Customer survey is a very effective way to gain valuable feedback and insights into what matters most to your customers. But oftentimes, people who don’t fit your customer persona may sneak their way in, ultimately impacting the quality, integrity, and accuracy of the responses.

How can you know you’re getting genuine responses from respondents?

Bots, multiple submissions, click farms, and other varieties of survey frauds have become quite common in recent times. If you’re worried about protecting your online survey from fraud (and you should!), this post discusses three (3) important tips to help engineer your survey for greater integrity and authenticity.

Unscrupulous elements are finding new ways to bypass barriers put in place to ensure the accuracy of surveys. This includes using bots and giving multiple responses, among other things. Verifying the real-world identities of respondents can help minimize the risks of this.

One way to do this is by verifying the identities of recipients with details such as email addresses, postal addresses, and other verifiable details against an existing database. Incorporating mobile OTP verification may work just as great as this helps tie responses and respondents to a unique mobile number - a strategy that could help prevent multiple participation and submissions.

More than half of organizations around the world have implemented geolocation information applications in one way or the other. Incorporating this into the customer survey process can also help improve survey integrity, especially for location-based market research.

IP geolocation can help identify the approximate location of respondents.

This capability can help deploy geofencing to gather specific data and insights from a target demographic. However, tools like VPN and other privacy-intended programs might help fraudsters override this. Geolocation distance checking might also help track people using secondary devices to make multiple submissions. When properly implemented, this is bound to help keep fraud to the barest minimum.

For fraudulent users trying to participate in surveys through bots, such users can be prevented by blacklisting the domains in the database. This helps keep fraudulent responses via bot out of the information gathering process.

Implementing other bot detection strategies will also help improve survey quality. This will help prevent the activities of click farms and nefarious actors from negatively impacting the survey data.

Organizations around the world continue to leverage surveys for market research and information gathering. But your surveys must be protected from fraudsters in market research. Here at DSG Associates, not only are our processes engineered to spot and stop frauds when surveying respondents, we also tick the boxes in other places to ensure the highest quality possible as far as data gathering goes.

Fraud has become all too common in today’s market research sector. Here at DSG, we do a great job of identifying and preventing it so your organization can rest assured you’re making informed decisions on the back of credible market research data. Contact us today to get started!