Are customer surveys dead?
The answer is “yes” according to many customer experience gurus. Surveys – which have long been central to companies’ Voice-of-the-Customer programs – have fallen out of favor at some firms for a variety of reasons:
- Survey fatigue. Businesses, in their quest to at least appear customer-centric, bombard customers with feedback requests at every turn, triggering survey fatigue that has depressed response rates and made it increasingly difficult to gather statistically significant data samples.
- Poor survey design. Many companies administer their survey programs in suboptimal ways, diminishing their perceived value to the organization – be it by fielding poorly designed, arduous satisfaction surveys (the kind that actually dissatisfy your customers), to inadvertently encouraging “score begging” by employees (thereby undermining the accuracy of the feedback captured).
- AI-powered tools. Finally, many argue that surveys will no longer be necessary thanks to AI’s ability to divine customer sentiment via real-time analysis of everything from purchase histories to customer service calls. No more fretting about low survey response rates; AI — we’re told — will accurately measure the satisfaction of every customer at every touchpoint.
Survey bashing has become a favorite pastime for many customer experience pundits, and there’s no question that plenty of companies administer their survey programs poorly, all but inviting this criticism. And while there are proven solutions to the most common survey program pitfalls, what the pundits fail to recognize is this: The value of customer surveys goes well beyond their role in quantitatively gauging customer experience quality.
To illustrate that point, consider a business travel experience I had a few weeks ago. When I returned from the trip, I received e-mailed satisfaction surveys from both the airline and the rental car company I patronized. This was not a surprise; I get those survey e-mails from them all the time after I travel.
This time, however, I was eagerly anticipating receipt of the survey. That’s because, during the trip, I didn’t have a very good experience with either the airline or the rental car company, and I was looking forward to telling someone about it.
“The value of customer surveys goes well beyond their role in quantitatively gauging customer experience quality.”
Now, here’s the catch: If I hadn’t been solicited for feedback through the survey, I would have never taken the initiative to contact the two companies to tell them why I was dissatisfied. It just wouldn’t have been worth my time, given the nature of the issue. But, if I had even the slightest inclination to provide feedback, the survey made it easier for me to do that.
And this is one of the unsung benefits of customer surveys. They are a form of proactive outreach that makes it more frictionless for customers to communicate back to the company (not unlike a website Contact Us form).
It’s also worth noting that the disappointments I experienced during my business travel would have never been revealed by any AI technology. That’s because I left no data breadcrumbs behind for AI to analyze. There were no calls to customer service, no canceled reservations, no social media posts. The airline and the rental car company wouldn’t have had a clue what it was that I disliked about the experience had they not explicitly asked me (via a survey) to tell them about it.
Yes, there are a whole host of challenges that can make it difficult for companies to see the good in customer surveys, declining response rates not least among them. But while a low response rate might diminish the value of a survey in terms of how well it measures customer satisfaction, it does nothing to diminish the value of the survey as a vehicle for facilitating customer communication (assuming, of course, that the company actually reviews, responds, and acts on survey responses — which is, admittedly, another area where many firms execute poorly).
Customer surveys are an inbound communications tool, and when viewed in that context, response rates (no matter how low) cease to matter. Rather, what matters is that the company is giving individual customers a platform for sharing gripes (and delights), including ones that AI will never pick up on. Absent that avenue, many dissatisfied customers will not take the time to provide feedback; they will simply take their business elsewhere.
Viewing surveys as outdated and ineffective reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about the role these feedback instruments should play in an organization. Companies must view surveys in a broader context, and recognize that their removal creates a communications blind spot — effectively silencing customers at the very moment when they might have something really valuable to say.