Consider the last few purchases you made, whether in-person or online. How long did it take after the transaction before you were hit with a request to fill out a cumbersome survey?
Surveys are used by companies large and small as a means of learning about their customer – their satisfaction levels with their product or service, what their customer service experience was like, and how likely they are to make a repeat purchase. Surveys can also take the form of market research surveys, designed to analyze how and where products are purchased in order to build competitive positioning.
Companies may also undertake brand awareness surveys, looking to understand how their brand is perceived and recognised within a global marketplace. Surveys can also be used to gather feedback after events, such as festivals, concerts or conferences, extracting data from attendees that can assess how effective the event was in delivering on their expectations.
The simplest form of a survey may be in the Net Promoter Score. This is a one-question customer experience survey that simply asks: ‘how likely are you to recommend (brand) to someone?’ Customers are given a scale of 1 to 10, creating an easy metric for brands to track over time.
Finally, segmentation surveys are often used to ensure marketing efforts are focused on the most effective and appropriate marketing segment. These surveys create opportunities for insight into the commonalities and differences across your overall target market, drawing on questions that reveal data across demographics, geography and more.
While surveys can be an effective tool for building customer insights, evaluating brand performance, identifying employee impact and evaluating critical opportunities for growth, there’s just one glaring problem: when they’re not designed with the customer’s experience in mind, people hate them.
A 2021 article written by Utpal Dholakia Ph.D. for Psychology Today identified that ‘there are gaping trust and empathy gaps between customers and companies in survey research at the moment. Customers do not 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.’
Here, a key problem in the usefulness and reliability of survey data is highlighted: if customers don’t trust the company that’s asking them to share details, opinions, insights or perspectives, they’re less likely to engage. This can lead to a skewing of survey data as respondents are more likely to have a positive existing brand association in order to trust the survey process in the first place.
Survey data can be of immense value to individuals and corporations. However, building a tool to genuinely receive that data is becoming more and more challenging as consumer distrust grows, creating distance between brands and their customers.
Here’s just a taste test of some of the reasons people hate surveys.
1. Surveys can be impersonal
Personalized customer service is of increasing importance. The Next In Personalisation 2021 report identified that companies who can demonstrate customer intimacy are able to generate faster rates of revenue growth than their peers, with 71% of consumers expecting companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t occur.
Surveys are, broadly speaking, the opposite of a personalized experience. Emails with links to generic feedback requests on the back of a purchase lack a sense of specificity and engagement.
When surveys are obviously designed to capture mass responses, without taking into account the products or services purchased, the customer’s experience, their mode of purchasing, and their satisfaction with the item itself, this can leave an impact on consumers that their answers aren’t of particular or considered valuable to the brand asking for them.
Opportunity: with personalized surveys, your customers are more likely to feel seen, valued, and engaged with.
2. Surveys can be focused on providing benefit to the brand, not to the consumer
Some brands have mastered the art of genuinely incentivizing a survey response through offering a discount, free product or some form of outcome that contributes direct value back to the consumer. Others, however, simply ask for their customer’s time, offering no incentive other than their ‘appreciation’.
The rise of eCommerce is increasingly leading to a savvy and intuitive consumer base who are reluctant to hand over data without a high degree of trust in the brand or company requesting it. Adobe’s Future of Marketing Research Series identified that 71% of UK consumers will stop purchasing from a company if their trust is broken. On the other hand, a strong foundation of consumer trust will lead to 71% of consumers making more purchases, and 61% recommending the brand to their friends.
Surveys that are sent without any kind of value-add to the consumer, and which aren’t designed around an individualized customer experience, can send a message that the relationship between the brand and the consumer is one-sided. By building on a foundation of mutual value, genuine trust, and a respect for your customer’s time, you can stand apart in a crowd of overwhelming survey requests that offer nothing of direct value back to the consumer other than ‘thank you for your time’.
It’s important to consider how surveys can also lack a sense of ‘closing the loop’. If a customer has gone to the effort of providing insightful, genuine feedback to a brand via a survey, there’s no guarantee for them that that feedback will be reviewed, considered, and actioned. More often than not, the experience of communication is one-sided, with customers being asked for input, but no acknowledgment from the brand requesting it that that input will be valued and implemented.
Opportunity: Surveys that are directly connected to actionable feedback empower customers to know their input makes a difference to the service they’ll receive in the future.
3. Surveys are time-consuming
Even if brands are successful at convincing customers to commence a survey, they may stumble again when that customer realizes just how much time they’re after. Have you ever opened a survey, only to see it’s asking you to answer question 1 out of 20?
By lacking awareness of how much time consumers are willing to invest in surveys, brands run the risk of taking their attention for granted. If a consumer gets the impression that their time and energy aren’t valued by the company, consumer trust goes backward, not forwards.
This also means that many people may be likely to close a survey halfway through – rather than gaining useful and tangible insights into the mindset and experience of their customer, the brand on the other end walks away entirely empty-handed.
Opportunity: Simplify your surveys! Get only the data you need, and none of the data you don’t.
4. Surveys can be highly repetitive
Data is of greatest benefit when it’s specific. Unfortunately for us consumers, that means brands can go all-in on designing surveys with highly specific, highly repetitive questions.
Let’s say you’ve purchased a new appliance online and decide to open up the customer experience survey you receive after completing the purchase. If you’re asked to rate the website experience out of 5, the pricing out of 5, the range of products out of 5, the shipping options out of 5… odds are high that you’ll be more likely to close the window down before reaching the end, rather than labor over repetitive questions that are too minute in their scope to feel of use to you.
When surveys are designed solely on the needs of the brand, and not in a way that’s cognizant of the customer experience, they run the risk of ‘farming’ their customer for data. This one-sided relationship doesn’t bode well for contributing positively to the ongoing brand-customer relationship.
Opportunity: Use surveys to build a two-way relationship, displaying a genuine value for the customer experience, rather than using their input as a data-mining exercise.
5. Surveys can often land at the wrong time in a customer’s journey
With so much of our purchasing happening online, consideration of the points of engagement with a customer along the purchasing journey is paramount.
For retailers who may send a customer satisfaction survey to their site visitors the moment a purchase has been completed, they’re setting themselves up for failure. If the product itself is yet to arrive, how can a customer report back on their level of satisfaction with it?
Poorly timed surveys can serve to irritate, not to encourage. If products are late in delivery, or the shipping process is yet to commence, a survey asking customers to rate their satisfaction may lead to negative outcomes that aren’t reflective of a true user experience.
Too many companies send survey requests at an inopportune moment in the customer’s purchasing journey. This contributes to the sense that the customer is a part of a mass audience, not a highly prioritized individual.
Opportunity: Understand how surveys feed into the wider customer journey – and use them accordingly.
How to make surveys work for you: 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 can be of benefit to both the brand itself and to its consumer base, building opportunities for feedback to be gathered that can then be implemented.
Autopilot Reviews is built with an awareness of both sides of the survey experience. It’s a customer experience tool that employees love, driving employee engagement and performance for your front-line employees. This powerful tool can save at-risk customers and enable self-correcting behavior, putting employees in the driver’s seat.
For the customer, Autopilot Reviews creates an exceptional customer experience, with 2-way text surveys doubling response rates and turning them into actionable insights. With direct insights into each of your customer’s individual experiences, you’ve got the tools you need to course-correct after a negative interaction, increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases and a loyal consumer base.
