I took five flights last week. I also received five “how did we do survey” requests. Two weeks ago, I purchased a ten-foot steel rod at the home center. A day later, I received an email that was titled, “rate your rebar.” A few months ago, I had foot surgery. The day after I received an email from the anesthesiologist asking me to rate his services. My first thought was, “Well, you put me to sleep and you woke me up. What else there to say?”
Chances are, you are inundated with the same flood of surveys that come after every purchase or contact with any business. And like me, you probably don’t respond to any of them. Why on earth would we take the time to do so when they are probably being scanned by artificial intelligence based on programmed keywords?
This madness has two impacts. First, these endless surveys drain our energy, even if we don’t complete them. Every decision we make consumes some of the blood glucose, or sugar energy, that powers our bodies. Just making a decision whether to respond to a survey taxes our time and focus.
I’m a responsible soul. I used to think, “I really should complete at least some of these surveys because people took the time to create them. But I don’t think like that anymore. There’s only so much time and energy in the day and this is not how I choose to spend it. I would advise you to do the same, if you aren’t already. Maybe if we all stopped filling out surveys period, those sending them would get the message.
That brings up the other impact. As with most efforts, quality is more important than quantity. Collectively, companies spend billions of dollars every year generating and analyzing so-called net promoter scores. These supposedly help them determine customer loyalty. But if all you’re doing is collecting endless data points from endless surveys, are you really better informed about what the customer or client really thinks.
Then there’s design. My wife and I took a river cruise last month. On the last day, the cruise director made huge thing about getting us to complete a survey of our experience. “We will be very disappointed if you do not rate every element as “exceeded our expectations,” he said. The cruise was great. But did it exceed our expectations? Not really, because we expected it to be great. So while I felt wonderful at the end of the cruise, I also felt just a touch manipulated. That’s probably not how the company wants us to remember our experience.
So, if you feel overwhelmed by the endless surveys, just ignore them. Truthfully, no one’s going to miss your input and you will be conserving energy you can place elsewhere. And if you are one of the people sending surveys, PLEASE take a step back and consider whether you really need to do so and are getting the kind of input that will help your business. Truth is, randomly calling a couple of customers per day for the next few weeks will probably get you better insights than the millions of data points you are attempting to collect digitally.