I took a short business trip recently and stayed overnight at a hotel at which I have previously stayed, not once but half a dozen or more times. I love the hotel. It’s great value, great location, and I recommend it to anyone I know who’s heading to that city without hesitation. After this visit, however, there arose a small issue.
They’ve joined the online customer service survey bandwagon.
A day after my stay, I received an email asking me to complete a short online survey. Being a fan of the hotel, I was happy to comply. For the first couple of screens, at least. But when the questions started drilling down into details like asking me to rate the lighting, the pillows, the muzak in the elevator, etc etc … I bailed.
About the same time, I took my car for an oil change. I went to the same dealership where I bought the car ten years ago and where I’ve been taking it two or three times a year every year since for routine service. In the past, service visits have been followed up by a simple email or phone call to check that things went well and that I was happy.
After this visit, however, I received an email invitation to complete an online customer service survey. Out of curiousity, I skimmed through some of it; it was pages and pages long, with dozens of detailed questions probing every possible nook and cranny of my ‘experience’.
I had an oil change, not a seat on Virgin Galactic’s first trip to the moon.
Now, I can see asking customers to complete a survey when they’ve undertaken a major financial transaction like buying a new car or getting a mortgage (that’s one I’d love to fill out …) because often there are a lot of factors at play and marketers want to know which specific ones may have helped seal the deal. I can understand asking a new customer for their impressions of a product or service they’ve tried for the first time: how did you find us / were your expectations fulfilled / etc. This can also offer valuable insight to the service / product provider. Surveys have their uses.
But what should be a sharp, precision guided tool is being used as a blunt instrument. It seems to have become standard operating procedure for businesses now to ask every customer to complete a survey after every encounter – no matter how small, routine, or repetitive. Buy a brace of 2×4’s at Home Depot or a can of motor oil at Canadian Tire and you’ll be asked to ‘fill out our online survey’.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m in marketing, and as such I understand the value of listening to your customers and seeking feedback on your products and services. But the current obsession with customer interrogation risks causing exactly the opposite effect to what is intended. Rather than being engaged and impressed, customers become irritated and turned off. This result is even more likely when, as in both my examples above, long time customers of proven loyalty are suddenly subjected to the third degree. They must know I’m happy; I keep coming back – so what’s with the inquisition all of a sudden?
Unless, of course, that’s not the point of the exercise at all…
There’s a lot of chatter in marketing circles these days about harnessing social media and predictive modelling and all kinds of other faintly Orwellian sounding tools to do a better job of selling you stuff. A base assumption to a lot of this thinking is that ‘the more we know about our customers, the better’. So firms of all kinds are hoovering up as much data as they possibly can about their customers to reach the critical mass of information that is generically termed ‘big data’. Firms aren’t sure yet how exactly to use all this information they gather, but in the short term they’re grabbing as much of it as they can. Hence the fixation with surveys and feedback forms and so on.
Bottom line: the driving force behind all this needy questioning is not so much about doing a better job for you, it’s just about selling you more. Think about that next time you sign up for a survey.
If companies are sincerely interested in how their customers feel about them, I’d offer two suggestions.
First, have a meaningful relationship with your customer (and this can be established on the very first visit). If you have a meaningful relationship and the customer is unhappy about something, they will usually tell you about it.
Second: use social media intelligently and strategically. Used properly, social media can enable you to scale your meaningful relationships to hundreds and thousands of customers. (Gary Vaynerchuk wrote the book on this. More here.) It is, of course, a double edged sword, because even if you aren’t using it (or using it intelligently) there is an excellent chance that your customers are, and they can use it to say bad things about you as well as good.
In our social media saturated age, companies have more channels than ever to communicate directly with customers, but customers have all those same channels to communicate directly with the world at large.
The best marketing is still word of mouth, and these days it carries further than ever before. Do right by your customers, and they’ll do right by you. Without being asked.
Literary footnote:
Dave Eggers’ The Circle is not what I’d call great literature, but it is an intriguing portrayal of our potential near future in which a company called The Circle – a fictional amalgam of Google, Facebook and Twitter – has pretty much monopolised online (and offline) life. Our heroine is hired to work in the Circle’s customer service department, where she fields enquiries from Circle users all over the world.
At the Circle, they’re very big on surveys. Every customer encounter is followed by a satisfaction survey. If the survey indicates a satisfaction factor of less than 95%, the customers service rep (CSR) is required to follow up with the customer and work to achieve a higher rating. It is not long before the customers are insisting that Circle’s CSRs undertake reciprocal surveys of their work / project / website / whatever, leading to a situation in which our heroine spends a great deal of her working life issuing, responding to, or completing online satisfaction surveys about the most trivial of matters. Nothing of consequence gets accomplished, but everyone feels listened to, and that’s just as important, right?