Editorial
The Gist
- Survey begging exposed. Survey begging harms customer experience by making interactions awkward and imposing, leading to unreliable feedback.
- Flawed feedback. Tying employee compensation to survey scores creates perverse incentives, skewing customer feedback and affecting business decisions.
- Quash the Begging. Quashing survey begging requires decoupling survey scores from compensation and ensuring surveys are administered objectively.
Survey begging, driven by the pursuit of positive customer feedback, is the bane of the customer experience. We've all encountered it, whether it's servers saying they'll lose shifts if they don't get all 10s on a survey, or a car dealer outright asking for a five-star review, regardless of what actually happened.
I recently purchased a new oven for my kitchen. After the delivery team had installed the new appliance and hauled away the old one, I got a call from the retailer asking me to review my experience. “We consider anything less than a 10 to be a failure,” the employee on the phone told me.
At a restaurant, the server brought our check with a survey printed on it and told us, “Just so you know, I’m assigned worse shifts if I don’t get 9s and 10s on the survey.”
At the end of a phone call with his healthcare provider, the employee on the line asked my friend John how he would rate his satisfaction with the healthcare system. He gave them a rating of eight. “Only an eight?” the employee responded. “Not a 10 today?”
From the customer’s perspective, these conversations are awkward and annoying. But there’s a bigger problem: Survey begging produces flawed customer feedback.
Wait, What’s Survey Begging?
Survey begging is when employees coax customers into leaving high survey ratings, often in exchange for a discount or other incentive.
Sometimes, question biases and leading constructs are lumped in with survey begging. But for our purposes here, we'll define survey begging as just the bias that results from employees (subconsciously or consciously) affecting customers' answers to your survey.
Related Article: How to Create Effective Customer Surveys and Obtain Actionable Insights
Survey Begging: Why It's a Problem
No matter where or how it happens, survey begging makes customers feel awkward and imposed upon — two emotions at odds with a positive customer experience.
Even worse, your customers will feel uncomfortable just as their interaction with you draws to a close. The timing matters here because extensive social research shows that an interaction's peak and conclusion leave the strongest impression. So, even if the entirety of an experience is positive, if your associates are begging at the end, that is what your customers will remember most.
Moreover, survey begging is bad for business. Bill Gates has said, "...the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts." Skewing customer data obscures research and prevents you from hearing your customers’ actual thoughts.
Are your customers unhappy? You want to hear why. Are they delighted? You want to hear about that, too. Customers' opinions show you how to steer your company. But survey begging all but guarantees the opinions you've collected are unreliable; even worse, you will have annoyed your customers for no reason at all.
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What Drives Survey Begging?
Usually, the root cause of survey begging is tying employees' shifts or compensation to survey scores. Then, to compound the problem, if you link executives' bonuses to survey scores, you have a system of perverse incentives where employees push customers to fudge their answers while executives demand only top scores.
Ready to quash survey begging and keep this bias at bay? Read on for four tips to ensure you get objective, actionable data instead.
Tips to Quash Survey Begging
Tip 1: Don't let your employees administer surveys about the very interactions they were part of. Most customers will cave to social pressure and give a high rating rather than describe their actual experience. It may seem convenient to wrap customer surveys right into interactions. However, it's not worth it if you care about honest customer feedback.
Instead, ask customers to take your survey a few hours after the interaction has concluded and when the employee is no longer present. Use SMS for your short surveys with limited open-ended questions. If your survey is more detailed, email is best.
Tip 2: Monitor your stores and contact centers for deals employees may be making with your customers. Mystery Shopping and Customer Service Evaluations aided by AI can help spot survey begging.
If you hear comments from employees like, "You'll get a survey later today; please remember to take it and give me a 10," it's time for a reboot.
Tip 3: Sometimes, phone calls are necessary to boost survey response rates, but make sure your surveyors are not forceful in any way. Surveyors must sound interested, open-minded, polite and neutral without sounding robotic. An example of a disarming way to open a survey is this: "By any chance, did I catch you at a time when I could get your feedback about XYZ?"
To keep your surveyors from biasing customers' answers, they must do two things:
- Acknowledge that your customers are busy and that their time is a gift. This helps to open customers up to being honest.
- While being conversational, they must also refrain from emphasizing positive or negative words.
"Conversational yet neutral" is a surprisingly difficult skill, so you need to train for it or bring in a coach who can train for it. Training usually combines role-playing with monitoring.
Tip 4: Lastly, make sure to decouple survey scores from employees' compensation, because as long as there is an incentive to play games with your surveys, gaming will occur.
Customer Feedback: Begging Is Guessing
To grow profitably, companies need an accurate view of their customers' thoughts and feelings thorough customer feedback. If employees steer your customers' answers, your resultant data will be useless — and any business decisions you make based on that data will be no better than throwing a dart at the wall.
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