Focusing on increasing your survey response rate is important but I’m often asked: “what is a minimum acceptable survey response rate for a customer feedback survey: 1%, 15%, 50%?”. This question also comes in the form: what is the statistically valid response rate?

For example this recent blog post comment:

…if I have two NPS of two different cinemas in January.
Cinema 1: Spectators: 18509. Survey responses: 17. Responses percent: 0,1%. NPS: 76.
Cinema 2: Spectators: 44190. Survey responses: 200. Responses percent: 0,5%. NPS: 43.

My first question is: Can I do a valid comparison between the two cinemas?
And my second question is: [are the survey response rates statistically valid?]

These are good questions but unfortunately the answer is not a single response rate but a range depending on what you are trying to determine.

In this post we’ll discover that what is important is not so much the response rate, but but the total number of responses. Then we’ll use that information to calculate the acceptable response rate for your survey.

Note: The approach here works well for standard customer feedback surveys but if you are using Net Promoter Score you need to look at this post: How to calculate Margin of Error and other stats for NPS®

There is a lot of content in this post so here are some quick links to key parts:

1. How do you Calculate Survey Response Rate
2. What is a good Survey Response rate
3. What is a good NPS response rate
4. Statistically Valid Response Rates
5. What is an Acceptable Response Rate
6. Calculating an Acceptable Survey Response Rate
7. Low Survey Response Rates are not Always Bad
8. Other Considerations

Let’s dive in. [Read more…]

Adam Ramshaw

Adam Ramshaw has been helping companies to improve their Net Promoter® and Customer Feedback systems for more than 15 years. He is on a mission to stamp out ineffective processes and bad surveys.