Jen Sorensen for May 24, 2022

Unless they’re paying me, they have 15 seconds to interest me enough to give them 45 more. I’m perfectly happy to stop if they get silly… and they often do!

I’m always astounded at the ability of so many surveys to ask nearly unanswerable questions.

I ignore surveys now.

Know what we need now? Where is the survey about surveys?

I leave nice reviews about the customer and tech support people. They don’t get paid nearly enough to have to deal with the kind of abuse they so frequently get nowadays. When I was one, before the pandemic and our increasingly angry state of polarization, most people were civil, so I really feel for them all now.

The company I retired from expected store employees to get the top rating from customer reviews or it would be reflected in their annual review. The managers who gave the annual review were told that they needed to give people an average review unless they could prove how exceptional someone was, i.e. could walk on water.

Had an oil change done for the car. The car dealership emails me a survey. I delete it. They email a 2nd survey. Delete. They try phoning me. I do not answer the phone. They send a postcard with a survey on it. I shred the postcard. They send me a letter begging me to fill out and return the survey, but it must have the highest score. Paper shredder.

I love the political surveys. We are currently just over a week from our provincial election. I always tell them I supported an opposition party last provincial election, voted for the provincial ruling party at the federal level, give a different opposition party leader as the best choice to lead the province and that i intend to vote for yet a different party. If that gives them any useful information they are welcome to it.

I love the lame surveys that ask you questions that don’t apply to your experience and there is no N/A!!! I comment that they should find someone who knows how to write a survey!!

I do these, if they’re simple, ‘’good or stinky?’’ that sort of stuff.

When they get into the ‘’one to ten’’ stuff, I bail.

I do have a nice toaster, if anyone wants to know. A Magma 500.

Surveys are fun for bored people. But you do wonder about the intelligence behind some of the questions.

Companies are trying to get feedback, which is reasonable, but they are not doing a good job getting it. It is idiotic to ask for my feedback BEFORE I have received my package, for example, or when I have just opened a site. In the former case, I have nothing to rate; in the latter, it is actually blocking me from what I am trying to do. Also, because they don’t seem to realize how simple surveys work, they are highly unlikely to get useful data unless a customer gets really angry, and if someone is that bad, it should be obvious for other reasons!

The really pernicious thing is that they are using this badly-gathered information to reward and punish employees. This can work in reverse – for example, for a while, if you gave too low a score to an Uber, other drivers wouldn’t pick you up because they would know your average rating, and they needed 5-star ratings. That meant you had to give 5-star ratings to all drivers, which meant they were worthless. But it also means employees beg for 5-star ratings, and many people don’t want to be mean, so everyone gets 5-star ratings because customers are nice. If ratings were used for development rather than punishment, diagnosing opportunities to improve, I would approve of them. I assess and develop executives – believe me, I know whereof I speak, and this is what I do!

Otherwise, you get what you measure. Once you start measuring a certain way, people will do their best to hack the results to get that measure.

I get a survey form emailed to me from my repair garage every time I so much as bring my car in for an oil change. My reply is always the same: “I have been using your garage almost exclusively since 1966. Doesn’t that say it all?”

I dislike political or issues surveys because these are ideas that need nuance not scales of 1 to 5 or yes/no answers. If I bother to do customer service surveys I usually give the max because service jobs are very wearing. Also, if my company is a reflection of the trend, the company only looks at the highest customer service marks as being satisfactory. If the customer only gives a 4 out of 5 they look at it as a fail. Sigh.

Survey fatigue. Its a thing.

Accurate. Thank you for drawing this.

Recommended this comic to a friend, he said I was toast.

All true.

The upper right panel was a literal LOL, so i guess that’s my preferred panel.

Another thing to consider is that companies now use these endless surveys to browbeat their employees. Anything less than a perfect 10 is grounds for withholding promotions and pay raises. The surveys are designed to insure that employees continue to labor as downtrodden serfs.

I have been survey resistant for some time.

I do product reviews when I feel like it. I ignore all of the requests. On Amazon I subtract a star from the product review when I get a review request from the vendor.

I always wondered if the “Would you recommend this toaster to a friend” kind of question has an implied “assuming the friend needed a new toaster.”