Yet Another Useless Customer Survey
I’m on the phone right now with my bank, doing a “post transaction” survey. I always take these – what researcher doesn’t? And once again I’m annoyed. What has my bank learned from doing this survey? As far as I can tell, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
The purpose of my call to the bank was to get that number you need so someone can wire you money. Let’s see how the “post transaction” survey went:
- A question about the banker I talked to. He was just lovely. I asked my question badly, because I forgot the name for that number (routing? IBAN? something like that), but got an answer right away. Gave him a high number. Good so far.
- Wait, aren’t you going to ask me about the experience of getting to my lovely banker? Do you care that it took three calls and five minutes to get to the 30 second conversation? Apparently not. No questions about that.
- Now a question about the range of services offered by my banker. No idea. I only asked him one question. He answered it well. I can’t answer this question, but “don’t know“ is not an option on this survey. I can only choose “1=unacceptable through 5=excellent.” Where’s the N/A? Do I say “excellent” since I liked him and don’t want to get him into trouble? What if his bonus is based on this survey? But that will be misleading in the analysis. I could give a 3 to at least not skew the averages much, or just hang up. Or do I give him a 5 because I liked that he didn’t try to sell me anything else after he answered my question? I’ll just give a 4 to split the difference.
- What? We’re done? Where is my “If you’d like to leave any other comments please visit www.bank.com/survey” so I can tell them about the last question. How difficult is it to have a form for follow up in this day and age?
I will stop now before I begin ranting, but once again I feel like today’s ease of implementing surveys on web sites and telephone is causing some of the worst market research that has ever happened, and in the process annoying people who might stop doing surveys that are actually well designed and will drive better business practices.
10 comments
This has been one of my main pet peeves for years!! I always wonder who in the marketing department takes this data and how the heck they even “tell a story” with it? What could the story even BE with these few questions? Seems like it was just a monitor to check to see if their people are upselling the heck out of the customers and that’s it. Thus, Sales tracking does not equal Market Research, but alas, that’s what they’ll call it, MR.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeffrey Henning and DimensionalResearch, superdadATL. superdadATL said: Great example of survey disconnect…RT @JHenning RT @DimensionalR: Yet Another Useless Customer Survey! http://bit.ly/bKujiB #MRX [...]
Great, entertaining post! And we completely feel your pain:
http://bit.ly/aRA6k6
Hi Diane.
Here goes: I used to work in a Bank. For many years. During my penance, I spent some time in the Marketing Dept that conducted many customer research initiatives, most of which were outsourced to external market research companies (none of this was my responsibility thankfully – I just got to see the outputs). One of the things that was consistently fed back by Business Customers was that they felt that ‘My Banker (relationship manager) doesn’t understand my Business’. This consistently came out as THE Number 1 bugbear for that demographic with well over half ’strongly agreeing’. This was the case for ALL banks, not just mine.
So far so good. What happened next? Banks did one of 2 things: 1. Took the problem in-house and tried to address it (Result: Little change) or 2. Requested the external agency to come up with some solutions (Result: No change and a lot of moolah spent poorly on external consultancy).
So, where does this lead us to? Market Research (along with many other disciplines that have become industries) is often advertised as a solution. This of course is not the case. The results of Market Research should inform solutions/initiatives most of which (in my experience) will need other external inputs – but from experts in other fields (eg. T&D, change management, IT) and not the Market Research agency. Where, I feel, there is a gap which could be exploited for differentiation, is in the ‘partnerships’ or collaborations that Market Research agencies could form in order to deliver better and more compelling solutions to Companies. The feedback & insights gathered over time by agencies should inform where the best solutions should come from and therefore, where collaborations should be sought.
I always find these types of surveys very similar to tipping in some restaurants when you feel you need to ask questions before you can “award” on the scale. Like – who actually gets the tip? The waiter that offered you great service and knew not to come ask you how things were when the fork was just going into your mouth? Or do they have to share it with the bus boy that slopped water all over the table and the chef that couldn’t cook the meat to a well done no matter how many times you sent it back?
Sometimes there just needs to be clarification. And most times you don’t get any. Maybe it’s time to introduce the ‘customer satisfaction with the customer satisfaction survey’ survey.
Robert, what a great example from the “other side of the glass”. Thanks.
A-mazing! I actually got to design a follow-up survey for our printing company not too long ago, and I had a very, very hard time coming up with questions that weren’t going to warrant a N/A from a large percentage of our customers-but you’d better believe that our comments box is wide open!
I recently received a market research call regarding the November elections in my state. The caller mispronounced the name of one of the candidates. She also wanted to know for whom I was going to vote for governor. The problem is the candidates she mentioned are running for senator. (The governor isn’t up for re-election for another two years.) When I pointed this out to here, she informed me that if I had read yesterday’s news, I would know that these candidates are running for “both.” I ended up hanging up.
Anyway, to tie this anecdote back into the post, I wonder how valuable this market research could be in such a situation, where the caller can’t relay the name of the candidates to voters (who may not know either) and who doesn’t know the difference between a senator and a governor. Probably the answer is not very valuable at all.
Henry, that story is CLASSIC!!! And yet somebody paid that person to call and talk to you. Unbelievable!
Robert,
Thanks for bringing up the need of partnership between research vendors and clients. I wish there were more clients thinking like you. For more on this subject check this post: http://www.relevantinsights.com/market-research-vendors-and-clients-as-partners
Diane, great post!
Leave a Comment