Customer Survey Overload: Why Companies Flood Us With Endless Feedback Requests

I had seen my doctor and shopped online. Then I went on a European vacation that involved three airlines and three hotel stays. At any given moment, I was bombarded with dozens of requests for comment, often multiple times from the same company, on two or more aspects of the same interaction.

“How did we do it?” “How did the registration go? » “Evaluate your doctor!” » “Tell us about your flight!” » “What did you think of our dining offers in the Terminal 4 lounge? “How was check-in at your hotel?” » And that doesn’t include the little things with four facial expressions in airport restrooms that ask you to rank cleanliness by touching them. ENOUGH!!!

Americans have long been bombarded with customer experience surveys. But if you feel like things have gotten worse – much worse – in recent years, it’s not a figment of your imagination.

Last month, Qualtricsa software company that helps organizations collect feedback, says the total number of customer and employee interactions processed on its platform has doubled since 2023, and it now captures and analyzes more than 3.5 billion conversations and interactions per year. This includes surveys, but also call center conversations, chat logs, survey responses, social media posts and product reviews. According to research firm IBIS World, American companies will have spent $36.4 billion on market research this year, an expense that is increasing by nearly 4% per year.

“Survey fatigue is real,” says Brad Anderson, president of product and engineering at Qualtrics. He acknowledged that many emailed survey requests turned into spam, leaving people feeling overwhelmed. “It’s like the same brand bombarding an individual over and over again.”

And even though the average consumer is growing increasingly exasperated by the endless stream of feedback request emails, marketing experts say these tools don’t work particularly well. “If only all this email siege led to meaningful insights,” says Peter Fader, a professor at the Wharton School of Business and an expert in customer analytics. “But that’s rarely the case.”

For one thing, surveys tend to overindex on rants and praise: People are so exasperated by their interaction or by persistent, harassing emails that they might respond angrily. And when a consumer is satisfied with their product or service, they are much more likely to want to take a survey to give them the credit they are due. But the wide range of views between these strong opinions is much harder to grasp.

“You get a very skewed view, just because there’s an overload of surveys,” says Priya Raghubir, a marketing professor at New York University.

A Brief History of “Customer Obsession”

Asking customers what they like and don’t like after a transaction is of course nothing new. In the first half of the last century, as businesses expanded in the wake of the industrial revolution, they mailed standardized questionnaires en masse, refining search tools for gleaning information.

Then, by mid-century, focus groups, pioneered by sociologist Robert K. Merton, and more rigorous analysis of survey results, both qualitative and quantitative, allowed for much more sophisticated research. Most of the early adopters were in the consumer packaged goods sector.

At the turn of the 21^st In the last century, the industry saw the emergence of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), developed by Bain & Co consultant Fred Reichheld, as a benchmark metric, which many marketers still swear by. It measured consumer sentiment by asking a simple question: whether someone would recommend a brand to others. It became the gold standard, developing at the same time Amazon Then-CEO Jeff Bezos’ mantra – “We’re not obsessed with competitors, we’re obsessed with customers” – was becoming conventional business wisdom.

NPS was the first time customer feedback became a closely followed tool by the C-suite. Even today, executives love to present their NPS scores on calls with Wall Street analysts.

But in the age of e-commerce, in which you seem to have to give out your email address and create an account with any entity to complete the simplest transaction, from your neighborhood coffee shop and your favorite museum’s ticketing system to gigantic retailers and food delivery companies, the consumer feedback apparatus has shifted into high gear.

Brands know where to find you at all times, and every interaction seems to lead to a “How are we?” » email, all in the name of the sacred “deeper engagement” that is supposed to build customer loyalty.

Watch what customers do, not what they say

Practitioners and consultants say there are ways to reduce the overwhelming volume of emails people receive without losing any of the valuable information. Wharton’s Fader says brands should pay more attention to what consumers do and less to what they say.

“Actions speak louder than words,” says Fader. So instead of asking a busy traveler if they enjoyed an airport lounge, the airline can check to see if they returned to it on future flights. Businesses have enormous amounts of data from all their interactions with customers that, in theory, should allow them to understand their behavior at a granular level. This is a key factor in why companies put so much effort into their loyalty programs.

There’s also a risk in asking customers what they really think: they might actually tell you. NYU’s Raghubir gave a personal example of how this can backfire. Raghubir, who flies millions of miles for a major airline, says she is considering abandoning the carrier after her detailed, albeit pointed, comments in surveys were systematically ignored. “I raved and rambled – and there was radio silence on the other side,” she growled.

In the age of technological responsiveness, she said, surveys should have functionality to detect extreme customer dissatisfaction and alert a human on the customer experience team.

Don’t just ask for feedback; act accordingly

Indeed, making customers feel heard largely involves addressing their concerns, by doing something with the feedback gleaned from these ubiquitous surveys.

But many surveys take a one-size-fits-all approach, says Qualtrics’ Anderson. If a survey doesn’t focus on a customer’s particular experience or indicate whether the customer has been surveyed before, “Why should they take the time to complete the survey?” » said Anderson.

That’s where AI could make a difference, Anderson said. He sees a future in which surveys will provide more qualitative opinions and redirect irrelevant or minor comments. For example, if an airline customer wants to complain about the Transportation Security Administration’s screening process, Qualtrics’ technology can direct the digital investigation to explain that the airline’s security is beyond its control and link to the TSA feedback page.

Generative AI could also allow a survey to automatically add a few questions if the respondent has strong feelings about something. So if a traveler hates airport lounges, the survey might look for specific reasons, such as a lack of vegetarian options or a messy buffet. Qualtrics research shows that people are often happy to answer more questions if they feel like someone is paying attention to them and acting on their feedback.

AI already allows brands to integrate insights from calls, chats, reviews and social media to uncover trends. Given this trove of data and information that companies already have, says Vicki Morwitz, a professor at Columbia Business School, the surveys that companies send to consumers seem increasingly outdated.

“They could answer their questions,” she says, “without having to ask us.”