No, I Won't Answer Your Survey

I think I've mentioned this in passing before on this blog, and my friends and family have certainly heard me rant and rave about this. Survey culture is bad. The modern metric industry is driven largely by the business schools, who teach future executives that they can run any business- doesn't much matter what- so long as you have the data to make decisions. And so we are subjected to endless questions about how many stars you give any interaction with a customer service person, or how you liked the ordering process, or really anything the corporation feels it needs data about. All of this is to cover the lack of competent leadership.

Data is not a substitute for wise leadership, skin in the game, personal responsibility, and clear understanding of the business itself. In theory, asking your customers for feedback is a good thing, for perhaps they don't like something you do but won't take the time to tell you. But the reality of most businesses is that this data is only used to create a metric that sits on someone's spreadsheet, which then can be used to justify activities that benefit middle management.

Let's take customer service response times. Is cutting the response time from an average of 5 minutes to 3 minutes good? Good for whom? If "good" means customers simply wait less time for acceptable service, then the answer might be yes. But if "good" means some manager gets a bonus for "improving customer service", and his actions to bring this about involve farming all customer service to slave-wage Indian support companies and the quality of service declines significantly, then the answer is most probably no.

If you have purchased a car from a dealership in the last decade, the last thing the salesperson probably asks you to do is give them a perfect score on the inevitable survey that the manufacturer will send you. They will tell you directly that if you answer even one question less than perfect, they and the dealership itself will be penalized by the manufacturer. Why is this the case? Because the people who run the car companies have no idea what is happening at the independent dealerships that sell their products, and some battery of middle managers have their compensation tied to "customer satisfaction with the dealership experience." So if they can point to surveys in which 100% of customers indicate they were completely satisfied, these middle managers get their bonuses and can claim ignorance when third-party surveys indicate a reality much different.

The other big driver of this survey mania is the demands of Wall Street. While raw sales performance and future profitability are the main interests of investors, boards of directors and fund managers will often require customer satisfaction data, to prove that the executive team in place is "taking care" of the customer. "In Q3, our customer service response times went from five minutes to three," sounds like things are improving for the customer, and future sales may increase as a result.

In my own job, among other duties I am partially responsible for managing tech support across our enterprise. Do I know that we could be better at our response times in certain cases? Yes indeed, I take this seriously. But I know this not because we send out a survey every time we close a support ticket, but rather because I make it a point to ask people- from directors to people working on the shop floor- if we are doing a good job and how we can improve. I ask my techs how things are going, who's upset or frustrated and why. It is part of my job to know these things and make decisions to correct them.

I hope I am never in a position where I have to rely on automated automated, impersonal surveys to know if I'm doing right by my employer, employees, coworkers, and customers.

A final anecdote, recalling the situation with car dealers I mentioned above. My latest interaction with a dealership wasn't 100% satisfactory, in fact it was bad. They ordered my car in the wrong configuration and so I had to wait an extra two and a half months to get it. My salesman asked me, ruefully, to go easy on him when I got the survey from Lincoln Motor Company. The dealership was already in hot water with the manufacturer because of the misplaced order, and they probably lost real money because of it. I didn't tell them that I wasn't going to answer the survey, regardless of the short, satisfying meanness I would feel. It was hard not to, but in the end I am thankful for being spared this small sin.