Consider your last few purchases, whether in-person or online. How long before you were hit with a request to fill out a cumbersome survey?
Surveys are used by companies large and small to learn about customers—satisfaction levels, customer service experiences, likelihood of repeat purchases. From market research to brand awareness, event feedback to Net Promoter Scores, surveys serve countless purposes.
The Glaring Problem
While surveys can be effective tools for building customer insights, evaluating brand performance, and identifying growth opportunities, there's one major issue: when they're not designed with the customer's experience in mind, people hate them.
A 2021 Psychology Today article identified "gaping trust and empathy gaps between customers and companies in survey research. Customers don't trust companies' motives and are scornful of their abilities to properly collect or use survey responses."
"Companies are lacking in empathy at every step of surveying their customers, which may contribute to a devaluing of survey research."
— Utpal Dholakia Ph.D., Psychology Today
If customers don't trust the company asking them to share details, they're less likely to engage. This skews survey data—respondents are more likely to have positive existing brand associations to trust the process in the first place.
5 Reasons Why People Hate Surveys
Building a tool to genuinely receive customer data is increasingly challenging as consumer distrust grows
Surveys Can Be Impersonal
Source: Next In Personalisation 2021 Report
Personalized customer service is increasingly important. Companies demonstrating customer intimacy generate faster revenue growth than their peers.
Surveys are, broadly speaking, the opposite of personalized experiences. Generic feedback requests lack specificity and engagement. When surveys obviously capture mass responses without considering purchased products, customer experiences, purchasing modes, or satisfaction levels, customers feel their answers aren't particularly valuable.
💡 Opportunity:
With personalized surveys, customers are more likely to feel seen, valued, and engaged.
Focused on Brand Benefit, Not Consumer Benefit
Some brands masterfully incentivize survey responses through discounts, free products, or direct value outcomes. Others simply ask for time, offering only their "appreciation."
The Trust Factor:
Source: Adobe's Future of Marketing Research Series
Surveys sent without value-add and not designed around individualized customer experiences send a message that the brand-consumer relationship is one-sided. Customers often provide genuine feedback with no guarantee it will be reviewed, considered, or actioned.
💡 Opportunity:
Surveys directly connected to actionable feedback empower customers to know their input makes a difference to future service.
Surveys Are Time-Consuming
Even if brands convince customers to commence a survey, they may stumble when customers realize how much time is required. Have you ever opened a survey to see "Question 1 of 20"?
The Time Problem:
- • Brands lack awareness of time consumers will invest
- • Taking attention for granted erodes trust
- • Many close surveys halfway through
- • Brands walk away empty-handed instead of with insights
By not valuing customer time and energy, consumer trust goes backward, not forward.
💡 Opportunity:
Simplify your surveys! Get only the data you need, and none of the data you don't.
Surveys Can Be Highly Repetitive
Data is most beneficial when it's specific. Unfortunately for consumers, that means brands go all-in on designing surveys with highly specific, highly repetitive questions.
Example Repetitive Questions:
- 📊 Rate the website experience out of 5
- 📊 Rate the pricing out of 5
- 📊 Rate the range of products out of 5
- 📊 Rate the shipping options out of 5
- 📊 Rate the checkout process out of 5...
Sound familiar? Most consumers close the window before reaching the end.
When surveys are designed solely on brand needs without cognizance of customer experience, they "farm" customers for data. This one-sided relationship doesn't contribute positively to ongoing brand-customer relationships.
💡 Opportunity:
Use surveys to build two-way relationships, displaying genuine value for customer experience rather than data-mining exercises.
Surveys Land at the Wrong Time
With so much purchasing happening online, consideration of engagement points along the customer journey is paramount.
Common Timing Mistakes:
- Sending satisfaction surveys when products haven't arrived yet
- Requesting feedback during shipping delays
- Treating customers as mass audience, not prioritized individuals
Poorly timed surveys irritate rather than encourage. Surveys at inopportune moments contribute to the sense that customers are part of a mass audience, not highly prioritized individuals.
💡 Opportunity:
Understand how surveys feed into the wider customer journey—and use them accordingly.
How to Make Surveys Work: Autopilot Reviews
All hope is not lost for surveys and their usefulness in building genuine customer insights.
When surveys are simplified, focused, and easy to engage with, they benefit both brands and consumers, building opportunities for feedback to be gathered and implemented.
Autopilot Reviews is built with awareness of both sides of the survey experience—a customer experience tool that employees love, driving engagement and performance for front-line teams.
For Employees
- • Save at-risk customers
- • Enable self-correcting behavior
- • Put employees in the driver's seat
- • Drive engagement and performance
For Customers
- • Exceptional customer experience
- • 2-way text surveys double response rates
- • Turn feedback into actionable insights
- • Course-correct after negative interactions