RewardMe Infographic Friday: How To Take Advantage of Receipt Surveys
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- What is Gamification? Definition, Examples & Framework
- Top 10 Marketing Gamification Cases
- Top 10 eCommerce Gamification Examples
- 90+ Gamification Examples & Cases with ROI Stats
- Books by Yu-kai Chou
Prior to mobile surveys and some of the innovative ways of capturing customer data, restaurants and businesses used customer receipts as a way to gather customer data.
⚡ Speed Run Notes
- Receipt surveys are the most cost-effective feedback channel in retail, and most brands treat them as filler. They reach customers at the moment of highest recall, for zero marginal cost. Any brand that doesn't actively read and respond to its receipt survey data is leaving free intelligence on the table.
- Short surveys get answered. Long surveys get ignored. The design is the entire strategy. One question with a free-text box beats ten multiple-choice questions. Customers who bother to answer want to say something specific, and long forms waste their intent.
- The incentive on a receipt survey has to be worth more than the friction of completing it. Tiny discounts don't move the needle. A meaningful reward generates honest feedback. Brands that under-reward get self-selected complaints only.
- Reading the surveys is the actual strategy; collecting them is just the prerequisite. Most brands collect data and never read it. The signal is in the reading. A single manager reviewing 50 surveys a week outperforms a dashboard with 5,000.
- The deepest insight: receipt surveys are a trust test disguised as research. Customers who see their feedback acted on become advocates. Customers who see their feedback ignored become cynics. The brand that actually responds to receipt input compounds loyalty faster than any ad spend can.
While some customers may never stop to even look at their receipts, for those that do, they may find themselves with a free Whopper from Burger King or even a discount code for Old Navy.
Using receipt surveys, businesses are able to capture information on users that have completed a transaction. Unlike surveys that might poll consumers and customers who may never have purchased anything, receipt surveys guarantee that the customer has spent money with them.
For a business, the data and feedback that the user leaves behind is equal if not more valuable than the “perks” and free products that they give away. This reward mechanic taps into Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. Customers feel recognized and rewarded for completing a defined action. The element of surprise in what reward customers might receive also activates Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity. This makes the survey completion feel engaging rather than routine.
Check out this handy infographic on how to take advantage of receipt surveys as well as what some big brands incentivize their customers with:
Infographic credit to lemon.