Editor’s note: Shelly Chandler is the customer experience executive at marketing research technology firm Confirmit, N.Y.

The ability to gather and act on feedback has become a common necessity for most organizations. Across all industries there is tremendous pressure to listen, engage and cater to the audience – and ensure the consumer experience is a positive one. Conducting surveys is one medium that can help organizations accomplish this while also gaining a deeper understanding of how their audiences feels, acts and what they expect. With this data, companies can analyze and improve internal and external procedures.

Unfortunately, there is often a Catch-22 when it comes to feedback surveys: While most consumers expect companies to understand their wants and needs, a continuous drive for feedback from organizations can push consumers away, causing respondent fatigue. If you’ve conducted a survey in recent years, chances are you’re familiar with the struggle of declining response rates and low respondent engagement. Audiences are now facing a flood of survey requests from almost every channel, including Web, e-mail and text, and have developed a predisposition to ignore such requests.

How can you engage your audience and capture the insights you need while avoiding respondent frustrations?

The answer lies in survey design and implementation. Effective management requires a more tailored and attractive experience that includes relevant samples and careful survey design. When you plan your next survey, follow this list to ensure you are accurately capturing your audience and gathering data that is important to your organization’s success:

Are the questions short and to the point? 

Modern technologies continue to influence our ever-shrinking attention spans, which are now much shorter than the time it would take to complete most surveys. With social media and Twitter-style sentence...