It’s becoming one of the real annoyances of our daily life: the constant request to rate, score, or review every transaction we make. Buy a sandwich, rate the sandwich. Order an item from Amazon, rate the packaging. Call customer support, rate the agent. These days it feels like every business we interact with is less interested in serving us than surveying us.
There are so many customer surveys today because companies have become obsessed with measurement, and surveys are the cheapest, laziest, most automated tool they can deploy. Unfortunately, they create far more annoyance for us, the customer, than value for them.
The irony is that by bombarding customers for feedback, companies have made feedback less honest, less useful, and less worth collecting.
Surveys used to be rare. They used to mean something. You’d get an email from a company asking for five minutes of your time, and they genuinely seemed to want to know how they could improve. Some even provided compensation for taking the time to answer. Today, at best, they’ll enter your name with thousands of others for a chance to win a $100.
Today’s businesses seem to want to measure everything because they can: click-thrus, engagement time, churn rates, Net Promoter Scores. Because surveys produce neat numbers that fit onto executive dashboards, companies feel compelled to ask for feedback constantly. If it produces a score that goes into a PowerPoint deck, they want it. Somehow they’ve been sold a bill of goods that these numbers give them an accurate snapshot of their business.
But surveys have become so automated, so relentless, that they’ve lost any connection to reality. We’re being asked to evaluate everything, all the time, often before the experience is even complete. Go to a new site and you’re asked to rate it before you even start using it. Airlines send out multipage surveys asking you to rate TSA, the check- in process, the gate agent, the boarding process, the flight service and baggage retrieval. Everything but the wine! Often I’ll download an app and am asked for a review before I begin to use it.
The reality is that most of these companies don’t actually care about our specific feedback. Have you ever heard back when you provide a poor rating in the survey and include detailed comments? No one reads it.
These surveys serve another agenda. They allow companies to rate the experiences with their employees. Why do the work themselves when it’s easier to ask the customer to do it? Asking us to do a rating takes our time, but they could care less for inconveniencing us.
If businesses really want to know what customers think, they should stop pestering us with surveys and simply pay attention. Look at our repeat business. Monitor returns. Read our comments and follow up when there’s a serious complaint. Talk to us direct. And when companies do ask for feedback, they should make it rare, optional, and meaningful.
Until companies figure that out, we’ll be stuck clicking “No thanks” to yet another email, text, or pop-up asking us to rate how easy it was to rate the last survey.
And sorry for interrupting this article with a few of the latest survey requests that ended up on my phone and computer, but it proves the point of how ridiculous all of this has become.
