Obviously, filling out surveys or not carries little to no moral weight.
Companies expect a certain % of people to fill them out, not everyone. Sometimes they are used for customer service agent performance reviews, so if I had a good experience with customer service I usually fill out the survey.
Thanks, Swords_to_Plowshares, that’s exactly what I was hoping to hear.
For the record, I ran customer support groups at a number of high-tech companies, and we never used surveys to measure an agent’s performance. We had lots of other ways to do that, plus you would have to somehow match a survey with a particular agent, and there was no easy way to accomplish that.
I’m pretty sure that, for the most part, they aren’t idiots. But, IME, business leaders tend to (a) follow the trends, and (b) like easy-to-understand metrics.
In my four-decade career, I’ve lived through many cycles of the “next hot thing” in business becoming ubiquitous, and then fading away in favor of the next thing. That’s where we are right now with customer surveys and NPS scores.
We NPS for our phones based on short-term surveys (3-90 days). It’s good at identifying the highlights and lowlights. You can tell quickly if a camera, display, or battery life aren’t going well.
There is a difference between “how did we do?” and “would you recommend your bank teller” though. The second question is focusing on the actual customer service you got. The first question is too broad. People will give it a bad review if they didn’t like the bank’s interest rates or if someone cut them off in the parking lot.
You can see this when you read online reviews. “I’m giving this book one star because it shipped late.”
@kenobi_65 would know better, but asking a narrow question like that may be an intentional choice to limit the responses to people that had good or bad customer experiences. Maybe the goal isn’t to get a response from everyone.
Today, we seem to be hit with surveys from all sides. Safeway, Walmart, Home Depot, even the nationwide lube and oil chain Mr. Lube all have “Complete our survey online, you could win a gift card” on the receipt. I usually don’t bother, and nobody cares.
But then, I’m generally happy with the service I receive. If a company really loused up something, I’d let them know. If everything went well, then I don’t see the need.
I get that. But to my way of thinking, if they really want meaningful answers, they should ask, unambiguously, what they want to know. Was the teller reasonably polite and/or businesslike (that is to say, “not rude”)? Did the teller conduct the transaction without fucking up? Or if you just want one question, “Were you satisfied with the way Bertha conducted your transaction?”
As I said, my honest answer to the question they actually asked would have been no, but I didn’t want to say that because I didn’t want to imply that my teller did a poor job. I’m prepared to admit, though, that maybe that’s thinking about it too much. My brain tends to do that. I can’t help it.
I do too – as evidenced by this thread 
I suspect the bank teller question is intended to elicit responses only from the edge cases (good or bad) and exclude all of the satisfactory ones.
The net result is that people like us ask “Why did they say it that way?”
I like it when I get that one for some specialty program that we use for work which we must use & have no choice in the matter because that’s what the company uses.
I want to thank y’all for sharing some ammo for the annual employee experience survey (or whatever they’re calling it this year) my company is doing. While not the same as a customer survey, it’s similar insincere, performative bullshit.
I was in a meeting once where HR analyzed one of those surveys.
Totally useless. Anything negative was clearly the result of an employee who had performance problems. Not one suggestion for change came out of it.
As for customer surveys, I wonder if companies are still doing six sigma or some related bilge. Six sigma is good for manufacturing, but during the craze I went to lots of meetings where people forced to do six sigma with no data saying that they’ll get it with a survey. Surveys are a lot easier to do now than back then.
I never do them unless there is something I want to yell about, or someone I want to especially thank. Unless there is something in it for me, that is.
Paypal wants to know about my “recent checkout experience” with an online seller, in order to improve the Paypal experience.
The world has gone mad.
As I’ve mentioned many times elsewhere, I’ve been having health issued for the last eight months which have involved multiple hospitalizations and doctor visits. This has resulted in a flood of surveys from UNC Health Care asking for a review every single time.
We had one at irk earlier this year. Totally anonymous. Uh-huh, sure 
Not only did you continue to get reminder emails if you hadn’t filled it out (with a super-sekret unique-to-you code # in the email), but a month later, those who do got a small gift, a wireless charger/phone stand. I’m sure it was totally anonymous for anyone who gave negative feedback
Just like with government-run voting, it’s possible to keep “Did Citizen X vote?” unbreakably separate from “Citizen X voted as follows: …”.
