Foot in the door can lead to foot in the mouth

Organizations should often get relevant feedback from customers, clients, or audiences. Increasingly though, it seems every time I transact with a firm, I get a follow-up message asking me to evaluate the experience. This could provide useful information to the offering organization, improve its service, and even strengthen the provider client relationship.

In practice, it usually does none of these. All too frequently, the survey, questionnaire, or interview becomes a license to pile on reams of tangential or irrelevant questions. They seem to figure as long as you’ve clicked a respond button, they have a license to ask all sorts of questions in lengthy detail. In this age of Big Data and machine learning they seem to think, why not bulk up a data store? Some time, they may even try to analyze it and discover amazing insights.

Case in point – calls to technical support. Take, Adobe (please). After receiving what passes for “support,” you get a message asking you to “take a moment to let us know how we’re performing.” After the fourth or fifth screen of increasingly detailed yet irrelevant questions, you may feel taken advantage of. As, I suspect, many other customers did; I closed the window and abandoned the survey.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are, firms such as Blue Host. As you are being queued to speak with a support specialist, a recording tells you that if you wish, you may stay on after the call and answer a single question. The one question rates the service, similar to a Net Promoter Score.

It should be obvious to organizations, which abuse the privilege of asking customers for feedback, that they compromise both their customer relationships and the quality of their data. Apparently the part of the organization doing or commissioning the research is not the part, which lives with the consequences of irritating customers.

Some firms are not content to let the memory of bad service badly engineered fade but send “Friendly reminders” to customers who don’t want to waste yet more time by responding to surveys.

This should not be a difficult problem. It does require the organization to think about what information it should collect. Would it be able to act on such information to produce some improvement noticeable to clients? If not, think again before clicking that send button.