How to Do A Voice Feedback Survey: Make It Fun for Your Fans!

Surveys are a great way to learn more about your podcast’s audience, but only if you have enough participation and honest responses. What if you could make it even easier for people to give you candid answers? A voice feedback survey makes your audience survey stand out from others. It’s a low commitment on the part of the respondent, and it’s novel so people are more likely to participate. Voice messaging services like Telbee.io organize the responses with transcripts, so it’s easy to manage the answers. The results can be repurposed, in your podcast episodes, or as ideas for future content. Here’s how to do a voice feedback survey for your podcast.

Surveys as Simple as Voice Mail

Sign up for a web-based voice messaging system like Telbee. The free version has everything you need, and the paid version has more features. Telbee walks you through the process of setting up a channel and creating your question display.

Heads up: Our link to Telbee.io is an affiliate so we’ll earn a small commission should you choose to buy through it – though at no extra cost to yourself. You can also read our full Telbee.io review right here.

Keep the survey short. This isn’t the time for a long, multiple-choice survey. It’s time to ask one question and let your audience answer in their own way. You can ask a two-part question, like, “what’s your favourite (x) and why is it special to you?”  The benefit of a voice feedback survey is the respondent’s room for spontaneity, so use an open-ended question.

As an example, for a hypothetical cooking podcast, we’re asking “what’s your favourite childhood snack and why is it special to you?” 

When you set up the display window, you can add a title and a subtitle. Let your respondents know what you plan to do with the survey responses, to get their consent. For example, “By sending us this Vox, you agree that we can share your recording on our show.”

Telbee helps you create a short custom URL for the survey. It’s easy to share on social media, in your show notes, and in your podcast intros and outros. They record their answer, listen to make sure they like the message, and send it.

Managing Voice Feedback Survey Responses

Telbee organizes your voice feedback survey responses as audio files and text windows, showing the transcript.

You can read or listen, but doing both provides context clues, such as accents, that could affect the transcript. For example, if the transcript said their favourite snack is “soff pressels,” they could be saying “soft pretzels.” Telbee has remarkably good AI transcription, and you can set your survey for a multitude of languages. But, you never know who’s going to say “chock lit” for “chocolate.”

Look for patterns. In the hypothetical survey above, we asked what the respondent’s favourite childhood snack was. Do most people prefer something sweet? Savoury? Salty?  

Look for standouts. You’ll always have an unusual answer. Maybe someone says their favourite childhood snack was crickets (and they grew up in Oaxaca, where crickets are the main ingredient in chapulines).

Repurposing: How to Use Your Survey Responses

If you have their permission, you can share survey answers as part of your podcast episode. Respect your audience’s privacy, of course, but if you include a short montage of people in your audience telling you their survey answers, it’s fun for your core audience and a diverse and more interesting experience for your listener. Your standout answers can shine in this case. If twenty people say their favourite snack is peanut butter and jelly, and then one person explains what chapulines are, that contrast makes for a truly memorable podcast episode.

Depending on your question, your voice feedback survey can help you choose future episode topics. In this hypothetical case, if the responses tended toward sweet snacks over salty snacks, you could have future episodes with recipes for desserts. Conversely, you could favour savoury recipes. 

Simple to Use, Long-Lasting Impact

Voice Feedback Surveys are good because they’re low-commitment and novel, the responses are text and audio, and the responses can have more meaning for your podcast than pie charts and bar graphs. A voice survey allows for candour and spontaneity on the part of the respondent. You might have fewer questions per survey, but the responses will be rich with detail and repurposable for your podcast. 

Final tip – If you’re celebrating any sort of milestone (say, you’re about to hit 50 episodes) then you might want to try making a montage episode. Here, your audience can all answer the same question, or chime in on the same subject. You’d then edit all these clips together to create your montage. The voice feedback survey feature on Telbee.io would be perfect for this.