“The report of my death was an exaggeration.” – Mark Twain
Admit it. Sometimes you hate them. Surveys, I mean. They interrupt your web-browsing sessions, elongate your grocery receipt, accost you in digitized tones after telephone tech support, fill your email inbox after every purchase and accompany pleas of “please give me all high ratings or I’ll be fired” after home improvement installations.
As VoC / CX practitioners, we have a unique love-hate relationship with surveys.
As Customers
As consumers and B2B partners in our day-to-day lives, we experience surveys as pesky and intrusive. Those of us with professional survey design experience cannot resist evaluating survey structure and methodology as we reply: This survey is too long, the flow is off, the scales vary, the language is unclear, the attributes double-barreled.
Yet, even as we gripe, we know surveys empower us to participate in a type of formalized capitalistic democracy, essentially casting our vote for service performance, product features and service options. Along with alterations in buying behavior, direct contact to a company (compliments and complaints) and social media, modern consumers (B2C) and business partners (B2B) are empowered like never before to make their voices heard loud and clear.
As VoC / CX Pros
In our professional lives, surveys are an indispensable tool in our enterprise voice arsenal. When combined with operational data, business performance metrics, social media chatter and other less-structured forms of customer voice (e.g. call center logs, online comment cards, in-bound emails and letters), survey results form the critical foundation of a rich and robust voice of the enterprise choir.
Still, there are voices all around us telling us that surveys are dying, to be quickly replaced solely by social media and big data. Now, I suspect we will see an end to the tsunami of ad-hoc surveys, amateur surveys (thankfully), and survey-for-every-conceivable-event polls. However, as enterprise voice programs replace quantity with quality, we will see shorter, more targeted surveys.
An Incredibly Robust Enterprise Voice
The survey will be more focused and strategic, and we will see less of it. But love it or loathe it, the survey lives on. Far from leaving town anytime soon, the survey will take its place as a solid, battle-tested accoutrement to “big data,” and the resulting insights will bring dramatic change to open-minded organizations with an appetite for change.
Sarah is right. Surveys live on. Soon we will see more surveys conducted on mobile devices, as well. Because users are on-the-go and the devices have smaller screens, surveys will have to be more streamlined and more user friendly.
Ruth Winett
Ruth, thanks for stopping by and reading my post. I agree that the feedback world is finally ready for mobile and that we, as survey researchers, need to be ready to optimize our surveys for this mobile medium.