys can also help you determine how willing your customers are to recommend your product to their network.

You’re also more likely to get accurate responses from users because they just used your product and are eager to tell you how they feel about the process of navigating your platform.

6. Newsletter signups

You can also use intercept surveys to build a contact list so that you can notify them about promotions, which will help you re-engage inactive users and increase sales.

Benefits of Intercept Surveys

Intercept surveys enable you to get real-time responses from visitors, which allows you to improve their experience and create better products and services. Here are some of the most significant advantages of intercept surveys:

1. Get Real-time Responses

One significant advantage of using intercept surveys over email surveys is that you receive responses quickly. Intercept surveys also tend to capture respondents’ attention much more easily than email invitations.

The idea behind intercept surveys is to “intercept” visitors and collect their feedback while they are on the page. So, you collect information instantly from users.

Email survey respondents, on the other hand, complete the survey when they are ready.

Accurate user experience feedback improves your chances of optimizing your product to satisfy your customers. Intercept surveys have a much higher chance of producing accurate results than email surveys.

2. Help Build Comprehensive User Personas

If you’re trying to figure out who your customers are, an intercept survey is one of the simplest and quickest ways to gather participant demographics. Intercept surveys enable you to collect demographic information from all visitors, which allows you to effectively understand who your customers are and segment them.

Collecting data from all visitors also means you’re gathering information from a large pool of respondents, which reduces the chances of sampling bias. Email surveys, on the other hand, typically use a contact list of existing users rather than a mix of potential and existing users, increasing the likelihood of biased survey results.

People are also more willing to take intercept surveys than email surveys because of skepticism about phishing scams.

3. More Survey Responses

Intercept surveys allow all visitors to participate. As a result, every web visitor is a potential participant, providing you with a large pool of respondents.

Intercept surveys also eliminate the cost of sourcing for respondents. So, it’s a cost-effective way of reaching a large number of people in a short time.

4. Insigtful Responses

Most participants are people eager to share their experiences, you can be confident that the majority of the responses will be objective and will provide you with insight into how to improve your product and services. 

People who decline to participate in the survey are most likely people who are unmotivated to respond because they have no problem with your product.

5. Non-Intrusive Survey Request

The major issue with intercept surveys in the past has been how intrusive they can be, but the new intercept survey is designed to not disrupt the website visitor experience.

You can also set intercept surveys to appear only when a visitor is at a specific point in their customer journey to avoid disrupting their experience. For example, the intercept survey appears when users add items to their wishlist and return to the homepage.

Cons & Limitations of Intercept Surveys

• Intercept can come as a surprise to users. If users just want to use your product, the survey may feel like an interruption and they may abandon your platform.
• Reviewing intercept surveys can be time-consuming, especially if open-ended questions are included.
• Reviewing questions and noting key takeaways may take some time.

 

How to Conduct Intercept Surveys

 

Simple and Concise

The primary goal of an intercept survey is to collect feedback from website visitors without interfering with their journey. So, it’s important to keep the survey brief and stick to questions about their experience.

A good question range is 2-10 questions so that the survey does not last more than 2 minutes.

Responsive Survey Design

Create your survey to be compatible with all visitor devices, including mobile and web. People are more likely to respond to your survey if the survey design is compatible with their devices and they do not have to struggle to access and complete the survey.

Incentives

Offering respondents incentives motivates them to complete the survey, which gives you a larger sample size and reduces the tendencies of survey bias. 

However, giving incentives that aren’t related to your product isn’t always a good idea. This could change the motivation for responding to the survey to being solely for the reward and not telling you about their experience.

So, when giving incentives, it’s best to give incentives that will encourage respondents to interact with your product. For example, you could offer respondents a subscription discount.

Conclusion

Intercept surveys are a powerful market research tool for collecting responses from all website visitors, even if they aren’t active users yet. They help you optimize your platform’s user experience based on visitor feedback without paying through your nose.

So, if you want to find out what you can do to improve both existing and potential user experiences on your platform, an intercept survey is an excellent solution.