I’m tired of being asked to rate everything I do, everything I buy, and everyone I encounter. Apparently, my paying for a product or service is no longer enough. Now I’m expected to provide a review afterwards.
Whenever I conduct a transaction online, I invariably get an email or pop-up window asking how the experience went. When I receive the package, I’m asked to rate the delivery. Then a few days later I receive an email to review the product. A few days after that I get a reminder that I’ve not responded.
It’s relentless, intrusive, and actually pretty ridiculous. Somehow companies are convinced that pestering us is okay to do. But it’s not’ it’s simply spam. The only difference between these endless survey requests and ordinary spam is that they come from companies we’ve actually paid money to. Apparently, making a purchase gives a business permission to keep bothering us, often their best customers.
Often these requests make absolutely no sense. A restaurant wants to know whether I’d recommend it to a friend after I bought a sandwich. Door Dash wants me to rate the order process, the driver, and the restaurant. Fedex asks me to rate the person who left a package at my door, who I never saw. Amazon asks how my delivery was. An airline wants to know how I enjoyed the booking process. A website interrupts me to ask whether I’m enjoying the website, often a few seconds after landing on the page.
Yesterday when I contacted United Airlines using its “premier” customer service line, hoping to reach an agent quickly to make a reservation change, a recording asked whether I would take a survey after the call. When I quickly pushed “1” to agree and hoped to move to an agent, it subjected me to several more questions about how I wanted to respond, delaying the very help I had called for. The request to rate the experience made the experience worse.
What I find infuriating is that these companies place no value on our time. They’ll ask us to spend five minutes completing a questionnaire about a two-minute transaction. They’ll interrupt us with pop-ups, send follow-up emails, and occasionally remind us that our feedback is important. If my time is so valuable to them, perhaps they should pay me for it. Otherwise, stop asking.
Behind much of this madness apparently is an industry fueled by customer-experience software companies such as Qualtrics and Medallia that make it easy for businesses to automatically solicit feedback after practically every interaction.
Qualtrics website says, “Immediately surface customer friction and guide frontline teams in the moment to better serve clients. Increase your customer lifetime value by driving company-wide improvement—across processes, products, and digital properties.”
Medalia says “Only Medallia connects every customer signal, so you can move faster, act smarter, and drive results that count.” Whatever that means.
Have you ever seen changes come to sites that survey you?
The software products allow companies to automatically generate thousands of requests with almost no effort. But each request demands something from us: attention, time, and another decision about whether to respond, delete, or unsubscribe. Multiply that by the hundred of businesses we deal with or interactions we are involved in, and it becomes a constant assault.
Companies claim they want to improve our experience, yet they keep making that experience worse by pestering us after the sale. They spend millions on marketing to attract customers and then annoy them with an endless stream of unwanted requests. I have now stopped opening emails from businesses that I have successfully done business with, not because I didn’t like their product, but because they became so annoying after the sale with surveys and daily email ads.
I do have a suggestion for companies that want to improve customer satisfaction: Stop bothering your customers. Respect their time and put all the money going to customer-experience software in hiring real people answering your phone on the first ring.