Annoying Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Published 1 year, 4 months ago in travelI travel a lot for work. A lot.
That means I stay at lots of hotels. And rent cars. And take lots of flights…
And I really hate getting customer service satisfaction surveys from these companies. You know why? Because I don’t get anything out of taking the survey. Ever.
Here’s an example:
From: invite_doubletree@medallia.com
Subject: Your recent stay at Doubletree
Date: May 22, 2007 3:10:29 AM CDT
To: John EnglerDear John Engler,
We were delighted to serve you during your recent stay at Doubletree. We realize that you have a choice in hotel properties, and we appreciate your business.
As a valued HHonors member, your feedback is important to us. We invite you to take a few minutes to complete a survey about your stay at Doubletree Washington, where you checked out on May 18, 2007.
To view the survey, please click on the web address below. If that does not work, please copy and paste the entire web address into the address field of your browser.
http://doubletree.medallia.com/H.pl?b=1&ID=12345678&lopt=eng
Your comments are very valuable to us, and we look forward to hearing about your stay with us.
Sincerely,
Dave Horton
Senior Vice President
Doubletree
Gee, thanks Dave. Note very valuable to us. Emphasis is mine above. How valuable are they Dave?
I ask, because your stupid survey will take me 7-10 minutes to complete, according to your survey intro page:
Seven to ten minutes ?!?!?! Give me a break!
Do you know how busy I am? Can you compensate me for my time to take this survey? Give me some extra airline miles, or hotel points, or car rental credits? Maybe upgrade me to the next level of your loyalty program for my next stay at your hotel, or give me an upgrade if you’re an airline, or a car rental company?
I’m asking for this compensation because I’ve a) already paid you a lot for the hotel room that I stayed in from midnight (late flight) until 7 a.m. You already charged me $6 for the bottle of water I drank, and $4 for the snickers bar I ate (because there wasn’t a restaurant in the hotel), and b) 10 minutes of my time is worth a lot to me.
Make it worth it to me to fill out this survey and I’ll do it. Otherwise, if I had a problem at the hotel, I already dealt with it with the hotel manager on duty… and he probably got yelled at in the lobby in front of all your other guests.
If you really want my feedback, make it worth it for me to give it to you.
(And yes, I got this same survey form from Avis for this most recent trip, and the same comments apply to them too, and to every other hotel that’s ever asked me for my comments).
If you really want my feedback, compensate me for my time somehow.
5 Responses to “Annoying Customer Satisfaction Surveys”
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I agree 100%. These surveys are all too long, too repetitive, and often seem to have no impact on the hotel. I rarely receive any kind of follow-up when I rate something poorly. (Kimpton Hotels are the exception to this.)
Customer satisfaction surveys are valuable for making informed business decisions, whether your customers are internal or external. Internal satisfaction surveys can assist in streamlining processes and decision-making. Any organization that wants to gather feedback about their services and products from their customers can benefit from customer satisfaction survey software.
The information these companies get back from the survies are very important to the structure of the company. No matter how time consuming these survies are they do ultimately have a good purpose (even if you don’t see direct changes). They remind me of the teacher analysis surveyes you got every year for every teacher, very repetitive but I good way to speak your mind!
These surveys are good for the company, but it would be nice to get something back. It is funny that if you hate doing the survey, you are probably not that happy with the whole service, but if you give someone a goody for completing the survey their opinions might become biased!
I think the least they could do is provide a coupon as an incentive to 1. have you as a repeat customer and 2. compensate you for your time.