Nearly all customer experience (CX) measurement and voice-of-the-customer (VoC) efforts use customer surveys. But your surveys are costlier than you think. Obvious costs include the budget for a tech vendor you use to send and analyze surveys or incentives for customers.

Hidden costs are more problematic because we don’t consider them enough. They arise when surveys:

• Squander customers’ attention, time, and goodwill.
• Deplete stakeholders’ time and ability to make customer-focused good decisions.
• Waste your own time on reporting data that people don’t act on.

In this blog, I’ll focus on the first issue. If you prefer to listen rather than read, check out our CX Cast Episode, “Feedback Is A Touchpoint, Too.”

Surveys Squander Customers’ Attention, Time, And Goodwill

Consider these three major problems with surveys as they are today:

Surveys Consume Customer Attention

Your business can only survive if customers read, consider, and respond to your marketing emails, offers, campaigns, information, etc. You also need customers to take part in research so you can understand their future needs. Using some of that limited attention on a survey is absolutely worth it if the survey is good and brings you valuable data. But are most surveys? No.

Growing efforts to collect zero-party data to feed firms’ personalization efforts and the wider martech stack will make this even worse: More firms will reach out to customers, asking them about their preferences and wishes.

Surveys Undermine Customer Relationships

You risk seeming like you don’t know customers and don’t care about them. My bank asked me in a CX survey which credit card I own and how often I use it. The credit card provider knows both of those things — maybe the CX team cannot connect the data, but asking me these questions undermines my trust in my bank.

Surveys Add A Negative Touchpoint To Customer Journeys

In addition to the problem of making customers feel unseen, firms optimize surveys for easy analysis and for which questions various departments want to ask. As a result, they usually are a longish interrogation that doesn’t flow well and includes selfish questions or questions that customers don’t care about. And in many current surveys, the design still resembles a web form from the 2000s. If you have read your Kahneman (and I know many of you have), you will also realize that the survey touchpoint comes toward the end of the broader customer experience that the survey is about. So a bad survey is doubly problematic because the peak end rule tells us the end of an experience matters a lot to how customers remember the experience. If they like the branch visit but hated the survey, that will worsen memories of the overall experience!

Design Feedback As A Touchpoint

We need to follow six principles, all under the motto of “design feedback collection as a touchpoint,” if we want to strengthen relationships, be able to capture customer attention, and create good experiences rather than bad ones.

1. Rethink Surveys As Conversations

Surveys should be designed to mimic natural, engaging conversations rather than interrogations. This approach involves creating a flow where questions are logically ordered and relevant to the customer’s experience.

If you have conversational design experts at your company, get their recommendations on how to make the survey feel more like an engaging dialogue.

If you do nothing else, read the survey aloud to someone who matters to you (your boss, wife, first date). This simple exercise can reveal issues with wording and flow that may not be apparent on paper. If the survey is embarrassing or feels tedious to you, it’s likely your customers will feel the same. Don’t expose your customers to it.

2. Don’t Just Say You Value Customers’ Feedback — Prove It

If customers gift you their time to give feedback, you are now responsible! You must make sure to give back. Customers want to know their input is valued and acted upon. Share examples of tangible changes made based on previous feedback. You can do that in one-to-many conversations or even in your next survey invite, as you see in this example. This not only encourages participation but also enhances the customer experience by reinforcing their importance in shaping the brand’s direction.

As discussed, organizations often have internal pressures to include numerous questions in a survey, which can overwhelm customers. Highlight the opportunity cost of using customers’ time for unnecessary questions to streamline surveys and respect customers’ input and time.

3. Pre-Test To Avoid Confusion And Ambiguity

Pre-test the survey with real customers or employees outside the project team. Many organizations think of A/B tests, and while those are important, you need to do more. You also cannot just ask respondents if they understand the questions. Instead, ask them to restate the questions in their own words. This practice helps uncover potential misunderstandings and ensures clarity.

For example, when asking a question like, “Was our communication good?” respondents restating it tells you if they interpret this as the effectiveness of language, the overall communication process, or something else. Only if you identify these variances early on can you avoid confusion and gather more accurate and useful data.

4. Match Survey Content And Timing

I was recently invited to a radio interview on surveys by Marketplace, a US public radio broadcast covering business and the economy. The host Dan told the story of how he bought tomato seeds at Home Depot and got a survey about the purchase before he was even able to sow them, much less eat the fruits of his labor. Check out Dan’s interview with Fred Reichheld, two other experts, and me.

You can still send a survey right away, but limit yourself to things the customer can judge — like how easy it was to buy the tomatoes. And focus on things you want to change in that moment.

In addition, collect feedback after the customer achieves the goal of their journey. Only then will you get customers to reflect. These insights form the customers’ “remembering self” which influences customers’ future decisions.

5. Match The Survey Format To Your Relationship With Customers

Imagine your significant other wants to know what you think of your relationship. Do you still love your significant other? Are you committed to the relationship? Are there any issues you want to bring up?

Now imagine that your significant other sends you an online survey with five rating questions and a comment field. I am guessing you’d be unamused — rightfully so. Common sense says that for something as important as your relationship, you two should sit down and have a heart-to-heart about this.

This is the analogy I used in a recent blog to describe that the way we collect feedback doesn’t match the relationship we have (or hope to have) with customers. For example, in B2B, with hundreds rather than tens of thousands of customers, Amdocs changed its feedback approach to focus on interviews. I am not telling you to lay off the online survey entirely, but you must decide where to deploy it and where to avoid it like the plague.

6. Manage Surveys Alongside Other Customer Communication

Most companies don’t manage surveys in a feedback silo. Customers may be overwhelmed when they receive too many communications at the same time because there is no coordination. And it means that you don’t judge whether a survey is the right touch toward a customer right now. Integrating surveys into your overall communication strategy means integrating your feedback and your martech stack and collaborating with stakeholders to create rules around which communications take precedent when. Start by asking your marketing departments to understand how surveys fit into other communications of your brand.

Thank you for reading. If you are a Forrester client, please get in touch to discuss further. And follow me on LinkedIn for more insights.