Has your opinion of a company ever gone down merely because the company asks your opinion far too often? You're not alone.
Customer (“How are we doing?”) surveys are on the rise, according to an article in the New York Times today. There's a simple reason. Once upon a time, it was difficult to solicit customer feedback. It required paying a research or survey company to craft and undertake a complicated customer survey. The results needed to be collected (IF the response rate was good enough), the data needed to be crunched, the conclusions needed to be drawn and then the report needed to be written. It was costly and time-consuming.
This is no longer the case. Thanks to Web-based software and newer interactive voice response (IVR) technologies, companies can often do their own surveys quite easily, in real-time, generating their own results. And boy...do they take advantage of it.
Writes the NY Times, “Businesses want your opinion of them, too, and their requests for feedback, like relentless tugs on the sleeve, now seem to come with every purchase, every call to a customer service department and every click of a mouse that is followed with a pop-up ad pleading with users to take a survey about the 'Web site experience.' On the telephone, in the mail, on their computers, smartphones and iPads, American consumers are being solicited as never before to express their feelings about coffeemakers, hand creams, triple-bypass operations, veterinarians, dry cleaners and insurance agents.”
There's evidence that many of us are getting rather tired of the relentless pursuit, particularly when giving our opinions doesn't seem to improve a company's customer service very much. The constant nagging, writes the Times, has led to a condition known as “survey fatigue” and it's more than just an annoyance: it has led to declining response rates over the last decade.
Experts say where these companies are going wrong is in asking too, too much. They should make their surveys quicker, more focused and simpler.
“If customers balk at taking what can feel like an SAT test, the fault may lie with the surveys themselves. Many businesses, often against the advice of the experts they have hired to construct their questionnaires, cannot resist the urge to ask, ask and ask yet again. Exasperated consumers, assured that the survey will take only five minutes to complete, often bail out as they approach the 10-minute mark.”
So if you're ga-ga over customer feedback surveys but bewildered that you're not getting the kind of results you hoped for, it's time to examine your process. Can your survey be shorter? Do you have to ask customers for feedback at every interaction? Chances are, the answers are “yes” and “no.”