Dying Surveys and Soulless Reports
Introduction
For years, we’ve faced challenges getting valuable insights and information from customers about their experiences — and later challenges packaging research outputs into formats appealing enough to drive stakeholders to act on the recommendations. We’ve thought a lot and read a lot about how to improve surveys and reports, but we’ve neglected the human being who will be interviewed or who will receive the report and use its results. Have you ever thought about how to make customer feedback collection a process that both field researchers and respondents engage with? Have you ever thought about the feelings of the person flipping through pages or slides of a report you spent a week — perhaps more — preparing meticulously, only for the recipient not to feel it? My article will revolve around these two questions.
I recently read a book titled:
Design-driven Feedback
This book helped me adopt a new perspective I had been blind to, despite working for years in a field that should have prompted me to look from that angle. I recommend it to anyone working in customer experience or marketing research. You can download the book for free here or buy it.
Facts
The process of gathering customer opinions and researching their experience has become cold and soulless, which has lowered the value of the outputs from such studies. I knew the reasons behind this — among them, the massive volume of surveys we receive from many sources, either for services we recently tried or from friends and colleagues doing research for their master’s or doctoral theses. Other reasons relate to the survey itself, when it’s poorly designed because its designer is unfamiliar with the basics of survey design. The time the respondent needs to complete the survey also plays a fundamental role in driving respondents to abandon it without finishing. The scientific term that addresses these details is “survey fatigue.”
Survey Fatigue [2]
This refers to different types of fatigue affecting people targeted by opinion polls: fatigue from the sheer volume of surveys reaching a person; fatigue from long surveys; fatigue from an unprofessional survey structure; fatigue from asking the same question in different ways; and the most dangerous type of fatigue — the kind tied to the respondent’s belief that their opinions don’t matter, for the simple reason that they’ve previously made the same suggestions and complained about the same problems multiple times without seeing any serious action from the service provider or product manufacturer.
If we reflect on what’s been said, we come back to the same point: all the reasons revolve around neglecting the human side of the process.
Surveys as a Touchpoint, Not Just a Data Collection Tool
Have you ever looked at the survey (which we usually treat as a data collection tool) as a touchpoint within the customer’s journey with your product? And that this interaction between provider and customer can leave a negative or positive impact on the relationship? The customer’s sense of our genuine desire to hear their voice greatly affects the quantity and quality of what they’ll share. If the customer doesn’t feel that, they won’t share enough — or, more accurately, they won’t share at all and will refuse to take the interview or fill out the survey.
Electronic surveys feel dry (human addressing a machine), and phone interviews conducted by untrained employees give the customer the feeling that there’s a parrot or a robot on the other end repeating questions mechanically, with no genuine desire to listen. This leads to negative impressions about the brand and, naturally, to inaccurate, misleading results.
Those who use surveys as a data collection tool have overlooked an important aspect: how the human being interacts with this process and how they view it from their angle. “The reason was that these requests — that is, requests to participate in a survey — failed to comply with deeply rooted social rules that have evolved gradually over countless generations.” (p.55, Source 1) What the author is trying to say, as I understand it, is that many things have evolved in human relationships but the tool itself hasn’t evolved enough. That’s why there’s a strong trend among providers of these services to make the process more interactive, more enjoyable, and perhaps motivating through game techniques — what’s called gamification.
Outputs That Focus Only on the Dark Side
Practitioners in marketing/market research and in customer experience have an involuntary tendency to focus on the dark side of the results — service or product negatives, dissatisfaction, and the quotations tied to them. Perhaps recipients of these reports don’t know that producers do this involuntarily, because they think all the requester wants is the things that can be improved. But if the people who produce these reports look from a different angle — viewing the outputs being shared with stakeholders as a touchpoint, and recognizing that the content and presentation of outputs can leave a negative or positive impact on stakeholders and affect their engagement with them — the way they prepare reports would change. The author says: “We pre-program humans to engage enthusiastically with outputs if we craft them brilliantly; but if we present them poorly, we pre-program them to resist.” (p.22, Source 1)
That’s why we need to reconsider how we design outputs and how we share them, reconsider their content and think about how the recipient (a human being, a stakeholder) will receive it. What feelings will they experience while browsing it? We must revisit pages or slides that triggered negative reactions from the recipient, ask them and understand why those feelings arose, and redesign in a way that fits the angle from which they view the report. We must understand that one report won’t suit everyone, and that report content must vary by audience. For example: the same report with the same structure and content cannot suit people at different management levels. We must look at recipients of these reports as customers who have a right to satisfaction or dissatisfaction, happiness or anger. We must be alert to the curse of knowledge and remember that the recipient may struggle to interpret the report’s content and understand it. Perhaps they’ve never handled a document containing charts and don’t even know how to read them. Perhaps they don’t know many of the technical terms that usually fill such reports. After all these prompts, has your view of the report changed? Have you successfully practiced empathy with the report’s recipient? I’m certain your answer is yes.
Conclusion: What’s the Solution?
The solution is to make the data-collection mechanism more like human interaction — and to look at the person being surveyed or the person receiving the report as a human, trying to see things from their angle. We may need design-thinking specialists to tackle this challenge that requires research and a solution to help us escape the rigidity that characterizes surveys and the reports built on their outputs. But beyond specialists, what we all must practice is empathy — putting ourselves in the place of the person targeted by the survey.
As for the outputs (reports), the author [1] recommends using storytelling techniques, because humans naturally love stories and find them hard to forget. He also advises brevity wherever possible — those who need to review these reports don’t have time to read a massive number of pages or slides; the best speech is brief and to the point. The content of reports must also balance negatives and positives, because focusing only on faults makes the recipient feel that all their efforts have been denied and that the focus was on failures (which is unfair in their view), even if the report’s preparer had good intentions. Hardest of all is to walk the main stakeholder through the report and listen to them and debate with them before finalizing it and sharing it with everyone else.
For related work, see Voice of Customer (VoC) and NPS, CSAT, CES.
Sources
[1] Design-driven Feedback by Max Israel [2] https://www.surveycrest.com/blog/survey-fatigue-101/
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