The names we give them vary from company to company: rogue, unofficial, unsanctioned, ghost, one-off. Voice of Customer (VOC) experts appreciate the power of a neat customer feedback strategy. But in many organizations, there is no central authority governing how, when and why customers are surveyed.
When your customers are surveyed in a disjointed, illogical and inconsistent manner, both your VOC initiative and your customer relationships suffer. Some examples include:
Over-Contact
- With no method of controlling the frequency of contact, customers are overburdened with survey invites, especially highly sought-after research participants.
- Furthermore, lack of a survey contact strategy can lead to over-representation of certain respondents or response segments, skewing results.
Poor Design
- When non-researchers send surveys, they may unfortunately make rookie mistakes that reflect badly on your company and weaken your brand. These missteps may include:
- Simple operational mistakes like lack of quality assurance review that lead to dead-end links and spelling errors.
- Use of a rudimentary survey design tool or lack of access to graphics and branding expertise, resulting in a survey that looks “cheap” and doesn’t positively promote the brand.
Questionable, Scattered Data
- Lack of survey design experience can result in methodologically weak surveys that yield data of suspicious validity and water down overall VOC data quality.
- Variations in survey design, for instance differences in scale, mean results across the organization are incomparable and sometimes contradictory.
- Data stored throughout multiple databases is difficult to locate, share and leverage.
It’s frustrating for a VOC expert to know rogue surveys are compromising your VOC initiative and your brand voice. You may feel helpless in countering these negative forces, but you’re not.
Here are two methods you can employ to bring this matter under control.
Central Command
If unsanctioned surveys are a serious detriment to your VOC initiative in particular and your relationship to the customer overall, it may be time to announce “no more Mr. Nice Guy” and take control with a firm hand. Establish ground rules for surveying customers (who, what, when, where and why) and communicate these rules. Let it be known that your team and your team alone owns the process of gathering feedback from your customers and that all surveys, no matter the size or scope, need to be approved by your team to ensure adherence to your VOC strategy, methodology and sampling plan.
Best Practices Consultation
Perhaps resource constraints or corporate culture make a collaborative, consultative approach more appropriate. Proactively offer your expert services of survey design, survey media/method selection and sampling and contact frequency planning to your coworkers. Communicate to them that you have a VOC strategy in place that you would like them to follow and work with them in a positive, constructive fashion as internal clients to guide them to feedback program design excellence.
A good VOC initiative has set objectives in place and a plan to meet these objectives. Rogue surveys undermine your strategy by squandering valuable customer feedback opportunities, collecting data that does not map back to VOC objectives and polluting your data. While the approach taken to control wayward feedback initiatives will vary from one organization to the next, there is no better time than the present to bring rogue surveys to heel.




