Every day online, a pop-up or email from a major brand or frequently visited site implores me to answer a few questions about myself and them. I (almost) always decline. Not because I care about my privacy but because I don't care to waste my time.

Customers are continually being bombarded by large surveys. I know I can't buy much without receiving a survey a few days later asking how they did. The problem is these surveys are all so long.

One Fortune 100 firm showed me its comprehensively designed internal "innovation culture" intranet survey containing 25 questions. I (strongly) suggested they ask no more than five. They thought that ridiculous. But they were persuaded to run an A/B experiment where a third of the 10,000+ recipients got the short form. The results were unambiguous. Response rates for the fewer questions were over 11X better than for the full questionnaire. When one factored in the declining quality of "tail end" answers — people clearly just "box ticking" the final five or six answers to be done with it — less proved to be more.

I have been a big advocate of this for awhile. I know how I feel when I have taken one of these surveys, I am wondering when it will end. What is the important information they are looking for? When analyzed, I know the companies I have been involved with only focus on a few high-level metrics anyway, so why ask so many questions.

Start with a small baseline of questions and add-on as needed. It is like my database marketing strategy, you only add segments when there is a clear purpose for doing so. The same applies to surveys, keep it simple and the customer will give you better feedback.