Every now and then, the Federal Reserve will send me a survey. The last time I heard from the Fed, it was asking me about credit conditions for small businesses.
I didn’t answer it.
In the 10 years or so since hanging out a shingle, I’ve received many surveys from the Fed, but I don’t think I’ve ever completed even one. I may have looked at the first one or two, but I quickly realized it was long, complicated and time-intensive. I also discounted the impact my solo enterprise would make in the grand scheme of the $30+ trillion U.S. economy.
I’m not alone. And this is affecting more than just Fed surveys.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that an increasingly unresponsive public is taking fewer government surveys – and that’s undermining the data quality. Among the causes cited in the article were survey fatigue, distrust and apathy – that nothing will change as a result of providing such feedback.
Those issues are adversely affecting response rates:
“The share of survey participants who respond in time for the jobs report each month has fallen from an average of 74% from 2010-19 to 57% in August. Many respond by the second or third month, leading to large and growing revisions.”
This isn’t just a problem for government; it’s a problem for business too. I’ve conducted many surveys for clients and employers over the years, and getting responses is by far the biggest hurdle. It’s continuously gets harder, too.
The inbox deluge is real
A major driver of the the apathy for surveys is the volume of “output only” marketing. Customers are deluged with a variety solicitations. A single online purchase is rewarded with a pile of notifications:
- Sales confirmation email;
- Shipping email;
- Welcome email;
- Onboarding email(s);
- Join our loyalty program email;
- Donate to our cause email; and
- NPS emails.
Of course, unsubscribing from these unsolicited messages is a difficult feat. Even worse, these are commonly sent from “no-reply” email accounts.
With a nod to the idea that the medium is the message, I believe no-reply emails are a behavioral indication that businesses aren’t really interested in feedback. It’s digital equivalent of a face-to-face conversation, where your words are well-crafted, but your arms are crossed, face is frowning and your eye contact is non-existent.
Of course, it doesn’t stop there. You are further inundated with in-app solicitations. You get barraged with upselling pitches for additional features and events. There’s rarely a way to turn them off, or if there is, it’s temporary.
Still want that neural implant? Marketing will be glad to send in-app pitches directly to your cerebral cortex. Please blink twice if you are willing to take a survey later.
When you need help, it’s nowhere to be found
Conversely, when you need customer service, contact information is hard to find. It’s buried under a litany of common help desk articles that don’t answer your question. The chatbots can’t handle the nuance of your question and keeps recommending that same help desk article that didn’t actually help. When you are finally at your wits’ end and call the support line for help, you are routed through a time-wasting phone maze.
Then, while you wait for a real person, a synthetic voice tells you that your feedback is important, but the impersonal and repetitive nature says the opposite. Please stay on the line after the call ends to take a brief survey.
When you finally get a human on the phone, rather than being incentivized to solve the problem, they are incentivized to close the ticket as fast as possible.
When the ticket does close, the company sends a customer experience survey that narrowly surveys the interactions with the customer support representative (CSR), when really, you are satisfied with the entire experience.
I don’t typically answer these surveys as I worry the company will take it out on the CSR, when the reality is, they were the final stop on a long and frustrating journey. Frustrated customers may sound like they are upset with the CSR, when they are more accurately miffed with the whole process. And no person or team is looking at the end-to-end customer experience.
This desensitizes customers to the quality of the interaction they can expect to have with a company. It’s not just your company – it’s many of them, all at the same time – and over time, customers become less and less inclined to respond to feedback solicitations.
Ergo, your response rates crash.
Data shows what’s happening but not why
These experiences are fostering societal indifference toward feedback. Factor in the gluttony of spam emails, texts, robocalls and useless social media alerts telling you that two people recently looked at your profile and the torrent is overwhelming.
None of these addresses privacy concerns – the U.S. desperately needs a national data privacy law – or the flood of scams and phishing that are enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), and it’s getting worse by the day. By the time a business decides to collect real feedback from customers and prospects, they are beyond fatigued.
The result? Silence.
This is a big problem for businesses because they have no idea what customers are thinking. If you don’t know what people are thinking, you can’t plan ahead, you can only react, and that reaction is liable to be based on incomplete information.
That’s a blind spot that can leave a business vulnerable.
Take customer churn, for example, which is one of the biggest problems in SaaS today. A solid article in Martech points out that spreadsheets might tell you that churn is rising, but it doesn’t tell you why.
The only way to get that answer is to ask customers – but business has abused that ask – and customers are increasingly disinclined to provide it.
Business needs to be more deliberate about collecting feedback
Digital tools and automation have made it easy to solicit feedback, so the proportion of solicitation has grown. As in economics, the excess supply of feedback solicitations has chipped away at its value. It’s made the act of collecting feedback a routine, rote, low-level activity. Over time, customers and prospects have caught that vibe too, and this is where we landed.
The fix is for businesses to become more deliberate in collecting feedback and making sense of it. Below are some strategic and tactical recommendations.
Strategic suggestions:
- Put a person or team in charge and empower them to collect and represent the voice of the customer;
- Audit the ways your business collects feedback and analyze what they do with it;
- Treat every customer interaction as a two-way channel to collect feedback;
- Set feedback goals and develop a synchronized plan for feedback collection;
- Ensure the feedback process is comprehensive, obtaining perspectives on the brand, company, leadership, products, support and the overall market;
- Develop a unified approach to feedback so customers aren’t being hit separately by marketing, product and customer support;
- Ensure qualitative feedback is included so you understand the cause of a rating;
- Take time to demonstrate to customers and prospects how your business uses their feedback to make substantive changes for the better; and
- Periodically evaluate the entire feedback collection process to assess its value, new questions or make improvements.
Tactical suggestions:
- Use a variety of feedback techniques – digital and in-person – and qualitative and quantitative;
- Commission every employee as a sensor and offer an easy way for them to centrally share the signals they recieve;
- Look for ways to tag feedback onto existing programs – trade shows, customer conferences, webinars, newsletters, etc.
- Respond to customers who raise issues – nobody wants to share feedback in a void; and they won’t do it again;
- Question the viability of automating everything; and
- Remove those “no-reply” emails; at a minimum, collect the feedback and use generative AI to analyze the text for sentiment and trends.
Don’t put a machine between you and your customers
Technology provides many viable benefits that can accelerate, scale, and streamline a variety of business processes, including feedback. It’s fine to use them to assist with collecting feedback but businesses should be wary of overreliance. Technology cannot pick up on nuance or social cues – AI cannot read a room.
Overreliance risks diluting feedback and, as they say, garbage equals garbage out. So, don’t allow a machine to get between your business and the customer. Put real people on the task of collecting real feedback.
A version of this post was first published on Sword and the Script.
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