Last night I received via email a survey invitation from a national Telecom provider, administered by a well-known global market research firm. The email itself was very apologetic for the experience I had and said everything a proper email invitation should. As I’m reading through it in more detail this morning, I’m thinking about my experiences and with this Telecom and decided that I would share my feedback. As a customer experience advocate, I enjoy sharing my experiences particularly when it may contribute to improving that experience for myself and others.
“We value your feedback.”
-Email invitation from national Telecom
When I clicked on the link to share my honest feedback, in the hopes it will indeed provide value to the provider, to my amazement all I saw was the branding of the global MR firm and a message that stated:
“This survey is now closed.”
That’s it. My feedback is no longer valuable.
To be clear, I received the email at 9pm last night and went to take the survey at 8:30am this morning. There is no language that the survey invitation expired. It just closed… they don’t need my feedback. Now as a fellow researcher I can only assume that the survey is now closed because the MR firm reached some preset quota, but it begs the question of what the survey invitation really is.
Yes, to a researcher a survey is a measurement. It’s a data point. I’m assuming this company had a preset target of how many “data points” they needed. But the flip side to that is that I, as the customer, now feel like just a “data point.” MY feedback is indeed NOT valuable to this particular organization because I wasn’t one of the first 500 to click the link.
As a customer, I view this as a touchpoint. This organization values my feedback, and I was more than willing – even happy – to provide it to them. I had a bad experience, and this company wants to listen to me. That’s at least some consolation. But now they slammed the door on me and teased me with their offer to listen. That makes me even that much more dissatisfied with this company.
As you can probably take away from this, I’m pretty adamant that surveys are not just a measurement tool but are an important customer touchpoint. I, however, have seen far too many instances where they are not treated as such. So I’ll close with a few questions to my fellow researchers, as I’m most interested in varying perspectives:
Do you close out web surveys once you’ve reached a quota? Why or why not?
If so, how do you address a customer like myself who wanted to participate?
Are surveys measurement tools or customer touchpoints?
Brian Backer is an experienced consultant in Customer Experience measurement, insights, and management. As a Director at CFI Group, Brian and his team consult blue chip organizations in optimizing customer satisfaction and loyalty, utilizing customer metrics to drive process improvements that deliver positive ROI.