Nobody Cares What Your Company Wants

Many of us have been singing the virtues of the Internet for awhile as a great way to interact with customers and have them interact with companies. It's also no great secret that the Internet provides a tangible way to measure certain categories of success, even if achieving that success is difficult. Given that difficulty, why is it some companies are still making it harder for customers to interact with their websites regularly?

This weekend, I took the family out to eat at a popular chain restaurant that had just set up a new location. We had stopped going to this chain because the one that is closest to us has delivered us poor service time and time again, but we figured this new spot might be different.

Gladly, it was. However, the experience I had previously at this chain was so bad that a vast improvement raised it to the level of merely "average." Still, I was happy enough to respond to an Internet survey advertised on my receipt. Whereas I'm a firm believer that we always can vote with our pocketbooks, from time to time it's helpful to get direct feedback from customers about their experience. Not all feedback should be given in the form of a complaint.

The problem came a few steps into the survey. Most of the value questions had answers ranging from "Poor" to "Excellent." I considered my experience just "Good," (which, stupid me, I thought was acceptable) so I started putting that down. It was apparent that whoever designed the survey wanted to find out why someone's experience was anything less than, "Very good," because any time I gave an answer of anything less, they punished me by making me explain why.

It didn't help that the survey was too long to begin with and had no predetermined number of questions or steps that would help me know how long it would be before I could finish. By step 6, I wished I never decided to take the survey.

Fine! Fine! It was "Very Good." Will you stop asking now?

Your company's website
A few times I've asked why it is that any particular client would ask for personal and identifiable details at an early stage of the relationship. The answer I always got was, "Because we want that information. It will help us know how to sell to them better."

Pardon me for saying so, but you didn't answer the question. You told me what you want, not why your customers should care. Have you considered that your customers haven't been convinced at this point that it will help them? Structure your site correctly, and you don't even have to ask. Just suggest based on their behavior in a way that protects their privacy.

Companies don't do it because it's harder to build an intelligent site than it is to ask questions in a survey. Unfortunately, the way the questions are asked and when they are asked do affect the answers or the adoption rates -- regardless of what the companies may want. - Cam Beck

Comments

[mvellandi]

This is where the clear need for testing and improvement through better design come in.
I received a survey from Cox communications I'll have to post later, that could have reduced the number of questions in half had they thought a little more about ME. The offer for a $5 Starbucks card didn't make me want to write/comment any better, if the questions were irrelevant.

[Cam Beck]

Mario - I look forward to reading it. A $5 gift card just seems so small compared to fifteen minutes of wasted time, doesn't it?

[Lewis Green]

Great post Cam. You can just imagine most of my client faces when I tell them customers don't care what you want and seldom care what you think (unless you are a consultant). Their expressions seem to say, "How can you think that? Our products and services are the best in the world." Oh yeah! Who says? Why most everyone, of course, about their products and services. Um. See something wrong with that picture?

[Matt Dickman]

Cam -- Your point is right on. It's not what you want as a company, it's how you deliver value on the information your customers provide. I wrote a post in March called "Use it or lose me" (http://tinyurl.com/2adbpv) and my point was that asking for information from a customer so you can check something off a list is a cardinal sin. Each piece of information a site collects should benefit the user. If I give my name I expect to be greeted. If I give my zip code I want targeted ads/content. It's not about you it's all about me!

The other sin is not listening to my answers per your survey example. If you're really an improvement/value-focused organization, it should almost be easier for people to tell you bad things than good. People with good things to say will go out of their way. People with bad things to say get frustrated and leave. Listen and learn I say.

[Cam Beck]

Maybe I'm just delusional, but I think that if the company that designed the survey just asked, "If you could change ONE THING about your recent visit to our restaurant, what would that be?", the insight they could glean from that would far outweigh the aggregate data generated from the survey that practically begs people to lie.

[Paul McEnany]

So right on. How much trouble do they really expect their customers to go through when they get no benefit from it? Ridiculous.

[Valeria Maltoni]

I get surveys from professional associations I belong to all the time and some often crash at the very end. The ones by the American Marketing Association seem to be the worst. Aside from the Thank you at the end, I have not gotten one follow up to any of them.

I blogged about a phone survey at FC Experts http://blog.fastcompany.com/experts/vmaltoni/2007/01/do_you_have_a_minute.html