I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of being asked to fill out customer satisfaction surveys. It’s not that I don’t understand the need for customer feedback. Understanding the customer experience is important part of a good continuous improvement process. But often I’m not sure whether a company is going through the motions as a PR move  or really is going to do something about the feedback they get. If you think about it, you can be asked to fill out these feedback forms multiple times per day. In one day, I was asked for feedback by: my web hosting company after contacting tech support; my insurance company, after just calling to ask a question; the car dealer’s service department with an email before I even drove out of their parking lot; the hotel where I recently stayed, whose survey I abandoned after the second page of what was proving to be insufferably long and detailed. I’m getting survey fatigue.

One of the most challenging parts of surveys for the firms who use them is taking action, whether it be a customer survey or an employee suggestion box. It’s great to ask for feedback, but much harder to determine what feedback to implement and how to do so. Feedback can require root cause analysis to determine the source of the problem and the cooperation of multiple functions in an organization to solve it. Adopting the change that soliciting feedback requires is very hard work.

If I rate a service experience, is it the personality of the customer service rep that’s the issue? Is it their capabilities? Is it lack of training? Is it lack of resources in the customer service department?  And, in many instances, do I really care? A customer’s time for responding to surveys is limited. It’s usually hard to see the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) side of these surveys.

Perhaps, as Bill Kalmar said in his column in Quality Digest, companies asking customers to take surveys should show that they value their customers’  time by offering small rewards or some compensation. Many find that more motivating than filling out a multi-page survey out of the goodness of my heart for a hotel whose front desk employee was surly and unhelpful to me and where I am unlikely to stay in again.

-Sherry Gordon