Tag Archives: customer irration

Thanks For Not Asking

In the unending quest to “provide better service” or “get to know the customer,” a similarly unending army of organizations is asking us (visitors, prospects, customers, former customers, and innocent bystanders) about our experiences, desires, preferences, and opinions.

In the good old days, surveys were limited by the expense of field interviewers, printing and postage, and most effectively by limits in processing and analytical capacity. That was in the age of Little Data.

Now, thanks to the likes of SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, ForeSee, Qualtrics, and so many more, anyone with a mouse and keyboard has a license to impose and irritate by survey. Without warning, they can and do open fire by text, email, robocall, and pop-up.

This ability to inquire is not inherently bad. In practice it is often the lazy marketer’s way to bother and alienate, while learning nothing useful in the bargain. Aside the common errors of badly worded questions in a badly designed format. The offenses of the survey happy fall into familiar categories.

They ask:

Too early – The prospects or new customers are asked about experiences they haven’t yet had. Visit the site of some organizations and after a few clicks a pop-up window will offer to survey you about your “experience” on site. This before you’ve found what you came for or bought what you came to buy, and were satisfied or frustrated.

Too often – Asking more frequently doesn’t yield better data. It may however be a measure of a flaying marketer’s attempt to address customer irritation and brand erosion.

Too much – As long as they’re at it, why not ask another question or two or twelve? Wouldn’t it be nice to know… I’m reminded of a nonprofit, on whose website I was making a donation. Their pop-up survey had 37 questions across multiple pages and all had to be answered before betting to the next page. The only alternative was to abandon their survey and their site.

Too vague Diffuse or inappropriate questions, which could not be reasonably understood, let alone answered .

All of these violations come before analysis and action on the data. When the response rates are low for all of the above reasons there is a tendency to abandon the study and compound the problem by trying yet again and perpetuate the whole silly cycle.

Marketers, unfortunately, lack the equivalent of a Hippocratic oath, viz., “first do no harm.”

A number of organizations do get this right. Consider a recent message to clients of the Vanguard Group. Rather than barging ahead, it included a button asking if they would answer two questions. Those who clicked, were presented with two and only two multiple choice questions.