Random Thoughts – Randocity!

While I understand the need to ask for surveys or ratings or whatever after a purchase or talking to a sales or service rep, but give us a friggin’ break constant hounding. Flat out, I am not doing them any more.

Wasted Time

It seems that more and more places want to request surveys after having an interaction. Either they want vocal surveys over the phone after the call, place links on receipts or they want to send long and torturous Survey Monkey surveys. Worse, they are getting longer and longer and longer.. Worse, they’re getting to be so in-your-face with these requests now. These requests are way overreaching….and I’m not going to do any of them.

Yes, I’ll do them if I have a bad experience, but other than that, suck it up. I’m not doing it. So, don’t send me 2, 3 or 4 ‘reminder’ emails that I need to go and do it. Give it a rest. I’m not doing it. Worse, if you keep sending me these emails, I’m highly likely to mark them as spam, which isn’t going to help your email reputation. So, give that reminder thing a rest!

No intention of doing surveys

As the title says, not doin’ it. It’s a waste of my time to do these long survey forms that don’t really help me in any substantial way. If you want me to participate in your survey, why not give me an incentive? Like money off my next bill or a coupon for money off my next purchase? Seriously, how hard is it? If you really want me to do it, give me an incentive to do it. I’m not here to run your business for you. That’s your job. My feedback is likely to be tossed anyway. So, that 15-20 minutes I just spent on your behalf is a total waste of my time. If you want me to do them, then give me a substantial reason.

Bad service = bad review

On the flipside, if your service is awful, expect a bad review. So, you might not want to ask for them. Of course, if you actually intend to make your service better, then by all means ask. Not that I’m going to fill out a survey if the service is good. It just frustrates me when I fill out a survey and submit it to a company that has no intention of changing (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, et al).

I get the reason for asking for these surveys, but let’s end this trend. Let’s figure out a way to get what you need in another way. Surveys don’t provide you with what you need anyway. You may think they do, but they don’t. In the end, they don’t work to improve things and, in many cases, fall on deaf ears. So, they’re pointless. For this reason and the lack of incentive, I’m not doing any future surveys and will decline them every chance. I also plan to start marking them as spam at every turn. So, I’d seriously suggest businesses start being much more careful when sending after-the-fact emails asking for completion of surveys.

Bottom line… no survey for you.