“Feedback is a gift,” a former boss used to tell me. “You can either accept it or not.”
It’s time for some feedback on feedback — the constructive kind, of course.
Over the past six weeks I’ve received a dozen or so emails from companies ranging from Apple to Zappos, stores where I made purchases during that time, asking me to “Tell us how we did!”
In many cases, they aren’t looking for pass/fail type of answer. They want detail. They want a review. And writing a decent review, one that’s worthwhile to another customer, takes time. Who has time for that?
I know from working with my clients that Customer Satisfaction (always capitalized) is a crucial measure for the business and a it’s a key part of many employees’ compensation.
But this consumer wants out of the stream of surveys and feedback requests for every pizza and burrito, Target or Home Depot run.
I also know that for the most part these surveys are automated and occasionally targeted, and that companies need to send surveys to a lot of people and hope 10 percent reply.
Sometimes the surveys just don’t make sense, given the detail and data a retailer already has about the order. I placed a couple of gift orders for Christmas in which I had the items sent to the recipient in another state.
A few days later, I was being asked how the item fit and a bunch of other irrelevant questions — irrelevant because I don’t have the item and might never lay eyes on it.
The obvious answer** is to just ignore these survey emails and I do, for the most part. If there’s a discount code or something of value on the other end of the survey (my grocery store offers fuel points for a completed survey) I will do it.
But completing a survey for a three-minute run into the Hallmark store to buy a card? That’s a hard no.
This ends my rant.
*Please don’t.
**Another obvious answer is to stop sharing my email address and giving these places permission to email me. Don’t tempt me.
Mike McClary 