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 before you’re even off the phone. 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 the businesses.
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 meant 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 filling them out. Today, at best, they’ll enter your name in a lottery for $100;
And today modern businesseswant to measure everything because they can: click-throughs, 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.
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. I once was asked to rate my flight while I was still taxiing to the gate. Recently I downloaded an app and it asked for a review before I used it for any length of time.
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 bad rating in the survey and included detailed comments? Somewhere in the organization, someone is looking for the “Net Promoter Score,” an arbitrary number that tells the company how they’re viewed based on the compilation of thousands of responses.
These surveys serve another agenda. They allow employees to rate the experiences with a particular employee. Why do the work themselves when it’s easier to ask the customer to do it? Asking us to do a rating takes away from 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. Talk to us direc. 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 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 surveys that ended up on my phone or computer, but it proves the point of how ridiculous all of this has become.