The problem with surveys at work is management’s goals and the absence of any watchdog acting independently to verify they’re not lying liars who lie.
Where I vote, I sign in to vote & they mark my #; the first person in line is #1, the second person is #2, etc. They only know I was the #x person in line that day. I am then given a non-numbered ballot & go stand in a super-sekret table/chair with a large cardboard blinder to mark my form before putting it in the manila folder & walking over to the scanner reader & feeding it in. If I take more time than you but less than someone else they can have an idea that mine is close to the 500th one in the pile in the machine but it could be anyone between, say, 495 & 507 (if I go at the busy time of right after work).
Totally different when you click on a link to start your survey & it still has your ID# on the page & you have no idea who is running it. Is it truly some independent third party? Is it just something like Sign-up Genius with a skin so we don’t recognize their default URL & logo? When there are questions with free-form text answers is your writing generic or unique enough that your manager might recognize your sentence style? When during the survey period the big boss states that his team is in second place in terms of response percentage & he wants to be #1 so that we should all fill it out I really question the anonymity of it.
Sure. I would too. Because management are lying liars who lie.
My point was only that, logically speaking, it doesn’t have to be that way (non-anonymous). Practically speaking it does have to be that way. Because management are lying liars who lie.
I can only comment as to how this works on Qualtrics. When I set a survey to be anonymous, but with an invited list of participants a super-sekret code is generated for each participant. I can see which code goes with which email address, but I cannot see which set of results goes with which code or email address.
I could break the anonymity as surveys come in, by seeing who is newly marked as completing a survey, but if I’m going to be a lying-liar about it, then I would just not bother to check the “anonymous” box, and say I did.
The free response items can be a giveaway. If I received a comment from someone directly, and then later get the same comment on the survey, I’ll know who it is. Truth for me is, I don’t really care. If I wanted to know who the respondents were, I wouldn’t make it anonymous.
I want honest responses, because those are useful. I believe anonymity can help with honesty, so the survey is anonymous. If someone wants a response or to make a non-anonymous comment they can contact me directly, and I say this in the survey instructions.
While lots of people may fill out the forms, local divisions have to get feedback otherwise the whole process is even more worthless than you already think. If people just give bad grades, then it is reasonably anonymous. But as soon as they give specific comments, it is pretty clear who did it. Not enough feedback as a comment, safe. Someone screwed up in this way, not safe.
Our work survey is run by an outside firm. Results get filtered down to each manager. If you don’t have 5 or more people, you don’t get some of the details, like free form comments. It’s actually pretty useful. Not Earth shattering, but useful.
My company is large; if they were lying about the results being anonymous, where would that even go? Some HR database? Then for what purpose? Everyone knows who is disgruntled and who is gruntled.
I guess an owner of a small company could pretend something is anonymous. Then again they could also just spy on your computer to see what you really think.
I got that question from a pacemaker company.
I’ll let the cardiologists recommend pacemakers. I am not a cardiologist. My total unwillingness to go around recommending pacemakers to anybody has nothing whatsoever to do with the brand.
I recently got one from a seed company asking me to rate some eggplant seed I’d bought from them. The survey request arrived before I’d planted the seed, and months before it could have produced if I’d planted it the day it arrived. That one actually didn’t come from a no-reply address, so I replied pointing that out and that anybody who did take the survey would just be making up their reaction in order to get the small discount offered, so the results would be useless. I have no idea whether anyone was reading replies, though; they didn’t answer.
Mostly I just ignore them; in part because when I did use to attempt them I found out that they almost never had any way to say what I wanted, which was often something like “when I finally got somebody on the phone they did their absolute best, but your entire system is screwed up and also will you quit interrupting your hold music every 90 seconds with a voice that isn’t somebody actually answering the phone?” No, you can’t say that. You have to rate your experience overall from one to ten. No way to say that part was ten and part was one.