WSJ: Survey Research breeds Feedback Fatigue
Posted by Debra Semans on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 @ 10:00 AM
Last week (1/7/12), The Wall Street Journal reported on a phenomenon that they coined "feedback fatigue." According to WSJ, "With emailed appeals for comments on commonplace transactions and customer-service calls that beget requests to take a survey, consumers are being pinged for opinions at a rate that has gotten some publicly grousing about a surfeit of surveys."
The combination of do-it-yourself survey technology, social media and ecommerce has combined to make information about customers available to any sized firm. Additionally, it allows firms to reach out to consumers nearly constantly. Any contact, every transaction - and even lack of contacts - can trigger a request for feedback or information.
As a marketing research professional, this gives me several concerns. First is the shear number of bad surveys that are being conducted. Surveys that are too long, with badly designed questions, that frustrate respondents not only generate bad data, but also convince people to swear off completing any surveys. Response rate are already very low; what will happen if we continue to scare off potential respondents?
(From the WSJ article: Response rates have been sinking fast in traditional public-opinion phone polls, including political ones, said Scott Keeter, the Pew Research Center's survey director and the president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Pew's response rates have fallen from about 36 percent in 1997 to 11 percent last year, he said.)
As a customer satisfaction professional, I am delighted to see so many more companies attempting to collect information on the satisfaction of their customers. I believe this is a key metric of business health, and I believe that all businesses should do this on a yearly basis. Again, from the WSJ article, "... questionnaires have percolated into such professional settings as law firms and doctor's offices and become de rigeur for even everyday purchases." But with so many companies undertaking this effort on their own, I wonder how much value is actually being driven from this information.
And my final concern with this is the vast amount of information that is being given voluntarily through social media channels. As my friend and social media expert Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing and the Diva Marketing Blog asks: "Is the same thing happening with companies that conduct research under the guise of "crowd sourcing?" What has always bothered me about these platforms is people give freely of their intellectual capital without even a thank you or acknowledgement back ..most of the time."
As marketing researchers and marketers, we should keep in mind that survey and marketing research is a representation of our brand, our companies and impacts the way our customers and potential customers view us and their relationships with us. My rule of thumb has always been to collect only information that has a clear business action associated with it. And if the action is significant enough to justify research, you should spend the money to make sure the research is done correctly and that you get high-quality and reliable results.
These days, everyone CAN conduct marketing research. But it does not necessarily follow that they SHOULD conduct marketing research.
What do you think? Are you doing more or less marketing research - and why?
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