Per Deanna_D (and my own experience), the system is already gamed.
Per the Slactivist article, the only ethical thing to do is to always respond with a five.
No. I simply refuse. If they’re not going to take my feedback seriously (and they’re not), I’m not going to give them any feedback. I’m not going to be extorted into providing meaningless feedback (“do this or we’ll hurt the nice person who rang up your catfood!”).
I get this at work all the time (teaching)—the students rate me out of five. Except, most of them don’t fill out the surveys. My employer informs me that the response rate means that the results are statistically insignificant, and then judges me on them anyhow. Only a 4.something! Needs improvement!
I can personally confirm what the author is saying. When I managed a Jack in the Box our customer surveys asked people to rate us on a scale of 1-7. The only metric corporate scored us on, which went into everything from raises to bonuses o promotion eligibility, was the percentage of people who gave us a 7.
I like that! You could also give them a fake or a throwaway email address, but I admit that your approach is more satisfying!
I’m currently expecting an important email, and when I got the familiar “ding!” I immediately checked my messages. Ah, not as important as I thought. The gas company is asking me to “tell us how we’re doing”. The only thing I’m guilty of is paying my gas bill yesterday, but I guess that must have got their attention. Too bad these dumbasses don’t realize that so blatantly demonstrating absolutely zero concern for their customers by constantly invading their privacy with stupid bullshit just pisses them off.
Yep. The morons running these shams should be rated… honestly.
Not the same kind of survey, but when I get a call on my work phone and it’s a survey, I ask them, “What’s in it for me?” Surprise, they never have a good answer. That’s MY survey!
I got one of those from a pension provider telling me that I hadn’t read letters posted online (and that I should read them immediately as they might contain important information requiring urgent action - no and no; but, y’know, the envelope wasn’t overly full…)
I’ve been ignoring customer satisfaction surveys on principle unless the experience was really excellent and deserves high praise. This has been my stance since a horrific experience back in the early/mid 2000s when I bought a car from a Toyota dealership.
Everything was fine except when it came time to pay. I had walked in there with financing intact, I had a payment document from my own bank ready to be completed with the purchase price. But their finance department gave us the hard sell for HOURS trying to get us to finance through them.
I honestly can’t remember now how the financing ended up but I will never forget the survey fiasco! I completed the post-delivery survey honestly: All 5s except for an explanation about how much we disliked the pressure tactics of the financial people. WELL! You’d have thought we took out a billboard and slandered them in Times Square! I got several follow-up phone calls asking, nay begging me to withdraw my comments and fill out a new survey, etc. etc. Manager on up. Good lord. That was the last time I went to that dealership and the last time we purchased a Toyota. I mean, I realize they get dinged for stuff like that but hey, that’s the POINT of criticism!
Car dealerships have wised up though: The last time we bought a car, at a Kia dealership, they handed us a printout of the online survey we could expect, neatly annotated showing us exactly how to fill it out. Needless to say I ignored it when it came.
I only complete a survey if I have a specific complaint, but I otherwise like the place especially if they implement my advice. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it’s just a 1-5 star system of questions, that aren’t relevant to my complain, and with no free text to provide specific feedback. And about twice as long as I can pay attention for. So I don’t even fill out surveys then if I am not feeling lucky.
The only surveys I fill out any more are ones that offer some sort of bonus. Occasionally a hotel will offer rewards points if I complete their survey. The Nielsen questionnaires used to come with an actual dollar bill. I got a survey from UC Davis asking my opinions on public transportation that netted me a $10 Amazon gift card.
Speaking as a market research and advertising professional: even to me, the incessant “how did we do?” surveys have become tiresome.
As noted above, it’s clear that companies have decided this is an important piece of feedback, but what I don’t think they are taking into account is just how often the responses they get are skewed by customers who are rating how annoyed they are by the requests to take the surveys.
And, what I find particularly annoying is getting repeated requests to “rate us” for a five-minute trip into your store, to purchase a $5 item, where I used the self-checkout. What is there to rate?
I couldn’t have said it better myself. They are mostly pointless time wasters. As I said, I’m done with filling out out surveys forever. Life is too damn short.
If I had an interaction with a person, such as phone customer service, and it went well, I’m likely to fill out the survey giving highest marks. I think of it as sort of a tip, but paying with my time instead money. I don’t know if my single response is worth much to them, but in many situations it is the only thing I can do to substantively thank them for helping me.
If my experience was poor (aka typical), then I’ll just skip the survey.
What really gets me are the ones where I’m offered something that is worthless. “100 people per month can win $25” from a major national chain. I think the expected value of that payoff doesn’t even cover the time it took for me to read the offer.
Unfortunately the brewery near here that offered a free appetizer on your next visit for completing the survey was part of a small chain that didn’t survive the pandemic.
Sorry to reply twice in a row, but this just happened, and was too good not to mention.
I just got a survey email from Das Keyboard. Typical “to improve our service, we would like to know how we did” solicitation[1]. Only catch is I haven’t interacted with them in some time. So, I looked in my email archives. The survey is about a ticket from 2015.
It’s been exactly 9 years since the ticket was created. That can’t be a coincidence.
I send out surveys for a course I run, and schedule reminders to non-responders at 1 and 3 weeks. 468 weeks seems a bit excessive.
It wasn’t even a “survey” email that’s really an ad, just a link to respond to answer questions. ↩︎
Any time I get maintenance done at the car dealership they hound me for reviews. I told them my time doesn’t come free and I charge by the hour. They said it would only take two minutes but I told them I have a one hour minimum fee.
Every time I go to the doctor or have any sort of medical treatment I get an email from UNC HealthCare asking me to complete a survey on “how they did”. I continue to get them every few days until I do the survey. I think eventually they stop, but it’s annoying having to completely reassure them I didn’t have to wait long, that everyone I dealt with was respectful to my needs, etc etc etc.
I always fill out the medical clinic/provider surveys because those folks are made to do farr too much by giant mefical systems. My oncologists are always late for my appointments, but spent extra time wiyh me when I was in active treatment. I use the surveys to praise their triage and state that their caseloads are too large and appointment times too short.
I charge $6,000 per hour to do surveys. So $100/minute. If they actually want my opinion they’ll have to pay for it. So far nobody actually wants my opinion. They just want clicks.
