In my email inbox was a rather insistent letter from the people who made my car. They really wanted to know what I thought of a recent service appointment. It was the third time they had reminded me to fill in this survey.
They’re not alone. It seems that every interaction with any service provider of any description comes with a free survey they really want you to fill in. Need your internet repaired? Prepare for a survey. Buy some groceries? Fill out a survey and maybe win some free groceries. Breathe? Maybe we can get a survey about that at some point, we’re working on it.
I don’t know what exactly they’re going to do with all of this information gleaned from the survey. For the most part, interactions with service providers can be best described as “fine.” Take an internet outage for example. When I needed someone in my house, I was happy to see them – because they were there to fix my internet – and even happier to see them leave – because that meant my internet was finally fixed. Since the man did his job, I was generally pleased, but I don’t have any strong emotions about it. Certainly not strong enough to fill out a survey about it.
The majority of responses are going to be similar. The people we interacted with did their job so we are generally pleased with them. Could they improve? Who knows. I don’t know how the internet works and thus I can’t really be expected to know how this person could do their job better. If they did not do their job, they probably would be complaints, because the internet wouldn’t be working.
If you get a giant stack of surveys indicating that everyone is basically happy with what happened, what can you even do with that? You aren’t going to get much indication of where you can improve from thousands of people who are pretty much happy with their level of service.
If anything, the over-reliance of surveys might lower customer satisfaction, because people get annoyed with the constant insistence that they fill out surveys. Personally, I will generally think to myself “it’s fine, go away” when a message comes into my inbox insisting I fill out a survey about something I bought or a service I used.
Constant feedback feels like something that was created with the internet, as user reviews of products became a big part of people’s buying decisions. Soon, everyone wanted in on that action and constant ratings and reviews became the norm for anything you can name. At this point, we are getting saturated with information, and most of it is not of any real use. Perhaps we need to pause and reconsider the constant flood of surveys that everyone is requested to fill out.
